The musician, YouTuber, and data scientist Benn Jordan recently published An Open Letter to CrimRxiv. The focus is a preprint by Scott Mourtgos and Ian Adams, titled Working Paper: Automated License Plate Readers, Vehicle Theft, and Clearance. Benn raises concerns about the ...

Bloodstain Pattern Analysis (BPA) is one of the most valuable forensic techniques used to reconstruct violent crime scenes. It enables investigators to interpret the direction, velocity, angle of impact, and mechanism responsible for bloodshed, thereby helping establish the...

This book describes everyday life in Close Supervision Centres – special units within the England & Wales prison system that hold men considered too difficult or dangerous to be accommodated in mainstream prisons. Based on unprecedented access to these sites of ‘deep ...

This study is the initial step toward a contextual training approach for police force. It addresses the question “Which specific use of force situations should officers be trained for in Brazil?”. To date, the literature has offered little discussion of the contexts in which...

The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with one of the largest homicide spikes in U.S. history. Prior research has largely interpreted this increase as reflecting changes in the prevalence of serious violence. We depart from this work by asking a more fundamental question: To what...

Case formulation is an epistemic practice that generates hypotheses about offence-related behaviour and informs risk management and treatment. We argue that this process both produces and constrains understandings of individuals, while embedding power relations between ...

Existing research has conceptualized criminal expertise among sexual offenders through the combined examination of modus operandi sophistication and detection avoidance strategies. This study investigated whether forensic and investigative awareness strategies, considered ...

The growing literature on the structural and cultural covariates of homicide rates contain few studies of the role of citizens' prevailing sentiments. Yet population sentiments and perceptions of daily life tell us something about societies beyond official measures of ...

Is state-provided legal counsel comparable to private representation? Drawing on organizational sociology and social movements theory, we argue that public defender effectiveness depends on the organizational landscape in which defense operates. Public defenders are more ...

This article examines aguantar, the moral expectation that women endure suffering, as a form of gendered governance in rural Michoacán, Mexico. Drawing on 26 qualitative interviews with women, including trans women, the study conceptualizes endurance not as resilience but as ...

Digital technologies increasingly mediate coercive control, providing police with new opportunities to evidence patterns of abuse over time. Digital lines of inquiry can corroborate victim–survivor accounts and reveal otherwise hidden patterns of monitoring, surveillance, and ...

What happens to a man’s identity, moral compass, and survival instincts when institutional protection vanishes completely? In this video, we explore the deep sociological and psychological dynamics behind extreme confinement, focusing on the harrowing 2018 uprising at **Lee Correctional Institution** in South Carolina. Rather than viewing prison riots merely as administrative breakdowns, we look under the hood at the deeply entrenched codes of hyper-masculinity and surrogate family networks that dictate who lives and who dies. Key Topics Covered: The Crisis of Masculine Order: How formal institutional collapse forces men to rely on unwritten codes of honor and projected strength as a calculated survival tool. Gangs as Surrogate Families: Why incarcerated men turn to gangs not just for protection, but as sources of mentorship, moral guidance, and family structure in the absence of fathers and state safety[3][4]. The Crucible of Crisis: Reading the sensory cues before a riot—taped book armor, winter coats indoors, and daily stabbings—and the impossible choices during the chaos. Reactors vs. Thinkers: How older incarcerated men weighed strict gang loyalty against the desire for life and eventual freedom. Wounded Healers & Caring Masculinities: How former perpetrators of violence transform their toughness into protective leadership, de-escalating conflicts and redefining true strength. #PrisonReform #Masculinity #Sociology #LeeCorrectional #GangsAsFamilies #Rehabilitation #CriminalJustice #TrueCrimeSociology This is an overview based on the article, "Violence, Gangs, and the Making of Men: Masculinity, Surrogate Family, and Identity in the Aftermath of a Prison Riot" (https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.f85f22b7 ). We create these "Crimversations" with the AI tool Google NotebookLM. While we strive for accuracy, an overview may not perfectly reflect the original article, a limitation common to both AI-generated and human-led podcasts. For definitive information, please refer directly to the article. You'll find more free criminology resources at https://crimrxiv.com, https://crimconsortium.com, and our forthcoming website https://crimhub.com.

The study examines informal self-policing tendencies among Russian speakers in Latvia, finding that linguistic barriers, perceived discrimination, and exclusion from formal institutions encourage reliance on practices influenced by Воровской закон (“Thieves’ Law”).

Prison riots represent extreme institutional breakdowns with underexplored gendered dimensions. Drawing on interviews with 24 men incarcerated after the deadliest U.S. riot in 25 years, this study examines how masculinity and gang affiliation shaped violence and identity. ...

How should society react when someone commits a crime? In a democracy, public consent matters. Punitive approaches are popular, but not always consistently desired. Drawing on a variety of theoretical work, we use punitive dissonance to describe the phenomenon where punitive ...

This strategic and methodological report addresses technology watch and governance in policing and public security, with a 2026–2030 horizon. It examines the evolution of key technologies relevant to law enforcement—including artificial intelligence, data technologies...

Police forces in England and Wales are moving from evaluating generative artificial intelligence to deploying it, using large language models to draft witness statements, summarise evidence and support supervisory review. This article argues that the legitimacy question raised...

Why do lay judges report near-universal post-participation satisfaction (97%) despite substantial pre-participation reluctance (42%)? Using three datasets—nationally representative surveys (JGSS), a near-census participant survey (N = 5,048), and a comparative internet survey...

Hashimi, S., Cotton, N., Huff, J., Kearns, E.M., & Nix, J. (2026). Hiring and screening practices in a sample of US law enforcement agencies. Policing: An International Journal. https://doi.org/10.1108/PIJPSM-03-2026-0065

Adversity research typically relies on self-report or aggregates of administrative data, rarely combining measures from both data sources over time. Here, we leverage Dutch administrative data and self-report measures to enable fine-grained, longitudinal tracking of ...

Research on the immigration-crime nexus has grown substantially, yet few studies differentiate among immigrants of different legal statuses, including undocumented immigrants. Of those that do, analyses are conducted at state and metropolitan area levels, leaving unanswered ...

Sinds 2021 wordt Nederland geconfronteerd met een relatief nieuw fenomeen: het gebruik van geïmproviseerde explosieven om aanslagen mee te plegen op objecten. In de afgelopen jaren is het aantal aanslagen sterk toegenomen. Nederland is niet het enige land met deze ...

Although peer relationships are central to criminological theories of delinquency, little is known about which specific friendship characteristics shape situational susceptibility to deviant requests from particular friends. Drawing on differential association theory and wider...

Qualitative interviews are often treated as neutral tools for eliciting information, with methodological attention focused on question design, rapport, and researcher reflexivity. This article advances a methodological intervention by theorizing food as methodological ...

The current study measures whether AI-generated transcripts of body-worn camera footage accurately capture who is speaking and what is said, compared to human-edited transcripts. We analyzed AI and human-edited transcripts from 176 body-worn camera videos ...

For those of us who have spent careers studying evidence-based policing, the trajectory of the last three decades has been, on its face, a success story. call for police practices grounded in scientific evidence launched a movement that has produced systematic reviews ...

Modern police departments face a massive operational bottleneck, generating up to **350 hours of body-worn camera footage daily** that often goes unwatched due to staffing constraints. While automated speech recognition tools like Rev.ai promise an efficient fix to search and organize video backlogs[3], rigorous testing across 176 real-world police encounters reveals critical limitations. During high-stress events—such as **traffic stops, domestic disturbances, and mental health calls**—AI systems hit a hard programmatic ceiling of **7 speakers**, whereas human coders distinguish up to **16 distinct voices** in the same footage. This speaker attribution gap causes AI to blend overlapping voices and potentially misattribute high-stakes dialogue between officers and suspects, despite maintaining high overall word accuracy. To safeguard justice in criminal court cases and use-of-force reviews, law enforcement agencies must adopt **hybrid workflows** that combine AI sorting scale with essential human oversight. #AITranscription #PoliceBodyCam #LawEnforcement #CriminalJustice #SpeechRecognition #AIinPolicing #TechAndJustice This is an overview based on the article, "AI vs. human transcription: evaluating accuracy and meaning in police body-worn camera footage" (https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.3175eff0 ). We create these "Crimversations" with the AI tool Google NotebookLM. While we strive for accuracy, an overview may not perfectly reflect the original article, a limitation common to both AI-generated and human-led podcasts. For definitive information, please refer directly to the article. You'll find more free criminology resources at https://crimrxiv.com, https://crimconsortium.com, and our forthcoming website https://crimhub.com.

In earlier work, Nikolovska and I (2020) argued that technological change had outpaced the historical equilibrium between crime and the institutional response to it, producing a condition we termed crime exponentiation, the compounding expansion of criminal opportunity through...

Loss and rejection are central to prison life, yet how they crystallize into a more general sense of abandonment remains under-theorized. Drawing on 64 interviews with men held in prolonged self-isolation or serving indeterminate forvaring sentences in Denmark, we ...

The Mississippi Alcohol Safety Education Program (MASEP) is a statewide court-mandated intervention for individuals convicted of a first offense driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol or another drug. Studies of MASEP’s impact on repeat DUI offending have found that ...

Reentry scholarship frequently assumes that a partner's return stabilizes households and eases the burdens women absorbed during incarceration, yet the economic consequences of reentry for female partners remain empirically understudied. We conceptualize reentry as an ...

Why do crowded streets sometimes deter crime and sometimes attract it? Pedestrian volume can reduce crime through informal surveillance (“eyes on the street”) or raise it by expanding anonymity and opportunities (“suitable targets”). Most criminological research treats this...

The current study responds to calls to consider whether individual characteristics (e.g., psychopathy) interact with broader structural conditions (e.g., economic, social, and legal contexts) in ways that influence offending. We examined whether the psychopathy-violence...

This article examines the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) pilot deployment of Palantir analytics for internal workforce monitoring, announced in April 2026 as part of the force’s post-Panorama standards programme. The force defends the deployment as lawful, since it brings...

In this video, we dive deep into the school-to-prison pipeline (STP)—the systematic movement of students out of educational institutions and into the criminal legal system via exclusionary discipline. To map this journey on a granular, day-to-day level, researchers analyzed self-reported data from 2,844 students tracked across six highly segregated school districts in St. Louis County, Missouri over a full three-year period. We look beyond expulsions to see how minor punishments, like detentions, office referrals, and Tardy Hall, trigger a destructive cascade. In this video, we break down: 🔴 The 5-Step Punishment Cascade: Trace the sequential risk factors step-by-step, from initial punishment and academic disengagement to peer withdrawal, secondary punishment, and ultimately police contact. 🔴 The "Troublemaker Effect": How losing just 45 minutes of instructional time per minor punishment sets the groundwork for academic setback, peer exclusion, loss of trust, and truancy. 🔴 Racial Divergence in the Pipeline: Learn how the pipeline differs by race. We analyze the "more to lose" hypothesis for white students (where punishment causes a sudden shock to pro-social networks and heightened surveillance) and compare it to the Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework of cumulative structural disadvantage and baseline over-surveillance faced by Black students. 🔴 Data-Backed Solutions: How schools can shift from a culture of surveillance to a culture of support through proactive restorative justice practices, academic support for punished students, and reducing exclusionary discipline. If punishment only begets punishment, what does support beget? Watch to find out how we can break the cycle. #schooltoprisonpipeline #restorativejustice #schooldiscipline #educationreform #socialjustice #breakingthecycle #CRTInEducation #studentsupport This is an overview based on the article, "Punishment begets punishment: An exploration of racial variation in school-to-prison pipeline mechanisms" (https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.93ad12db ). We create these "Crimversations" with the AI tool Google NotebookLM. While we strive for accuracy, an overview may not perfectly reflect the original article, a limitation common to both AI-generated and human-led podcasts. For definitive information, please refer directly to the article. You'll find more free criminology resources at https://crimrxiv.com, https://crimconsortium.com, and our forthcoming website https://crimhub.com.

Siuda, P., Hewelt, P. (2026). Constructing an Elite: Identity and Boundary Work on a Darknet Drug Market, Deviant Behavior, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2026.2729277

Law-enforcement agencies increasingly target individuals considered at risk of cybercrime, yet evidence of these interventions’ effectiveness remains limited. This study evaluated an intervention in which law enforcement publicly replied to hacker-forum users with warnings...

Every year, roughly 1.5 million Americans attempt suicide—a massive, devastating crisis that frequently leaves communities, families, and first responders searching for answers. But what if the data systems we use to track and predict these crises are looking in the completely wrong places? In this video, we go "Beyond the Checkbox" to explore a groundbreaking 4-year study analyzing over 2,500 suicide-related service calls from a Midwestern police department. By digging past the sterile checkboxes of administrative data (like age, race, or past clinical diagnoses) and meticulously coding 1,600 handwritten officer narrative reports, researchers uncovered what is truly driving people to the edge. Using the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS) as a framework, we discuss the dangerous intersection of two profound psychological states: Thwarted Belongingness: The agonizing, deep feeling of total alienation and isolation. (e.g., "I've been crying for a week and no one truly cares about me"). Perceived Burdensomeness: The heartbreaking belief that your very existence is actively harming or weighing down those you love (e.g., "I feel like a burden to my father"). Key Discoveries in the Video: Interpersonal Over Clinical: While standard checklists focus on clinical diagnoses, officer narratives showed that relationship conflicts (27%) and family problems (18%) were documented far more frequently than mental or physical health concerns (20%). The Unsuspected "Null Finding": Quantitative analysis revealed that having a police-documented mental health checkbox (such as a label of depression or anxiety) was not significantly associated with repeated suicide attempts. The Systemic Gap: Current emergency tracking systems capture the who, but almost entirely miss the why and the when of immediate, acute situational triggers. A New Model for Crisis Response: To save lives, we must standardize crisis forms to capture acute situational stressors (like eviction or divorce), train first responders in interpersonal warning signs, and integrate mental health professionals into police work through co-responder models (where social workers ride along with officers). If you found this video insightful, please Like, Subscribe, and Share to help raise awareness about the human stories hidden in the margins of our crisis response systems. #suicideprevention #MentalHealth #CrisisResponse #FirstResponders #BeyondTheCheckbox #PoliceNarratives #ThwartedBelongingness #PerceivedBurdensomeness #HiddenInTheMargins #Psychology #InterpersonalTheory This is an overview based on the article, "Beyond risk factors: a mixed-methods study of interpersonal dynamics in suicide attempts and reattempts from police narratives" (https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.61b1e3de ). We create these "Crimversations" with the AI tool Google NotebookLM. While we strive for accuracy, an overview may not perfectly reflect the original article, a limitation common to both AI-generated and human-led podcasts. For definitive information, please refer directly to the article. You'll find more free criminology resources at https://crimrxiv.com, https://crimconsortium.com, and our forthcoming website https://crimhub.com.

US homicide rose roughly forty percent between 2019 and 2021 and returned to its pre-pandemic level by 2024. One prominent explanation that has been offered for the decline holds that the American Rescue Plan's $350 billion infusion into state and local budgets brought...

This article examines the challenges facing the probation service in responding to stalking following the publication of the United Kingdom government's Freedom from Violence and Abuse strategy. It summarises the reforms introduced to address low charge and conviction rates, ...

To mitigate the consequences of school punishment, we must move from documenting the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) toward understanding how punishment increases criminal legal system involvement. Beyond impacting academic performance, punishment may encourage disengagement ...

Background: Complaints made by users of NHS mental health services occupy a structurally weaker position than complaints made against other public bodies exercising comparable coercive powers, including the police, yet this asymmetry has received little sustained theoretical...

Each year, approximately 1.5 million Americans attempt suicide, and repeated attempts pose heightened risks for individuals, families, and communities. These attempts can result in long-lasting injuries, isolation, and psychological distress. Research relies heavily on ...

Criminology students are routinely exposed to distressing material through both coursework and work-integrated learning. However, there has been limited attention to how criminology programs might respond pedagogically. This article describes a whole-of-program well-being ...

Berlin, J., Bacon, M., Beerjeraz, A., Duckworth, P., Glasspoole-Bird, H., Hendrie, N., … Stevens, A. (2026). Involving lived experience peer research in programme evaluation: the case of police-led drug diversion schemes in England. Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 1–10.

Public services face growing pressure to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) to close the gap between rising demand and falling resources. That pressure has intensified with general-purpose AI (GPAI): AI built on large language models that can be directed by prompt alone to ...

In criminology, the call for transparency and openness in research practices is resounding louder than ever. FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) and open data are recognized as a necessity to enable replication of criminological research, enhance future ...

The rapid expansion of cybercrime has challenged traditional conceptions of security and policing, particularly those that associate security threats with physical violence, territorial disruption, and visible material damage. As digital infrastructure becomes embedded within...

Objectives: To investigate whether victimization follows an age-victimization curve analogous to the age-crime curve and, if so, whether its shape differs between interpersonal and property crime. Methods: We analyzed police-recorded victimization data from the Recorded Crime...