Eastern Prostitution from Russia to Sweden and Finland

Trafficking is a relatively new phenomenon in the research agenda on organized crime. In this article the spread of the phenomenon in Scandinavia is described and discussed. Special attention has been given to Russian-organized prostitution in the Tornio Valley (the borderarea between northern Finland and northern Sweden). The data for the article consist of observations at special 'deposit-sites' in Finland and interviews with the authorities concerned (police, customs, social services, Center for Disease Control (CDC), etc.) in Sweden, and also newspaper articles that have reported on the phenomenon. The methological projection of the article is exploratory in character with the purpose of describing the phenomenon, rather than being able to explain it. The results show that there is an organized trade in women in the Tornio Valley (set rendezvous points, pick-up sites, transport via Russian-registered minivans etc). Despite this the phenomenon cannot be tied conclusively to Russian-organized crime. One conclusion is that further research on this phenomenon should gather information from the Russian authorities and from the prostitutes themselves.     

Economic crime: does personality matter?

Since the publication of Edwin Sutherland's classical study, White Collar Crime, personality has been treated as completely irrelevant as a cause or as a correlating variable in studies of economic crime. This article questions that thesis. In an ongoing Swedish project studying economic crime in the areas of construction, engineering, and the music industry, 128 informants were interviewed regarding the personal character of the economic criminal compared to that of the law-abiding businessperson. Data were collected from five different regions in Sweden using the Big Five model, the personality model most often used within the field of personality research today. This article compares the results from the interviews with the few international studies that exist regarding economic crimes in these areas and common results are emphasized. It also presents nuanced analyses of the significance of personality in economic crime.     

The Roots of Modern White-Collar Crime: Does the Modern Form of White-Collar Crime have its Foundation in the Transition from a Society Dominated by Agriculture to One Dominated by Industry?

The purpose of the present paper is to investigate whether the process of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society was a watershed for white-collar crime, such that this type of crime increased rapidly in connection with the industrialization process. The theoretical reasoning behind this notion is that the transition process promoted a mentality characterized by self-centered values and a culture of competitiveness, which together paved the way for fraud perpetrated at the expense of others. The data are from Statistic Sweden’s historical records and cover the period of 1864–1912. Since there is no way to measure all crimes that can be defined as white collar crime, we have used bankruptcy offences as an example of white collar crime. The results do not support the notion that the transition period from an agricultural to an industrial society showed an increase in bankruptcy offences. Instead, the results show that when fluctuations in the economy are taken into account, the industrialization process per se entailed less bankruptcy offences. On the other hand, other research using the case of Sweden has shown that it was first after World War II that bankruptcy offences increased rapidly. Our argument is that the transition process as a structural mechanism had a greater impact on bankruptcy offences when industrialized capitalism became advanced.

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The Sutherland tradition in criminology: a bibliometric story

In this article, we provide an overview of the body of knowledge associated with the Sutherland tradition in criminology. We track Sutherland’s impact through a bibliometric analysis of papers citing any of Sutherland’s works and by focusing on publications that are co-cited with Sutherland. This approach enables us to visualize Sutherland’s role in relation to the forerunners and founding fathers of criminology during his own active period, to his followers, and to contemporary scholars. The dataset consisted of 2596 genuine articles that cite at least one of Sutherland’s publications, in which he appears as first author in Web of Science ^TM published between 1955 and 2010. The results show a clear impact of the Sutherland tradition more or less throughout the twentieth century, peaking during the 1930s and 1940s and decreasing in the 1990s, when the Sutherland tradition was more powerfully challenged, primarily by the life-course tradition.