Criminality has accompanied social life from the outset. It has appeared at every stage of the development of every community, regardless of organisation, form of government or period in history. This work presents the views of criminologists from Central Europe on the phenomenon of criminality as a component of social and political reality. Despite the far advanced homogenisation of culture and the coming together of the countries that make up the European Union, criminality is not easily captured by statistics and simple comparisons. There can be huge variation not only on crime reporting systems and information on convicts but also on definitions of the same crimes and their formulations in the criminal codes of the individual European countries. This book fills a gap in the English-language criminological literature on the causes and determinants of criminality in Central Europe. Poland, as the largest country in the region, whose political post-war path has been similar to the other countries in this part of Europe, is subject to an exhaustive and original look at criminality as part of the political and social reality. The authors offer a contribution to the debate in the social and criminal policy of the state over the problems of criminality and how to control it.

Criminality has accompanied social life from the outset. It has appeared at every stage of the development of every community, regardless of organisation, form of government or period in history. This work presents the views of criminologists from Central Europe on the phenomenon of criminality as a component of social and political reality. Despite the far advanced homogenisation of culture and the coming together of the countries that make up the European Union, criminality is not easily captured by statistics and simple comparisons. There can be huge variation not only on crime reporting systems and information on convicts but also on definitions of the same crimes and their formulations in the criminal codes of the individual European countries. This book fills a gap in the English-language criminological literature on the causes and determinants of criminality in Central Europe. Poland, as the largest country in the region, whose political post-war path has been similar to the other countries in this part of Europe, is subject to an exhaustive and original look at criminality as part of the political and social reality. The authors offer a contribution to the debate in the social and criminal policy of the state over the problems of criminality and how to control it.

Teresa Pac provides a much-needed contribution to the discussion on shared culture as foundational to societal survival. Through the examination of common culture as a process in medieval Kraków, Poznań, and Lublin, Pac challenges the ideology of difference—institutional, religious, ethnic, and nationalistic. Similarly, Pac maintains, twenty-first century Polish leaders utilize anachronistic approaches in the invention of Polish Catholic identity to counteract the country’s increasing ethnic and religious diversity. As in the medieval period, contemporary Polish political and social elites subscribe to the European Union’s ideology of difference, legitimized by a European Christian heritage, and its intended basis for discrimination against non-Christians and non-white individuals under the auspices of democratic values and minority rights, among which Muslims are a significant target.

In recent times the question of private sector involvement in public affairs has become framed in altogether new terms. Across Europe, there has been a growth in various forms of public-private cooperation in building and maintaining (new) penal institutions and an increasing presence of private companies offering security services within penal institutions as well as delivering security goods such as electronic monitoring and other equipment to penal authorities. Such developments are part of a wider trend towards privatising and marketising security. Bringing together key scholars in criminology and penology from across Europe and beyond, this book maps and describes trends of privatising punishment throughout Europe, paying attention both to prisons and community sanctions. In doing so, it initiates a continent-wide dialogue among academics and key public and private actors on the future of privatisation in Europe. Debates on the privatisation of punishment in Europe are still underdeveloped and this book plays a pioneering and agenda-setting role in developing this dialogue.

"As the world becomes increasingly globalized, a shared understanding of the various aspects of criminal justice becomes imperative. Drawing from countries across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere, this book is a go-to reference in comparative criminal justice studies"--

This open access book explores how biometric data is increasingly flowing across borders in order to limit, control and contain the mobility of selected people, namely criminalized populations. It introduces the concept of bio-bordering, using it to capture reverse patterns of bordering and ordering practices linked to transnational biometric data exchange regimes. The concept is useful to reconstruct how the territorial foundations of national state autonomy are partially reclaimed and, at the same time, partially purposefully suspended. The book focuses on the Prüm system, which facilitates the mandatory exchange of forensic DNA data amongst EU Member States. The Prüm system is an underexplored phenomenon, representing diverse instances of bio-bordering and providing a complex picture of the hidden (dis)integration of Europe. Particular legal, scientific, technical and political dimensions related to the governance and uses of biometric technologies in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom are specifically explored to demonstrate both similar and distinct patterns.

Though criminology took root in Russia in the early 1800s and has gone through various stages of maturation—paralleling developments of the discipline in Europe and North America over the last two centuries—its contributions and presence in the field is hardly noticeable in the English-speaking world. The objective of this book is by no means to fill that void, but rather to bring together the recent developments in Russia, keeping in context its rich history of criminological legacies, traditions, and its current experiences and growth since the restructuring of Soviet Union. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.