Cybercrime, offending minors and tobacco norms amongst topics of interest for the Criminology Sciences Team
“This has less to do with criminal or forensic sciences, the study of DNA, the clues left, the post mortems...”. Despite the fact that the Donostia-San Sebastián-based Basque Institute of Criminology, belonging to the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), has been up and running for nearly thirty years now, there is still the belief that its walls hide some kind of CSI. This impression could not be further from the truth, according to César San Juan, project coordinator for the Criminological Sciences Consolidated Research Team (GICASS) which was born at the Institute and is led by Professor of Criminal Law, José Luis de la Cuesta. Its mission is not to catch the offender —the “bad guy”—, but to “tackle the reasoning behind or explanation for criminal phenomena”. The Basque Institute of Criminology arose as a teaching mission but, over time, its character changed, gradually becoming the research centre that it is today. This is how GICASS was born, a group made up of 12 researchers — jurists and psychologists. “For me the special feature of this team is that it is multidisciplinary. Basically we have come from two Departments: Public Law, on the one hand and, on the other, Social Psychology and Methodology of Behavioural Sciences”, stated Mr San Juan, who belongs to the latter. He considers this to be very enriching, “because the product, our results, is more than the sum of the parts of both disciplines”. GICASS currently comprises four Research and Consultation Units (known as “ÚNICOs”): three encompassing quite diverse projects and a fourth, , which acts as a consultation tool for the other Units. All the projects carried out by these ÚNICOs are “highly topical”, mostly being research commissioned by government bodies: “Our aim is to provide judicial case elements; firstly, to make reliable diagnoses of criminal phenomena and all its adjacent circumstances in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (CAPV-EAE); secondly and most importantly, to enable policy decisions to be made in order to enhance the quality of people’s lives”. In the ÚNICO on security in urban and professional contexts, researchers are working on a project which is a clear reflection of the contemporary character of GICASS. With the title, , it tackles cybercriminality or harassment through the Internet. This project shows that political institutions have to contextualise the legal framework and social policies: “We are studying the ecology of crime — the context in which delinquency occurs. In recent times, physical space has disappeared and so we have begun to talk about cyberdelinquency, which has given rise to different typologies of felony”. Another project within this ÚNICO on security, currently underway in Bilbao and previously in the city of Donostia-San Sebastián, is that of the geography of crime. “We use Geographical Information Systems to geo-reference felonies, but also to pinpoint where people are in fear of being the victim of another person”, explained Mr San Juan. “Different layers of data can be incorporated into this type of geographical analysis in order to measure objective delinquency, thanks to sentences (in which the street on which a crime has been committed is specified); the perception of insecurity, through surveys; and victimisation (where people say they have been a victim of crime), also through surveys. These three layers do not always coincide”. Another ÚNICO project from GICASS focuses on victimological aspects and delinquency amongst minors. Besides a project on the recovery of historical memory regarding female prisoners in the Saturraran prison during the Spanish Civil War and post-war period, this ÚNICO has taken on board another, known as the . This involves periodically evaluating the efficacy of measures implemented in the Juvenile Justice Plan of the Basque Government by, amongst other things, identifying the psychosocial profile of the minor offender. Thus, in the most recent report, it is defined as male, the majority born in the CAPV-EAE, who offend once or twice throughout their life record history of offences, do so in a group, and who commit acts mostly related to robbery. In 2010, the rate of re-incidence was 21.7 %. Finally, the GICASS team also took on purely legal projects. “These are more office-based studies, providing legal solutions to new problems”, explained Mr San Juan. Amongst these are, for example, the , incorporated into another ÚNICO involving the social and legal aspects of traffic and consumption of drugs. This project, commissioned by the Basque Government’s Office for Drug Dependency, started an investigation into legislation on tobacco, which acted as a basis for initiating the reform of the Basque Law on Drug Dependency (Tobacco). Currently, the team is setting out the guidelines for new legislation on matters of drug dependency.
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