The 22nd Annual Meeting of the International Police Executive Symposium was held in August 2012 at the United Nations Plaza in New York. Chaired by Dr. Garth den Heyer, the symposium focused on the links between economic development, armed violence, and public safety. Drawn from these proceedings, Economic Development, Crime, and Policing: Global Perspectives presents the insight of police leaders and researchers from a number of countries. They provide worldwide perspectives and case studies about the complex interrelations and influence of these issues on police practice in developed, developing, and transitioning countries. Topics include: Youth violence in society Economic downturn and global crime trends Restorative justice and recidivism Community-based policing Investigation techniques applied to financial crimes Policing gang violence Implementation of the rule of law in postconflict countries Policing transportation infrastructures The book organizes these topics according to regional perspectives (global, modern democracies, emerging democracies, and newly industrialized countries). It highlights ongoing response efforts related to challenges facing the police in emerging or newly democratized states. The book concludes with a comprehensive review of the fundamental elements of police reform and explores how such changes might affect society. It discusses the role of society in reforming police systems and suggests new directions for this broad research agenda. This book is a co-publication with the International Police Executive Symposium.

A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018

While few economists analyzed criminal behaviour and the criminal justice process before Gary Becker's seminal 1968 paper, an enormous body of economic research on crime has since been produced. This insightful and comprehensive Handbook reviews and extends much of this important resulting research. The Handbook on the Economics of Crime provides cutting-edge and specially commissioned contributions dealing with theoretical and empirical modeling of criminal choice and behavior, including Isaac Ehrlich's exposition of what he labels the 'market, or equilibrium, model of crime'. The public production and allocation of various criminal justice services is also examined, as are significant components of the costs and consequences of crime. Finally, current debates and controversies in the economics of crime literature are considered, with the expert contributors offering suggestions and guidance for future research. With a broad set of crime-related topics examined from an economic perspective, this extensive Handbook will be welcomed by academic researchers and graduate students of the economics of crime and criminology as well as legal scholars focusing on criminal law.

A Modern Guide to the Economics of Crime discusses the evolution of a field, whose growing relevance among scholars and policymakers is partly related to the persistence of crime and violence around the world and partly to the remarkable progress made in recent years in the economic analysis of individual and organised crime. With contributions from some of the leading scholars in the economics of crime, the volume highlights a variety of topics, conceptual frameworks and empirical approaches, thus providing a comprehensive overview of the most recent developments of the field.

Wide ranging and accessible, this is the most up-to-date textbook in this area, taking current economic research and making it accessible to undergraduates and other interested readers.

This title presents a survey of the crime problem in Latin America, which takes a very broad and appropriately reductionist approach to analyse the determinants of the high crime levels, focusing on the negative social conditions in the region, including inequality and poverty, and poor policy design, such as relatively low police presence. The chapters illustrate three channels through which crime might generate poverty, that is, by reducing investment, by introducing assets losses, and by reducing the value of assets remaining in the control of households.

This book is the first attempt to establish 'economic crime' as a new sub-discipline within criminology. Fraud, corruption, bribery, money laundering, price-fixing cartels and intellectual property crimes pursued typically for financial and professional gain, have devastating consequences for the prosperity of economic life. While most police forces in the UK and the USA have an ‘economic crime’ department, and many European bodies such as Europol use the term and develop strategies and structures to deal with it, it is yet to grain traction as a widely used term in the academic community. Economic Crime: From Conception to Response aims to change that and covers: definitions of the key premises of economic crime as the academic sub-discipline within criminology; an overview of the key research on each of the crimes associated with economic crime; public, private and global responses to economic crime across its different forms and sectors of the economy, both within the UK and globally. This book is an essential resource for students, academics and practitioners engaged with aspects of economic crime, as well as the related areas of financial crime, white-collar crime and crimes of the powerful.

Winner, 2018 Law & Legal Studies PROSE Award The consequences of big data and algorithm-driven policing and its impact on law enforcement In a high-tech command center in downtown Los Angeles, a digital map lights up with 911 calls, television monitors track breaking news stories, surveillance cameras sweep the streets, and rows of networked computers link analysts and police officers to a wealth of law enforcement intelligence. This is just a glimpse into a future where software predicts future crimes, algorithms generate virtual “most-wanted” lists, and databanks collect personal and biometric information. The Rise of Big Data Policing introduces the cutting-edge technology that is changing how the police do their jobs and shows why it is more important than ever that citizens understand the far-reaching consequences of big data surveillance as a law enforcement tool. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson reveals how these new technologies —viewed as race-neutral and objective—have been eagerly adopted by police departments hoping to distance themselves from claims of racial bias and unconstitutional practices. After a series of high-profile police shootings and federal investigations into systemic police misconduct, and in an era of law enforcement budget cutbacks, data-driven policing has been billed as a way to “turn the page” on racial bias. But behind the data are real people, and difficult questions remain about racial discrimination and the potential to distort constitutional protections. In this first book on big data policing, Ferguson offers an examination of how new technologies will alter the who, where, when and how we police. These new technologies also offer data-driven methods to improve police accountability and to remedy the underlying socio-economic risk factors that encourage crime. The Rise of Big Data Policing is a must read for anyone concerned with how technology will revolutionize law enforcement and its potential threat to the security, privacy, and constitutional rights of citizens. Read an excerpt and interview with Andrew Guthrie Ferguson in The Economist.

Over seven million Americans are either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, with their criminal records often following them for life and affecting access to higher education, jobs, and housing. Court-ordered monetary sanctions that compel criminal defendants to pay fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution further inhibit their ability to reenter society. In A Pound of Flesh, sociologist Alexes Harris analyzes the rise of monetary sanctions in the criminal justice system and shows how they permanently penalize and marginalize the poor. She exposes the damaging effects of a little-understood component of criminal sentencing and shows how it further perpetuates racial and economic inequality. Harris draws from extensive sentencing data, legal documents, observations of court hearings, and interviews with defendants, judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. She documents how low-income defendants are affected by monetary sanctions, which include fees for public defenders and a variety of processing charges. Until these debts are paid in full, individuals remain under judicial supervision, subject to court summons, warrants, and jail stays. As a result of interest and surcharges that accumulate on unpaid financial penalties, these monetary sanctions often become insurmountable legal debts which many offenders carry for the remainder of their lives. Harris finds that such fiscal sentences, which are imposed disproportionately on low-income minorities, help create a permanent economic underclass and deepen social stratification. A Pound of Flesh delves into the court practices of five counties in Washington State to illustrate the ways in which subjective sentencing shapes the practice of monetary sanctions. Judges and court clerks hold a considerable degree of discretion in the sentencing and monitoring of monetary sanctions and rely on individual values—such as personal responsibility, meritocracy, and paternalism—to determine how much and when offenders should pay. Harris shows that monetary sanctions are imposed at different rates across jurisdictions, with little or no state government oversight. Local officials’ reliance on their own values and beliefs can also push offenders further into debt—for example, when judges charge defendants who lack the means to pay their fines with contempt of court and penalize them with additional fines or jail time. A Pound of Flesh provides a timely examination of how monetary sanctions permanently bind poor offenders to the judicial system. Harris concludes that in letting monetary sanctions go unchecked, we have created a two-tiered legal system that imposes additional burdens on already-marginalized groups.