Recruitment into Organized Crime: An Agent-Based Approach Testing the Impact of Different Policies

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - We test the effects of four policy scenarios on recruitment into organized crime. The policy scenarios target (i) organized crime leaders and (ii) facilitators...     

A historical review of the critical judgement of Il Gattopardo (1958) on the Risorgimento

The Leopard (Italian: Il Gattopardo) is a novel by Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the end of the Bourbons' kingdom and the beginning of the Savoy dynasty, the first sovereigns of the new Kingdom of Italy (1861). Published posthumously in 1958, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and it is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. In 2012 The Observer named it as one of the ‘10 best historical novels’. The purpose of this article is to refute the negative image of the Risorgimento as presented in this novel. The Leopard, with its broad resonance, has strongly contributed towards distorting the historical judgement on the foundations of the Italian nation, above all by failing to do justice to Prime Minister Cavour's courageous and judicious political strategy in the choice of the leadership class – also Sicilian – in the newly created Kingdom of Italy (1860–61).     

“The guerilla is like a poet”

Abstract

And once more, the company brought with it harassment and destruction. This time, however, it was the PANAMIN main office that sent the orders to have the Manobos taken off their land. PANAMIN, the supposed friend of the cultural minorities, ordered their evacuation. And so they were trucked in a BUSCO vehicle like cattle, and dumped at the Quezon public school and Catholic chapel. Dumped and left there. With little food, little medicine, little shelter. It was there they lived for one month. One long month.     

Analyzing Multiple-Item Measures of Crime and Deviance I: Item Response Theory Scaling

Multiple-item measures of self-reported offending typically provide the principal outcome measures for individual level research on the causes of crime and deviance. This article directs attention to the substantial problems presented by the task of forming composite scores for these measures, and it presents a possible solution to those problems. We consider scaling by means of the graded response model from item response theory (IRT) as a potential means of overcoming the shortcomings of traditional summative scaling and of obtaining valuable information about the strengths and weaknesses of our measures. We illustrate this strategy through a scale analysis of a fourteen-item, self-report measure of delinquency, using three years of data from the Monitoring the Future study, an annual national survey of high school seniors. The graded response model proves to be consistent with the data, and it provides results that address important substantive questions about self-report measures. The findings are informative about the strengths and weaknesses of alternative strategies for developing self-report instruments, indicating that there is little to be gained by making fine distinctions in the frequency of individual delinquent acts.