1. Trafficking offences, organized/transnational crime and containment policies

Trafficking offences today are at the center of the attention of crime policy makers. Production and trafficking of cocaine and marijuana have been placed under an international system of penal prohibition and have triggered significant reforms of substantive and procedural criminal law. Penal prohibition has come also with consequences among which we find organized crime groups and the sidelining of health policies. The costs of penal prohibition are enormous and these costs have during the last years reignited a discussion on whether penal prohibition is a solution to the problem or rather one of the causes of the problem. Uruguay has, as have the US states Colorado and Washington, decided to break with the policy of penal prohibition in the field of Marijuana control and to implement policies which shall provide for more effective answers to the problem of organized crime which flourishes in the shadow of prohibition and to other problems related to the shadow economy and black markets. It seeks also to implement a health policy which is not restrained by criminal prohibition.

2. Developments in Detention and Prison Policies in Latin America

Prison overcrowding and in particular pervasive use of pretrial detention have been common elements of   the crime policy agenda in Latin America for decades. Evidently, this has not resulted in changing the situation in Latin American prisons. Riots and violence in prisons are closely associated with overcrowding. The project aims at:

Evaluating reform policies implemented during the last decades with a view to reduce prison overcrowding, the use of prison sentences and pretrial detention and answering in particular the question of why reform efforts have not been successful.

Collecting comparative data on the prison systems in Latin America  whereby explanatory variables which will help to understand the use of imprisonment and prison systems. This will allow researchers to develop prison policies based on evidence related to forecasts of the prison population.

Monitoring and analyzing legal and administrative prison regimes and their compliance with international law and standards.

3) Responding to a Violent and Repressive Past: Latin American Perspectives

Many Latin American countries during the Cold War period have suffered from political repression and large scale violence affecting political opposition and minorities. The last two decades have seen various attempts to deal with this repressive and violent past. The project will collect systematically information on completed and ongoing activities of truth and reconciliation commissions, criminal courts, etc. dealing with repression (and human rights violations) of the past.

4) Violence in Latin America

In some regions of Latin America violence is endemic. Internationally, many South American countries are top ranked with respect to the officially recorded murder rates. While large numbers of killings are sometimes associated with insurgencies and civil war, it is also clear that levels of general violence in Latin America are far above those found in Europe and Asia. However, also within Latin America large variation in violence can be observed. Even within a single country violence may take different courses. The project seeks to go further in violence research in South America (which is in some respects well developed) and will try to find new answers which will help create promising legal and social policies.

5) Restorative Justice.

Restorative Justice is an alternative or complementary form to the retributive or traditional criminal justice. Criminal justice seeks to punish the perpetrator and the reparation of the social harm to the community, while restorative justice seeks to compensate the damage caused to the direct victim. To achieve this goal restorative justice offers comprehensive procedures, in which besides the victim and perpetrator, members of the community (family members, friends, neighbors, neighbors’ and social’s leaders, etc) can participate. This possibility aims to obtain reparation agreements that could bring satisfaction to the victim and that could be voluntarily accepted by the perpetrator.

In Latin America the violence is a common denominator of many frequently committed crimes. Latin American countries usually react against crime with violence and by using the criminal law system violating the human rights through the prisoner system. And to make matters worse, by using the incarceration as preventive detention.

Since this situation increase the escalation of violence and does not solve social conflict, some Latin American countries are looking for alternatives ways to react against crime.

South American Police Offices are analyzing some restorative justice programs to deal with crime and some of them have implemented the victim-author mediation, the reparation and the conditional suspension of the criminal procedure. The implementation of this change of paradigm in Latin America should be monitored in more detail.

Given its focus on the conflict’s protagonists and social harm in unequal societies, Critical Criminology has played an important role in the analysis of the social costs of punishment in Latin America. This doctrine shares some theoretical aims with restorative justice. They both seek to create an actors centered approach to conflict management. Both seek to get back the conflict or a part of it to the real protagonist.  The differences and similarities between the Critical Criminology and the Restorative Justice should be deeply analyzed by LatOCC.