History of Crime

Young, poor men and women migrated from the countryside and swelled the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed in Mexico City during the eighteenth century. With this rapid growth in population came an increase in street crime--thefts, assaults, and murders--along with moral crimes--prostitution, adultery, and vagrancy. These transgressions provided a steady flow of inmates to the city's six jails. This pioneering social history of crime and punishment in late colonial Latin America plunges us directly into the daily life and experiences of its lawbreakers. Women typically represented 30 percent of all criminals, and by the eighteenth century concern for their welfare resulted in Mexico City's first attempts at rehabilitation. This Enlightenment-era experiment in social re-education took the form of placing women in separate facilities or in private homes to serve as maids to "respectable" families, which often amounted to little more than exploitation of unpaid laborers. For men, jail was a way-station followed by severe corporal punishment and then years of forced labor. Many male criminals were assigned to clean rubbish-filled streets and open canals of Mexico City. Others went into factories, mines, or military service. All were expendable and frequently died before completing their term of confinement. "A superior work of scholarship."--Colin MacLachlin, Tulane University

От манипулацията на телефонните сигнали до "социалния инженеринг" - първите страници в историята на компютърната престъпност.
В сборника "Наръчник на следователя: Престъпления с висока обществена опасност", изд. Камара на следователите в България, София, 2019

The fire caused a lot of damages in cities and towns of the region of
Liptov. And since the majority of fires was caused by human, magistrates were trying to avoid it by various regulations. Usual
punishment for carelessness in the handling of fire was 12 guldens.
From all cases of arson the highest number is unintentional arson.
Usually magistrates were punishing it by mulct or whipping.
Punishments for intentional arson were more stritc. If court found
person guilty, he was facing the death penalty. Smoking was
widespread during modern times, which has been behind many of the
fires. Magistrates were fighting against this by using the regulations.

This article focuses on infanticide prosecution in sixteenth-century Spain, and the judicial fate of women suspected of violating both criminal law and Christian precepts in the era of Tridentine reform. Through court records from the Kingdom of Navarre (annexed by the Castilian crown in 1515), the author explores how women on trial for the suspicious death of their infants co-opted language of Christian maternity and Catholic sacramental morality to craft their defense against prosecutorial allegations of murder and sacrilege. The article argues that accused infanticidal mothers used performative public piety and doctrinal ambiguity surrounding the post-mortem fate of the unbaptized to their legal advantage, not only to plead their innocence but also to assert their reproductive agency before the early modern Spanish court.

This article features a connected history of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire, from the independence of Spanish America to the " loss " of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Three levels of entanglement are highlighted here: the article looks simultaneously at punitive flows stemming from the colonies and from the metropole; it brings together the study of penal transportation, administrative deportation, and military deportation; and it discusses the relationship between punitive relocations and imprisonment. As part of this special issue, fore-grounding " perspectives from the colonies " , I start with an analysis of the punitive flows that stemmed from the overseas provinces. I then address punishment in the metropole through the colonial lens, before highlighting the entanglements of penal transportation and deportation in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire as a whole.

The Victorian underworld continues to fascinate. Works of popular history that take readers to the heart of the slums of nineteenth-century London are avidly consumed. Movies about gang warfare in 'old' New York are box office hits. And a whole army of 'Ripperologists' pore tirelessly over the evidence in search of the identity of the serial killer who struck in Whitechapel in 1888. Yet against this insatiable popular appetite for the latest horror stories from the citadels of vice and crime, one may be forgiven for thinking that academic historians have lost their nerve. Many no longer seem willing to contemplate the underworld as a social reality, preferring instead to conceive of it as a 'mythical', 'imagined' construct. The idea of the 'criminal classes', so beloved by Victorians themselves, is generally rejected as a bourgeois stereotype. And some even doubt our ability as historians ever to recover the experiences and perceptions of the criminal and the vicious themselves. Histories of crime 'from below', some now argue, are just not possible...

A Népliget közvetlenül közparkká válását követően kétes hírű területként vált ismertté, ahol rablóbandák garázdálkodtak, prostituáltak kerestek maguknak kuncsaftot, s egyúttal a fővárosi homoszexuális szubkultúra számára is fontos találkahellyé váltak a liget eldugott részei. A tanulmány a park normával ellentétes térhasználati módjait mutatja be 1896 és 1945 között, a korabeli rendőrségi források mellett elsősorban a budapesti sajtótudósítások segítségével. Az elemzés három fő témára, a bűnözésre, a (homo)szexualitásra, valamint a ligetben elkövetett öngyilkosságokra koncentrál. A Népliget a vizsgált korszakban több kisebb-nagyobb bűncselekményben játszott szerepet, akár a cselekmény elkövetésének helyszíneként, akár az elkövetők búvóhelyeként, akár a bűneset során szerzett zsákmány rejtekhelyeként. A bűnözés mellett a hetero-, és főleg a homoszexuális kontaktusok megteremtésének fontos színtere volt a Népliget. A rendőrség a kriminalitást és szeméremsértő szexuális praktikákat fokozott felügyelettel, gyakori razziákkal igyekezett megakadályozni. A Népliget a köztérben elkövetett öngyilkossági  kísérleteknek is gyakori színhelye. A tanulmány végén a parkban dokumentált öngyilkosságokat elemzem az öngyilkosság elkövetésének módja, helyszíne, valamint az elkövető kora és társadalmi státusza alapján.

Pour les intellectuels et lexicographes officiant sous l'Ancien Regime, le peuple de France n'est alors pas un mais multiple. Au cœur de l'espace urbain, exclusion faite de la population mendiante et vagabonde, la partie tout a la fois la plus nombreuse et la moins bien consideree de ce peuple regroupe les travailleurs journaliers et sans qualification, ceux de la terre ou plus ou moins qualifies mais non dependants d'un cadre corporatif, la domesticite au sens large, les ouvriers de manufactures, les compagnons et garcons de metiers jures ainsi que l'ensemble des chambrelans besognant en contravention aux statuts des jurandes. Cette population que nous identifions sous l'appellation " second peuple " se caracterise par une existence de ses membres majoritairement vecue dans la precarite quotidienne, une insertion plus ou moins bien definie et solide au sein de la societe urbaine et une inscription en dehors de toute forme officielle d'organisat...

"Le second peuple de Nantes au XVIIIe siècle :
environnements du quotidien et interactions sociales.

Pour les intellectuels et lexicographes officiant sous l’Ancien Régime, le peuple de France n’est alors pas un mais multiple. Au cœur de l’espace urbain, exclusion faite de la population mendiante et vagabonde, la partie tout à la fois la plus nombreuse et la moins bien considérée de ce peuple regroupe les travailleurs journaliers et sans qualification, ceux de la terre ou plus ou moins qualifiés mais non dépendants d’un cadre corporatif, la domesticité au sens large, les ouvriers de manufactures, les compagnons et garçons de métiers jurés ainsi que l’ensemble des chambrelans besognant en contravention aux statuts des jurandes. Cette population que nous identifions sous l’appellation « second peuple » se caractérise par une existence de ses membres majoritairement vécue dans la précarité quotidienne, une insertion plus ou moins bien définie et solide au sein de la société urbaine et une inscription en dehors de toute forme officielle d’organisation horizontale du travail. Une attention portée sur trois pans majeurs de l’existence du second peuple de la ville de Nantes au dernier siècle de la monarchie absolue, soit la vie en communauté, la consommation matérielle et l’activité laborieuse, est en mesure de dévoiler quelques-uns des traits essentiels des individus le constituant : place centrale de l’élément féminin, importance des notions de déplacement et d’implantation géographiques, force des connexions et solidarités de voisinage, rapport parfois houleux à l’autorité et frugalité de l’environnement matériel du quotidien.

Mots clés : peuple, ville, Nantes, inventaire de biens, travail illégal, résistance, solidarité, voisinage, lien social, violence, mouvement, migration, parrainage, pauvreté, précarité, consommation, micro-histoire, déménagement.

The second people of Nantes in the XVIIIth century:
everyday environments and social interactions.

For the intellectuals and lexicographers officiating under the Ancien Regime, the people of France was then not one but many. At the heart of urban space, excluding the population of beggars and vagabonds, the at once most numerous and least well regarded part of this people groups together unqualified day laborers, those working on the land or more or less qualified but not dependent on a corporate framework, domestic workers in the broadest sense of the word, factory workers, journeymen and juniors in the legal profession and all “roomworkers” toiling in contravention of the statutes of the guilds. This population that we identify under the name of the “second people” is characterized by a life of its members mostly lived in everyday poverty, a more or less well defined and strong insertion in the heart of urban society and an entry without any official form of horizontal organization of work. A focus on three major segments of the existence of the second people of the city of Nantes in the last century of absolute monarchy, be it community life, material consumption or work activity, is able to reveal some essential features of the individuals which make it up: the central role of the feminine element, the importance of the concepts of travel and geographic location, the strength of connections and neighborhood solidarity, sometimes stormy relations with authority and the frugality of the material environment of daily life.

Key words: people, city, Nantes, inventories of goods, subterranean work, resistance, solidarity, neighborhood, social tie, violence, movement, migration, spiritual kinship, poverty, precariousness, household consumption, microhistory, move."

In an important 1984 paper, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,” Jean Hampton justifies the practice of inflicting painful criminal punishments if and only if punishment is morally educative. Hampton’s suggestion forms the point of departure for this paper on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Below, I show that Dostoevsky agrees with Hampton that punishment should aim at moral reform; however, Dostoevsky presents no evidence that self-punishment or legal punishment reliably cultivates respect for law, legal authority, oneself, or for others as moral agents. Instead, Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian writings are highly critical of Russian criminal justice, and emphasize that moral education comes through dialogue, reflection, and criticism. This highly individualized treatment may be experienced as painful, but it does not have to result from, and it may even be impeded by, legal “hard treatment.”
Keywords: moral education; punishment; Dostoevsky; rehabilitation; crime

On 4 June 1737, the celebrated artist François Lemoyne, first painter to king Louis XV, committed suicide by violently stabbing himself to death with his sword. This article offers a forensically inspired art-historical narrative about a crime that took place three centuries ago. Using police records, medical reports, property inventories, eyewitness accounts, and the archives of the Académie Royale, this study pieces together the intriguing tale of Lemoyne’s suicide, examining what drove him to such tragic extremes, and resolving the mystery of how he committed his bloody act. But even more fascinating than the story of Lemoyne’s death is what the evidence uncovers about the ordinary details of Lemoyne’s life, offering glimpses into private spaces, habitual routines, personal relationships, and professional ambitions. Showing how an investigation of Lemoyne’s death reveals more than we might expect about the wider art world of eighteenth-century Paris, this article re-evaluates our art-historical aversion to biography. Borrowing methods from historical writing as well as looking for a distinctly art-historical approach, this article makes a case for the potential of microbiographical and object-driven modes of life-writing in social histories of art.

This article is a part of a Criminal History book : "Fiume Bojaccia. Delitti e misteri romani sul Tevere", where the Author writes about 11 famous criminal cases of the past. This one is about the trial and the  decapitation of Beatrice Cenci, her brother and her step-mother, in 1599 on the order of pope Clemente VIII.
At the end of the article can be found the bibliography.
The research has been mostly based on original documents preserved in the State and Vatican Archives; especially on "apografo Stramazzi".

Obiettivo della seguente ricerca è stata la ricognizione, analisi e critica del delitto politico a seguito dell’istituzione della magistratura degli Inquisitori di Stato della Repubblica di Venezia. Partendo dalla definizione stessa di delitto politico, si è dedicata una prima parte all’analisi complessa della formazione dello stato moderno e del dibattito politico sui mezzi a disposizione dello stesso. Dalla concezione della ragione di Stato, al diritto di guerra, all’individuazione del nemico pubblico al fine di giustificare sul piano religioso-morale l’utilizzo di veleni e sicari. Nella seconda parte
si è analizzato l’antimito come chiave per la comprensione della ercezione attorno al fenomeno dell’assassinio politico. Una terza sezione esamina i dati raccolti dalle fonti archivistiche primarie presenti nei fondi archivistici delle magistrature coinvolte. Un'analisi etimologica, giuridica e sociale del fenomeno nel XVIII secolo. Partendo
dall’assunto che tale pratica lascia traccia sotto l’aspetto economico e della
corrispondenza verso i rappresentanti della Repubblica di Venezia, si è potuto creare un database mirato all’analisi puntuale sulle modalità adottate. Distinguendo tra le varie logiche politiche applicate di caso in caso emerge un quadro complesso di trasferimento delle competenze dal Consiglio di Dieci agli Inquisitori contro la propalazione dei segreti successivamente rinominati Inquisitori di Stato.

This article is a part of a Criminal History book : "Fiume Bojaccia. Delitti e misteri romani sul Tevere", where the Author writes about 11 famous criminal cases of the past. This one is about the death of Giovanni Borgia, son of pope Alessandro VI, in 1497.
The article's title is written in reinessance italian; that's why the verb "hanno" (they have) is written without the "h" and the verb "morire" (to die) is transitive.
At the end of the article can be found the bibliography.
The research has been mostly based on original documents preserved in the State and Vatican Archives.

RESUMEN Apoyándose en un corpus de escritos informales de policías de la ciudad de Buenos Aires publicados entre fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX, el trabajo se ocupa de las narrativas de la pesquisa nacidas en el seno de la institución policial. Argumenta que en el contexto decimonónico de expansión de un imaginario literario de la detección, los policías debieron redoblar esfuerzos para construir una voz profesional sobre la investigación y el quehacer de los detectives estatales, y que esos esfuerzos resultaron en discursos no del todo autónomos de las reglas de la ficción. A lo largo de su desarrollo, el trabajo reflexiona, además, sobre la relación entre policía, literatura policial y culturas policiales. ABSTRACT Drawing from a body of informal writing authored by Buenos Aires policemen between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, this article deals with informal chronicles of detective investigation. It argues that in the context of the expansion of a literary imagination about detection, in the late 19th century, it was hard for policemen to build up a professional voice about the work of public detectives. Ultimately, their discourse was never completely free from the influence of literary voices. Moreover, the article reflects on the complex relationship between the police force, detective literature and police cultures. Cita sugerida: Caimari, L. (2017). Cómo se investiga un crimen. Detectives y literatura detectivesca en Buenos Aires entre los siglos XIX y XX. Orbis Tertius, 22(26), e050. https://doi.org/10.24215/18517811e050 Esta obra está bajo licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.es_AR

My PhD thesis on violence and gender in Dutch newspapers, 1880-1930. Introductory chapters consider the changing position of women and children in Dutch society, the prosecution of family and sexual violence, and  the rise of the mass media in this period. In three chapters on press reports of intimate partner violence, violence against children and sexual violence, I show that media coverage of violence against women increased, but this did not equate to a sustained criticism of male violence in society.

Il saggio si propone di illustrare le posizioni favorevoli al mantenimento della pena di morte da parte di alcuni esponenti della Scuola positiva (Lombroso, Garofalo, Ferri). A tali posizioni fanno coppia quelle che vedono nel "disadattato", che si segnala per una forte propensione al crimine, un pericolo per la società. Pur irrilevanti nel dibattito sulla pena di morte, gli orientamenti della Scuola positiva ebbero modo di essere indirettamente recepite nella legge sulla PS del 1889 e poi nel codice pena del 1930 attraverso l'introduzione delle cd. "misure di sicurezza", tra le quali anche i ricoveri in manicomi giudiziari.

La storia di Giuliano de' Medici (1453-1478), esponente di una delle più famose famiglie di Firenze, ucciso dai suoi nemici in una chiesa, Santa Maria del Fiore, durante la Messa.
The story of Giuliano de' Medici (1453-1478), exponent of one of the most famous families of Florence, killed by his enemies in a church, Santa Maria del Fiore, during the Mess.

How did the Brazilian legal system deal with obscene writings, objects and acts between 1830 (when the first independent Brazilian penal code was issued) and 1923 (when the press law significantly changed the penal treatment of obscene publications)? Assuming the idea of criminalization as a historically contingent process rooted in historically localized cultures, it was possible to detect a deterioration of the liberal patterns of criminalization when the pornographic market in Brazil was increasing and when international articulation against obscene publications was growing, which involved, among other aspects, the problem of the distinction between pornography and art. The relative vagueness of the legal notion of obscenity throughout the whole period provided a window of access to the margins of the modern notion of legality and allowed us to address how law itself historically defines its relationships with other normativities and historical contingencies.

Jana Arsovska’s book Decoding Albanian Organized Crime is an insightful study that uses both historic and anthropological lenses to comment on complex and diverse local and international Albanian criminal networks that are used to commit illegal acts, such as human trafficking. Despite her youth, Arsovska, assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, with over 15 years of personal and professional experience studying Albanian crime networks, writes smoothly with much detail on the criminal underworld and, of course, the criminal codes. It is important to note that, beyond writing a case study on criminal networks in Macedonia, Kosovo, and the United States, the author paints an in-depth description of actors, illegal activities, criminal, corrupt business and governmental structures, and even the local context, all of which stimulate the consolidation of ethnic transnational organized crime.

This book tells the history of Cambridge from the earliest Roman and Anglo Saxon inhabitants through to the notorious Cambridge Spies, who actively spied for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Told in an accessible manner, and illustrated throughout, the contents are:
1. Etheldreda: Born a Princess, Died a Saint
2. Vanquished by the Vikings: the sacking of Cambridge
3. Fire, Death and Murder at the Fairs: Stourbridge and Midsummer Fairs
4. Jousting Tournaments: history of jousts at Cambridge
5. The Black Death: death in Cambridge
6. Peasants' Revolt: attacks on Cambridge colleges during the revolt
7. Bloody Mary's Revenge on Cambridge
8. Burnt at the Stake: John Hullier, the Protestant Martyr
9. Bear-Baiting: cruel sport in Cambridge
10. Witches and Witchcraft: women killed for being witches
11. Bull-Baiting: more cruel Cambridge sports
12. The English Civil War: the fortification of Cambridge
13. Oliver Cromwell's Missing Head
14. Pressed for an Answer: Peine Forte et Dure
15. One in the Eye for Sir Isaac Newton
16. Highway Robbery: highway men in Cambridge
17. Branding: punishment for crimes
18. Bloody Burwell Fire: the death of 70 innocent people
19. Dick Turpin: his time hiding in Cambridge
20. Cockfighting: history of cockfighting at Cambridge
21. The Resurrection of Tristram Shandy - death of Laurence Stearne: grave robbers steal his body for dissection in the university
22. Cambridge Gallows: the tragedy of those hung at Cambridge
23. The Tragical Death of the Revd Samuel Reeve
24. The Chimneysweep Burglars: thefts from colleges
25. Elizabeth Woodcock and the Curse of the Three Tuns Inn
26. General Tom Thumb Causes a Riot
27. Sister Act: The Cambridge Arsenic Poisoners
28. The Three Tuns Inn: Den of Thieves
29. Burned Alive
30. Bloody Students: The Battle of Town and Gown
31. Fatal Bumps: death on the river Cam
32. Suffragette's Protest
33. The Great War: the role the university played in WWI
34. The Judases Who Betrayed from Within: the story of the Cambridge spies: Blunt, Burgess, Philby, MacLean, and others
35. The Enigma of the Second World War: the role Cambridge played in cracking the German enigma codes at Bletchley Park

Also attached are reviews of the book in the Cambridge News by Emma Higginbotham and a piece about Oliver Cromwell's Head, taken from the book.

La storia dell'attentato dinamitardo a Napoleone III, perpetrato da Felice Orsini (1819-1858), anarchico italiano vicino a Giuseppe Mazzini.
The story of the dynamitic attack perpetrated, in order to kill Napoleone III, by Felice Orsini (1819-1858), italian anarchic, very close to Giuseppe Mazzini.

At the beginning of 20th century, Budapest was seen and presented by both public
opinion and political discourses as a sinful, immoral city. One of the “social illnesses”
appearing in the discourses was homosexuality. Since homosexuals most
often practiced their sexuality furtively, urban space and its distinct types play a vital
role in examining their subculture. The public, semi-public and private spheres
surface in police and press discourses, almost exclusively in the context of conflicts
between the authorities and queers, or crimes committed against the members of
the gay community. Therefore, the modes of how queers used the urban space,
can also be investigated through these conflicts. Starting from this idea, this paper
attempts to show the places, in which Budapest police authorities and the metropolitan press located the queer subculture from the turn of the century up until the outbreak of Second World War. Narratives of criminal acts committed against the members of the queer community, mainly blackmail cases and murders, help us in drawing the mental map of “queer Budapest”, but also give a glimpse into the social opinions of homosexuality in the examined time period.

The paper examines the main features of the image of queer subculture in the first half of 20th century based on police and press discourses. Queer subculture in the modern metropolis was a very diverse and complex phenomenon in the early 20th century, with a number of different sub-types. This complexity is not only for historians of queer culture evident but was also observed by contemporary analysts like police officers and journalists. As indicated in the title of the paper, the discourse about male homosexuality in this period is characterized by a gradual medicalisation: after the 1900s homosexuality was interpreted as a disease and a perversion that can be cured and healed. The primary sources of the study are police documents, books published by police officers and articles circulated in Budapest newspapers. In addition to the daily press we examined books of urban reportage appearing first in the 1900s in Budapest, which are closely linked to the press discourse. Especially the joint works of reporter Kornél Tábori and police press office chief Vladimir Székely give an insight into urban queer culture of Budapest.
One of the main characteristics of the medicalisation of male homosexuality is that while press and police discourses borrowed notions of medical science in their analysis of metropolitan social problems since the end of 19th century, this had merely a stylistic role and the interpretation of sexual otherness on a scientific basis has become commonplace only in the early 1900s. The ongoing trial in 1908-1910 of Szpázó Kragujevics plays a decisive role in this respect. Kragujevics, who himself was a queer and had a close link to the queer subcultures of Berlin, Vienna and Budapest, was accused of commiting several crimes against homosexuals. The case played an important part in contemporary press discourse especially in the context of the Eulenburg-scandal in Germany. 
The analysis of the police and press discourses of sames-sex sexuality seems to support the thesis that from the 1900s right until the end of the Horthy era, regardless of political system the issue of queer culture was characterized by a generally tolerant attitude, which is largely related to the fact that non-normative forms of sexual behavior were interpreted in a medicalised way.

La storia di Edoardo II di Inghilterra (1284-1327), re poco politico e molto gaudente, morto in prigionia per probabile comando della sua regina.
The story of Edward II of England (1284-1327), more reveller than political king, probably killed by order of his queen.

The aim of the chapter is to describe diversity of punishments which Liptov county court imposed for vice crimes in 18th century. The most numerous in reviewed period were in Liptov observed infanticidium and lechery, less numerous were incest and adultery and rarely was observed zoophilia, bigamy, prostitution and rape.
The punishments were the following: For less serious crimes as for example lechery or adultery court used flogging an whipping, fines or short-time jail. More serious crimes as incest and zoophilia were punished by few years in jail or by death (most often execution as decollation by a sword). Punishments could be combined or complemented for example with expulsion from the territory of county.