The internet has become a popular marketplace for the sale of illicit products, including stolen personal information, drugs, and firearms. Many of these products are acquired using cryptocurrencies, which are generally defined as forms of digital currency that is traceable through blockchain ledger technology. These currencies are thought to be more secure than other forms of digital payment, though law enforcement and financial service providers have found ways to investigate account holders and their transactions. Consequently, several service providers have begun to offer cryptomixing services, which effectively launders payments to circumvent detection and investigation tools. Few have explored the practices of cryptomixing services, or the ways in which they are marketed on the Open and Dark Web. This inductive qualitative analysis will examine a sample of 18 cryptomixing services advertised on both the Open and Dark Web to better understand cryptomixing and its role in facilitating illicit transactions across the internet.

This paper tests a which postulates that the number of femicides should increase as an unintended consequence of the COVID-19-related lockdowns. The monthly data on femicides from 2017 to 2020 collected in six Spanish-speaking countries-Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Panama, Mexico, and Spain-and analyzed using threshold models indicate that the hypothesis must be rejected. The total number of femicides in 2020 was similar to that recorded during each of the three previous years, and femicides did not peak during the months of the strictest lockdowns. In fact, their monthly distribution in 2020 did not differ from the seasonal distribution of femicides in any former year. The discussion criticizes the current state of research on femicide and its inability to inspire effective criminal polices. It also proposes three lines of intervention. The latter are based on a holistic approach that places femicide in the context of crimes against persons, incorporates biology and neuroscience approaches, and expands the current cultural explanations of femicide.

The expansion of monetary sanctions constitutes what Beckett and Murakawa describe as the "shadow carceral state," where covert penal power is expanded through institutional annexation by blending civil, administrative, and criminal legal authority. A growing body of work on monetary sanctions has begun to dissect covert penal power by tracing increased civil and administrative pipelines to incarceration, civil financial alternatives to criminal sanctions, and innovations to generate criminal justice revenue. However, institutional annexation and innovation in the form of contemporary pay-to-stay practices remain understudied and undertheorized. In this article, I first examine statutes and practices to theorize pay-to-stay as exemplary of the shadow carceral state-an outcome of legal hybridity and institutional annexation legitimated using the legal construction of "not punishment," which frames monetary sanctions as non-punitive. Second, I expand Beckett and Murakawa's framework to argue pay-to-stay practices reveal how the shadow carceral state compounds or initiates the civil death of those charged. I broaden our notion of civil death to include financial indebtedness to the shadow carceral state. I suggest covert penal power expands through the accumulation of resources extracted from people marked for civil death through criminal justice contact. Finally, I conclude that monetary sanctions such as pay-to-stay reveal how the shadow carceral state expands covert penal power through necrocapitalism, meaning institutional accumulation occurs through dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death.

Monetary sanctions are a common tool for enforcing accountability within the criminal justice system. However, it is unclear how individuals with disabilities who have a limited capacity to work interact with the system of monetary sanctions. Drawing on courtroom observations and interviews in Washington State, we find that although the court does take disability into account when imposing economic sanctions and monitoring payment compliance, individuals with disabilities end up in a perpetual cycle of administrative hearings that can result in serious financial and health consequences for those involved. Implications for findings are discussed.

Over the last several decades, with the rise of mass incarceration in the United States and its steep costs, governments at the federal, state, and local levels have dramatically ramped up monetary punishment. Monetary sanctions are now the most common type of criminal penalty in the United States. The growth of fines, fees, and other legal financial obligations (LFOs), and the ensuing legal debt, reflect a shifting of the system's costs onto its primarily low-income and indigent subjects. This study provides an exploration of previously underexamined ways in which monetary sanctions impose distinct burdens on the poor. Interviews with 121 defendants in Texas and New York, along with courtroom observations, demonstrate that criminal legal debt is particularly challenging for people with low incomes in three meaningful ways. First, systems set up to handle indigency claims do not adequately address the needs or complex individual circumstances of those who simply do not have the ability to pay. Oftentimes, alternatives are unavailable or statutorily prohibited. Second, the lack of alternatives to payment lead to compromising situations, which then compel indigent defendants to make difficult choices about how to allocate scant resources. Finally, being encumbered with fines and fees and participating in alternatives like community service comes with taxing time requirements that can prove uniquely challenging for those who are poor. These three findings lead us to propose a series of policy recommendations revolving around three key themes: (a) enhancement of indigency procedures, (b) equity in monetary sanctions, and (c) alleviating burdens by improving accessibility.

A unique form of sexual victimization that often goes undiscussed and, therefore, underassessed is that of being forced to penetrate another person (i.e., forced penetration). Due to forced penetration being a relatively novel addition to the definition of rape, there is a lack of assessment tools that identify forced penetration cases. Thus, the goal of this study was to assess the utility and validity of new items designed to assess forced penetration. More than 1,000 participants were recruited across three different studies to assess forced penetration victimization and perpetration. The rate of forced penetration victimization ranged from 4.51% to 10.62%. Among men who reported victimization of any type, 33.8% to 58.7% of victimized men reported experiencing forced penetration across the samples, suggesting this experience is common. All new and unique cases of sexual victimization identified by the forced penetration items were those of heterosexual men. These findings suggest that assessing for forced penetration would increase the reported prevalence rates of sexual victimization, particularly in heterosexual men (and correspondingly, rates of perpetration in women).

In this paper we seek to identify whether the relationship between health disparities and crime occurs at a micro geographic level. Do hot spot streets evidence much higher levels of mental and physical illness than streets with little crime? Are residents of crime hot spots more likely to have health problems that interfere with their normal daily activities? To answer these questions, we draw upon a large National Institutes of Health study of a sample of hot spots and non-hot spots in Baltimore, Maryland. This is the first study we know of to report on this relationship, and accordingly we present unique descriptive data. Our findings show that both physical and mental health problems are much more likely to be found on hot spot streets than streets with little crime. This suggests that crime hot spots are not simply places with high levels of crime, but also places that evidence more general disadvantage. We argue that these findings have important policy implications for the targeting of health services and for developing proactive prevention programs.

Previous research has identified the importance of romantic partners-including spouses, significant others, and dating partners-for influencing the engagement in health-risking behaviors, such as alcohol misuse during emerging adulthood. Although genetic factors are known to play a role in the development of young adult alcohol misuse, little research has examined whether genetic factors affect young adults' susceptibility to their romantic partners' alcohol misusing behaviors. The current study tests whether a single nucleotide polymorphism in the gene (rs279845) moderates the relationship between romantic partner alcohol misuse and frequency of drunkenness in young adulthood. Results revealed differential risk associated with romantic partner alcohol misuse and young adult drunk behavior according to genotype, such that individuals with the TT genotype displayed an elevated risk for frequency of drunkenness when romantic partner alcohol misuse was also high (IRR = 1.06, ≤ 0.05). The findings demonstrate the potential for genetic factors to moderate the influence of romantic partners' alcohol misuse on drunk behavior during the transition to young adulthood.

Using a longitudinal sample of Puerto Rican adolescents living in the Bronx, New York, this study examines the predictors of exposure to violence within gender. Results from a series of negative binomial regressions suggested (a) sensation seeking, peer delinquency, coercive discipline, and initial delinquency increased the likelihood of exposure to violence for both males and females at multiple time points and (b) initial delinquency was the only consistent predictor of exposure to violence at all time points. Regarding the role of gender, the results indicated that some risk factors were similar across genders (e.g., sensation seeking, coercive discipline, peer delinquency, and delinquent behavior), whereas other risk factors differed across gender (e.g., age and welfare among males and school environment for females). Study limitations and implications are discussed.

This paper introduces two new conceptualizations of desistance based on individuals' personal assessments of their own movement away from crime. Drawing from qualitative accounts of changes in offending, we develop survey items indexing subjective desistance and reference group desistance. We then use a representative community sample of young adults to compare these new conceptualizations of desistance against more established measures derived from changes in arrest and self-reported crime. The results indicate that the prevalence and the predictors of desistance vary with these alternative conceptualizations. While relationship quality is consistently related to each desistance measure, the effects of prior crime, peer relationships, race, gender, and parental status depend upon the outcome under consideration. These results show both the generality of the desistance process and the utility of comparing subjective accounts of this process alongside official and self-reported behavioral measures.