Crime and Punishment around the World
This is a four-volume reference series aimed to provide factual, descriptive, and statistical information about the amount and types of crime, the findings of guilt, and typical punishments employed in every country across the globe. Graeme R. Newman is the General Editor for the series. I am co-editing the Americas volume, along with Hung-En Sung from John Jay College. The series is expected to be published in early 2010.
Social Change and Crime in Post-Communist Societies
This project assesses the effects of large-scale, macro-level political and economic changes on personal and property crime rates in East European countries. It not only examines well known correlates of cross-national crime, but also intensively explores the socio-historical context of crime occurrence and crime control, which is often overlooked in comparative crime research. It expands my previous work on nine East-Central European countries to include other post-communist countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as Western European countries for comparison. This is a secondary analysis of existing data sources, including Interpol, the United Nations Crime Surveys, the European Sourcebook, and World Development Indicators, among others. It employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. The data collection was funded by the University at Albany Faculty Research Award Program 2006-2007.
Regime Change and Manifestations of Violence in Post-Communist Societies
This project seeks to understand the relationship between political regime change and violence in Eastern Europe during the post-communist transformations. The political transformations in this region during the 1990s were accompanied by violence, but the manifestations, magnitude, and duration of violence varied across countries. Relying on a theoretical framework built upon literature from comparative/historical sociology, criminology, and area studies, I link these variations in violent occurrences with differences in post-communist regime changes, particularly with respect to processes of democratization. Using secondary data from a number of international agencies, this project describes the patterns and trends of violence in post-communist Eastern Europe and examines how these patterns are related to regime change. The quantitative analyses will also be framed with qualitative knowledge about post-communist transformation processes to thoroughly incorporate socio-historical context into the explanatory framework.
Revisiting Nations Not Obsessed with Crime
In 1983 criminologist Dr. Freda Adler published a unique monograph called Nations NOT Obsessed with Crime. While most criminologists at that time were concerned with explaining high crime rates in the United States by looking almost exclusively within the United States, Adler instead looked to countries with low crime rates to see what lessons could be learned. She examined crime rates and criminal justice systems in ten countries representing each region of the world. Although it was difficult at that time to collect comparative data to study this issue, Adler was able use qualitative data to examine the formal and informal mechanisms of social control in these ten countries. She concluded that crime rates were low in these countries because they had effective criminal justice systems that were popularly accepted, along with strong informal social control institutions that successfully transmitted shared values to the population.
Since Adler’s publication, cross-national criminology has grown as a subfield of criminology, but few researchers have followed her example and studied nations with low crime rates. This research project revisits the countries that Adler studied almost 25 years ago to investigate whether they have continued to maintain low crime rates, what contributes to the trend of low crime for some countries, and why other countries have not been able to keep crime down.
