This book critically examines the link between guns and violence. It weighs the value of guns for self-protection against the adverse effects of gun ownership and carrying. It also analyses the role of public opinion, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and the firearms industry and lobby in impeding efforts to prevent gun violence. Confronting Gun Violence in America explores solutions to the gun violence problem in America, a country where 90 people die from gunshot wounds every day. The wide-range of solutions assessed include: a national gun licensing system; universal background checks; a ban on military-style weapons; better regulatory oversight of the gun industry; the use of technologies, such as the personalization of weapons; child access prevention; repealing laws that encourage violence; changing violent norms; preventing retaliatory violence; and strategies to rebuild American communities. This accessible and incisive book will be of great interest to students and researchers in criminology and sociology, as well as practitioners and policy-makers with an interest in gun ownership and violence.

This book presents primary research conducted in Italy, USA, Australia and the UK on countering strategies and institutional perceptions of Italian mafias and local organized crime groups. Through interviews and interpretation of original documents, this study firstly demonstrates the interaction between institutional understanding of the criminal threats and historical events that have shaped these perceptions. Secondly, it combines analysis of policies and criminal law provisions to identify how policing models which combat mafia and organised crime activities are organized and constructed in each country within a comparative perspective. After presenting the similarities between the four differing policing models, Sergi pushes the comparison further by identifying both conceptual and procedural convergences and divergences across both the four models and within international frameworks. By looking at topics as varied as mafia mobility, money laundering, drug networks and gang violence, this book ultimately seeks to reconsider the conceptualizations of both mafia and organized crime from a socio-behavioural and cultural perspective.

Terrorist's Creed casts a penetrating beam of empathetic understanding into the disturbing and murky psychological world of fanatical violence, explaining how the fanaticism it demands stems from the profoundly human need to imbue existence with meaning and transcendence.

This book develops the idea that the Cosa Nostra Sicilian mafia likes and, more than any other criminal organization, follows the patterns of capitalist transformation. The author presents analysis of the mafia under post-fordism capitalism, showing how they rely on increasingly more flexible networks for reasons of both cost and dodging police control, as well as changing their core businesses in relation to the risk that some activities, such as drug trafficking, are likely to incur. Combining sociology, criminology and labour sociology, the book provides an interpretation of Cosa Nostra which focuses on the connection between legal and illegal economies and politics, thus doing away with the idea that organized crime is always an external entity to society. An authoritative and original study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of criminal justice, politics and economics.

New Zealand's underworld of organised crime and deadly gangs 'The best true-crime book of the year by a long stretch.' - Steve Braunias, Newsroom 'A series of rip-snorting yarns about gangs, drugs, fancy cars, wads of cash, violence, and guns - Aotearoa New Zealand style.' - Simon Bridges New Zealand is now one of the most lucrative illicit drug markets in the world. Organised crime is about making money. It's a business. But over the past 20 years, the dealers have graduated from motorcycle gangs to Asian crime syndicates and now the most dangerous drug lords in the world - the Mexican cartels. In Gangland, award-winning investigative reporter Jared Savage shines a light into New Zealand's rising underworld of organised crime and violent gangs. The brutal execution of a husband-and-wife; the undercover cop who infiltrated a casino VIP lounge; the midnight fishing trip which led to the country's biggest cocaine bust; the gangster who shot his best friend in a motorcycle shop: these stories go behind the headlines and open the door to an invisible world - a world where millions of dollars are made, life is cheap, and allegiances change like the flick of a switch.

This book responds to the claim that criminology is becoming socially and politically irrelevant despite its exponential expansion as an academic sub-discipline. It does so by addressing the question 'what is to be done' in relation to a number of major issues associated with crime and punishment. The original contributions to this volume are provided by leading international experts in a wide range of issues. They address imprisonment, drugs, gangs, cybercrime, prostitution, domestic violence, crime control, as well as white collar and corporate crime. Written in an accessible style, this collection aims to contribute to the development of a more public criminology and encourages students and researchers at all levels to engage in a form of criminology that is more socially relevant and more useful.

One of the dark sides to democratization can be crime and corruption. This book looks at the way political liberalization affects these practices in a number of ways whilst also challenging some of the scare stories about democracy. The book also brings the politics of power back into an examination of corruption.

This Brief provides an in-depth look at crime and corruption in Russian Law Enforcement, in the fifteen years since the 2009 police reforms. It focuses on corruption and organized crime at various levels of public services and law enforcement, how these organized crime networks operate, and how to enhance police integrity and legitimacy in this context. It begins with a short overview of the history of law enforcement in the Soviet and Post-Soviet context, and the scope of organized crime on the operations of local businesses, public services, and bureaucratic offices. It provides an in depth examination of how organized crime developed in this context, to fill a void between the supply and demand of various goods and services. Based on an in-depth survey of police integrity and corruption in Russia, it provides key insights into how countries in a transition to democracy can maintain and enhance legitimacy of their police force. This Brief will be of interest to researchers in Criminology and Criminal Justice, particularly with a focus on policing, corruption or organized crime, as well as related disciplines such as political science.

This book examines security in three cities that suffer from chronic violence: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Medellin, Colombia; and Kingston, Jamaica. In each, democratic states contend with subnational armed groups that dominate territory and play important roles in politics even as they contribute to fear and insecurity. Through a nested three-city, six-neighborhood analysis of the role of criminal groups in governance, this research provides a deep understanding of the impact of crime on political experience. Neighborhoods controlled by different types of armed actors, operating in the same institutional context, build alliances with state officials and participate in political life through the structures created by these armed actors. The data demonstrates the effects criminal dominance can have on security, civil society, elections, and policymaking. Far from reflecting a breakdown of order, varying types of criminal groups generate different local lived political experiences.

Phases of Terrorism in the Age of Globalization considers terrorism as an aspect of the capitalist world system for almost five centuries. Jalata's research reveals that terrorism can emerge from above as state terrorism and below as subversive organizations or groups.

This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.

PARALLEL LINES is the story of a deadly rivalry on both sides of the law. With criminal rival and would be underworld kingpin Declan Meehan on the verge of controlling Glasgow's lucrative illegal drug trade, Detective Sergeant Angus Thoroughgood vows to bring him down. An edgy and fast-paced crime thriller set in the seedy criminal underworld of Glasgow, Scotland, Parallel Lines is the first book in the long-running Thoroughgood series. With Meechan bludgeoning his competition into submission, seizing the city piece by piece, his conflict with Thoroughgood gets all too personal when Celine Lynott, the woman who broke Angus' heart ten-years earlier, falls for his nemesis. Parallel Lines sees author RJ Mitchell drawing from his 12 years of experience as a Glasgow police officer to drag readers into the city's sleazy underbelly to encounter the violent and lawless stories that can be found there.

The life, crimes and bloody end of John 'Goldfinger' Palmer were straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster - and Marnie Palmer, his wife of forty years, had a front row seat. The poor Solihull lad, whose childhood home was so cold the goldfish froze, fought his way up to a lifestyle of private jets, yachts and Ferraris, thanks to a home-made gold smelter in his back garden and a multi-million-pound timeshare empire. By the turn of the millennium, Palmer was 105th on the Sunday Times Rich List, but Goldfinger had a long list of enemies. In Goldfinger and Me, his widow Marnie shares her unique insight into his roller coaster life, from dealing scrap in Bristol, to the Brink's-Mat raid that changed their lives - ending with his downfall of betrayals, jail stints and his still unsolved assassination.

This Brief studies the important role that tattoos play in prison culture, and examines its unique manifestation among minority inmates. This work aims to provide a better understanding of prison group culture, particularly among social marginal groups, through the lens of Russian immigrants in Israeli prisons. Russian immigrants currently represent approximately 25% of the total Israeli prison population, and this book examines how tattoos show an important form of rebellion amongst this group. As tattoos are forbidden in some forms of Islam and Judaism, and the Israeli prison service confiscates over 200 homemade tattoo devices per year, this is a significant phenomenon both before and during incarceration. This work examines how despite the transition to Israel, the main social codes of Russian prisoners are still dominant and help segregate this group from the larger prison population. It provides a lens to understand Russian criminal activity in Israel, and in a larger context, the modes of social cohesion and criminal activity of organized crime groups operating in prison systems. This work will be of interest to researchers studying the organized crime and the criminal justice system, Russian organized crime in particular, as well as related studies of immigration, demography, and social cohesion.

Known for their striking full-body tattoos and severed fingertips, Japan's gangsters comprise a criminal class eighty thousand strong - more than four times the size of the American mafia. Despite their criminal nature, the yakuza are accepted by fellow Japanese to a degree guaranteed to shock most Westerners. "Yakuza" is the first book to reveal the extraordinary reach of Japan's Mafia. Originally published in 1986, it was so controversial in Japan that it could not be published there for five years. But in the west it has long served as the standard reference on Japanese organized crime and has inspired novels, screenplays, and criminal investigations. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition tells the full story of Japan's remarkable crime syndicates, from their feudal start as bands of medieval outlaws to their emergence as billion-dollar investors in real estate, big business, art, and more.

This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.

In an article in 2001 the author analyzed the way the Hungarian political party Fidesz (the Federation of Young Democrats) was eliminating the institutional system of the rule of law as it was on government for the first time. At that time, many readers doubted the legitimacy of the new approach, in which the author characterized the system as the 'organized over-world', the 'state employing mafia methods' and the 'adopted political family'. Critics considered these categories metaphors rather than elements of a coherent conceptual framework. Ten years later Fidesz won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, removing many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. It is common in many post-communist systems that a segment of the party and secret service became the elite in possession of not only political power but also of wealth. However, Fidesz, as a late-coming new political predator, was able to occupy this position through a change of elite. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules.