Nicolas Trajtenberg

• University of Cambridge

Prison violence remains a critical issue, significantly influenced by the dynamics of leadership within the prisoner population. This chapter investigates the dynamics, factors, and barriers that are involved in prison violence and prevents prisoners from assuming leadership roles, identifying three primary obstacles. First, the tendency to ignore...

Prisons are concerned with safety. One key piece of information is how much violence takes place in prison. This is important from a micro perspective – will this new inmate be at risk of victimization? And from a macro one too – are more resources needed in a prison to reduce the potential for violence? Yet our knowledge about the ‘dark figure’ of...

Cybercrime is on the rise, and so is the need to systematically analyze its prevalence, distribution, causes and consequences. While official records (mainly police, prosecution and court statistics) provide important information to explore online crime, they have been subject to extensive criticism due to the presence of measurement error arising...

There is a vast literature evaluating the empirical association between stay-at-home policies and crime during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these academic efforts have primarily focused on the effects within specific cities or regions rather than adopting a cross-national comparative approach. Moreover, this body of literature not only generally...

Contemporary criminology issues are increasingly global, cross-cultural, and multilingual. Moreover, students from different cultural and national backgrounds will need to apply data analytics in their respective contexts. Crime data used in statistical courses should reflect this diversity, and in turn enhance the equality and inclusivity of the t...

Community management policies for individuals convicted of sexual offenses (ICSO) are controversial, mainly because the effectiveness of these policies in reducing recidivism is limited and appear to have some collateral effects. Despite this, the current meta-analysis found the public highly support these policies. Studies examining public percept...

Community management policies for individuals convicted of sexual offenses (ICSO) are controversial, mainly because the effectiveness of these policies in reducing recidivism is limited and appear to have some collateral effects. Despite this, the current meta-analysis found the public highly support these policies. Studies examining public percept...

Psychopathy remains a relatively unexplored concept in Latin America. The abbreviated Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (SRP-SF) seems promising in this under-resourced context. However, the SRP-SF should be tested for measurement invariance to achieve meaningful comparison across countries in Latin America. Therefore the aims of this study were to exa...

Objective: This study examined whether executive functioning (EF) mediated the relationship between childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI) and engaging in bullying in prison (BP). Participants: A sample of male adults in custody in Uruguay (N = 236), drawn from five prisons. Methods: Inmates filled out self-report questionnaires examining TBI...

Cybercrime is on the rise, and so is the need to systematically analyze its prevalence, distribution, causes, and consequences. While official records (mainly police, prosecution and court statistics) provide important information to explore online crime, they have been subject to extensive criticism due to the presence of measurement error arising...

Government responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic had an unprecedented impact on mobility patterns with implications for public safety and crime dynamics in countries across the planet. This paper explores the effect of stay‐at‐home guidelines on thefts and robberies at the neighborhood level in a Latin American city. We exploit neighborhood heterogene...

Treatment for individuals convicted of sex offenses has substantially improved in developed countries in recent decades, providing practitioners with an extensive literature to guide the implementation of effective programs to reduce sexual reoffending. Nevertheless, sexual offending rehabilitation is still in its infancy in Latin American countrie...

There is evidence that childhood maltreatment (CM) is an important risk factor for adult criminal behavior. However, little is known about the cognitive processes mediating this relationship. This study examined the mediating role of executive functioning (EF) on the relationship between CM and history of criminal behavior on a sample of 334 male i...

Este trabajo proporciona un panorama general de la Policía Nacional del Uruguay, el actor más importante del país en materia de seguridad. Para ello, se analiza primero la historia de la fuerza policial, desde sus orígenes en 1829 hasta los más recientes esfuerzos de modernización en el siglo XXI. También se analizan sus actuales arreglos instituci...

Despite the increasing prevalence of cybercrime and its study by criminologists, very little research has examined the extent, nature, and impact of fear of cybercrime. In this study, we conducted a multilevel analysis of the 2018 Eurobarometer Cybersecurity Survey to test the applicability of routine activities theory on fear of economic cybercrim...

Chapter 11 addresses the prohibitionist argument that has historically dominated the International Drug Control Regime discourse, and falls under the broader ‘securitization’ agenda. Analyzing studies that deal with the link between narcotics and crime, the chapter evaluates whether existing empirical evidence in Latin America backs up prohibitioni...

This book asks how the international community can tackle the complex causes and consequences that the War on Drugs is intended to address. This question arises against the backdrop of the War on Drugs’ failure to significantly reduce the scale or impact of illicit drug production and trafficking as well as the lack of consensus on the way forward...

Structured risk assessment tools are widely used across the criminal justice systems in western countries. However, little research has been conducted to validate these tools in low and middle-income societies. The aim of this study was to validate a cost-efficient risk assessment tool, the Self-Appraisal Questionnaire (SAQ) in Uruguay, Latin Ameri...

The stay-at-home restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 led to unparalleled sudden change in daily life, but it is unclear how they affected urban crime globally. We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to ass...

Childhood and adolescence are critical periods for human development, involving an inherent tension between children’s development and autonomy and their safety and well-being. The digital mediation of children’s increasingly autonomous participation in the social world has been one of the most heated issues for parents and policy maker, generally...

Bullying and cyberbullying victimisation are serious problems worldwide, especially among children and adolescents. However, there is much research on risk factors, the evidence about victim typologies that combine online and offline bullying with the specific nature of the victimisation episodes and other sociodemographic and individual features i...

A contentious criminal justice policy issue in recent times has been community management policies for individuals convicted of sexual offenses. This systematic review attained professionals’ views, areas of concern, and recommendations for community management policies. It went beyond the extant literature by exploring perceptions of heterogenous...

Previous research has found association between antisocial behavior and deficits in executive functioning. However, research into a link between them accounting for criminal history has found divergent results in western countries. The present study sought to determine the severity of executive functioning deficits in offenders compared to a normat...

This chapter gives a general overview of policing in Uruguay with a particular focus on the Uruguayan National Police, the most important security actor in the country. To this end, we examine the history of the police force from its origins in 1829 to its recent modernization efforts in the 21st century. Also reviewed are its current institutional...

There are considerable variations in the extent to which growth has improved the position of the poor. In all cases except one the incomes of the poorest have improved over the periods for which data on distribution are available. However, in all cases there is some evidence that inequality has tended to increase. The relative importance of mineral...

In the field of criminology social inequality has long been theorized to be associated with crime. This issue has been extensively studied and empirical research has shown that income inequality and low socio-economic status are positively associated with crime perpetration and victimization. Latin America constitutes a particularly interesting cas...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is characterized by a change in brain function after an external force or sudden movement to the head. TBI is associated with risk-taking, impulsivity, psychological distress, substance abuse, and violent crime. Previous studies have also linked problem gambling to TBI, but these studies have not controlled for possible...

Introduction: This paper accomplishes two goals. First, we assesses the measurement invariance of legal cynicism among adolescents in São Paulo, Brazil, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Zurich, Switzerland. Second, we evaluate a series of social and individual antecedents that are expected to influence legal cynicism across contexts. Methods: This paper f...

Background Effects of treatment for child sexual abuse (CSA) victims have important implications. Assessing Risk of Bias (RoB) is a vital step to inform interpretations of treatment effects for these victims. The AMSTAR-2 (A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews) offers a comprehensive critical appraisal, allowing users to distinguish high...

Prison violence is a fundamental problem for all prison systems in the world. It compromises the human rights, security, and integrity of the lives of the inmates and prison officers, affects the effectiveness of programs, recidivism and economic costs in society. Despite its relevance, prison violence has been little studied and the scarcity of st...

The highest rates of serious interpersonal violence occur in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs) especially in Latin America, the Caribbean, and sub–Saharan Africa. However, previous reviews of risk factors for youth violence focused almost entirely on studies from high-income countries (HICs). Rigorous synthesis of evidence is needed for LMICs...

En las últimas décadas, Uruguay enfrenta un escenario de aumento del crimen, la violencia y su concentración espacial. La creciente alarma pública que despierta este problema ha llevado a varios actores políticos a plantear que la solución es incrementar la reacción penal frente al delito, asumiendo que este tipo de respuesta es lo que la ciudadaní...

El artículo está centrado en el estudio de las formas de participación laboral y de construcción de la legitimidad de las normas de calidad en diferentes empresas de la rama química y alimenticia en el Uruguay. En el trabajo se discuten los resultados del análisis cualitativo realizado a través de entrevistas en cuatro dimensiones i) la relación en...

Use of illegal drugs is a billionaire industry related to a diversity of significant health, social and economic costs for societies (Caulkins, Reuter, Iguchi, & Chiesa, 2005; Hall et al., 2016). An important social cost of using drugs is crime and violence. Evidence showed a robust relationship between drug use and violence and crime (Bennett, Hol...

Emotions and Explanation in Cultural Criminology Cultural Criminology (CC) is one of the most recent and exciting developments in criminological theory. Its main argument is that mainstream criminological theories provide inadequate explanations of crime due to epistemological and theoretical flaws. CC’s alternative involves assuming a phenomenolog...

La educación y el trabajo tienen un rol central en las explicaciones del delito y la reincidencia. Consecuentemente, las políticas y programas de rehabilitación de las instituciones penitenciarias han buscado incidir en estas dos dimensiones. En este trabajo introduciremos la literatura especializada sobre el rol del trabajo y la educación en la ex...

This book presents a findings from a representative survey on self-reported offending and victimization among adolescents in Montevideo. Based on the findings and a comparative analysis with Zurich, Switzerland, the report makes recommendations for an evidence-based violence prevention strategy in Uruguay

In this article we first describe the political discussion on the reform on diminishing the age of criminal responsibility and its assumptions: i) 16-17 youths are responsible for a significant portion of criminality in Uruguay; ii) increasing the severity of penalties diminishes crime. We use official statistics and the international literature to...

The impact of rehabilitation programs and its effect on the reduction of recidivism is a very relevant public policy problem. Although the design of intervention models is a key factor, there are intangible dimensions that affect the efficacy of programs. This article has three goals. First, we systematize the key problems of programmatic integrity...

RESUMEN En primer lugar, el artículo sistematiza algunas ideas de Bauman, como los conceptos de orden, ambivalencia, modernidad líquida, estado y rol del intelectual, la exclusión en la globalización y la doble metáfora (turista, vagabundo), el productor y el consumidor, y la comunidad. En segundo lugar, el artículo analiza el papel que juega la e...

Este trabajo se propone mostrar los resultados del Proyecto de Investigación “Competencias organizacionales para el sostenimiento de Programas de Calidad ante situaciones de incertidumbre” financiado por la Comisión Sectorial de Investigación Científica de la Universidad. El Proyecto está centrado en el estudio de las competencias organizacionales...

El artículo está centrado en el estudio de las competencias organizacionales necesarias para el sostenimiento de los programas de certificación de calidad en diferentes empresas de la rama química y alimenticia en el Uruguay. En el trabajo se discuten los resultados del análisis cuantitativo acerca del alcance de los procesos de certificación de ca...