Public Security

Canada’s crime rate is the lowest it has been in over 40 years, according to a report issued by the government of Canada. To find out what the statistics in Canada mean and what can be learnt from them, Comunidade Segura sat down with criminology professor Anthony Doob from the University of Toronto to discuss the trends being seen in Canada and what they mean for other countries around the world.

A group of Venezuelan researchers spoke in Rio de Janeiro during the "Dialogue on Urban Violence in Rio de Janeiro and Caracas" conference, organized by Fride and FLACSO on "Insecurity and Violence in Caracas". They said the country's institutional crisis was the main cause of increasing violence in the nation's capital.

This May, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that overcrowding in California prisons violated the 8th Amendment, which prohibits the use of "cruel and unusual punishment", and ordered the state's penitentiary system to release an estimated 30,000 prisoners within two years. The ruling highlighted the strain that U.S. prisons are under: as state and federal budgets are being slashed, U.S. incarceration rates remain the highest in the world.

In many developing countries, there is no system to monitor violence-inflicted wounds that would—consistently and reliably—provide information necessary to create violence-prevention programs. The reason for not implementing a systematic collection of information is usually a lack of funds. Zavala Zegarra, from the School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Ponce, Puerto Rico, says however, that reliable data on violence-inflicted wounds is not a luxury for developed countries.

In order to verify the official data issued by the Rio de Janeiro Institute for Public Security, Sociologist Ignácio Cano analyzed the data, comparing it to data from the health system. Though there are flaws, the news is that the drop is real.

10 shantytowns were pacified by the police, now it is the turn for government, private enterprise and civil society organizations to step in and restore the citizenship of those until recently relegated to social exclusion. The plan to take services and bring down borders that kept residents in shantytowns apart from the rest of the city has been launched: UPP Social.

“Changing lives through literature”. This short phrase in plain English makes up the title of a program in US penal policy and also, surprisingly, and much more ambitiously, an alternative sentence, to jail. The program that has recently called the attention of the press as it spread from its origins in the State of Massachusetts to seven other states in the US and spawned a version in the UK, began humbly back in 1991.

It is the vital document, the link to bring all the components of a police investigation together for delivery at the justice system. The document the prosecution needs to launch a criminal investigation. But under scrutiny it has become a bone of contention, beset with low productivity, high bureaucracy, bouncing back and forth in the justice system like a ping pong ball. A new study on Brazil's Police Inquiry bares it all.

A judicial ruling to decrease the number of inmates in overcrowded prisons and a fiscal deficit have put California's correction system in a bind: it must lower the number of detainees held in prison, but the entire system is geared towards inflating it. Bill 3x18 has been enacted to help parolees stay away from jail, affecting a projected 6 thousand offenders, but how significant is it?

Launched at the end of the 2010 UN Crime Congress, the Salvador Declaration calls for justice systems to adapt to a changing world, for harmonized international law, and crime fighting firmly grounded in human rights. The declaration also notes the key role of civil society in strengthening the rule of law, present in a record number of NGOs that in turn issued their own statements.