Proyectos nacionales
FAKE PENAL
The project starts from the premise that citizen participation should be at the foundation of the construction of criminal law and that it should move towards deliberative participation. In addition to the greater legitimacy of decisions and the higher epistemic value from the way consensus is reached compared to the isolationist approach, we believe that the population is not punitive when well-informed and that, through deliberative processes, a “better” and democratic criminal law could be configured.
However, the project also acknowledges that this ideal of free citizens’ participation in deliberating about the penal system must be contrasted with the real dynamics of communication about crime and the response to it, as well as the configuration of public opinion on criminal matters in which social networks are playing a significant role. We also recognize that the current indications of the impact of social networks predict a context of misinformation, polarization, and simplification that will make well-informed citizen participation around criminal issues more challenging. Therefore, it is essential to understand, and we can approach this empirically, how the new media-social environment influences opinions on criminal law and how public opinion can be informed or transformed in the real world. Only in this way will we be in a real position to know if and how it is possible to configure a more participatory but not more “Fake” (in the sense of misinformed) criminal law than we already have in these times.
Funded by:: Ministry of Science and Innovation.
IUS MACHINA
El proyecto IusMachina busca determinar las bases normativas para el uso de algorítimos predictivos en los ámbitos judicial y penitenciario, así como establecer el impacto real que estos sistemas tienen y pueden tener en los ámbitos mencionados, prestándose especial atención a las implicaciones éticas de la implementación de estas tecnologías. La capacidad de las actuales soluciones algorítmicas para gestionar y procesar datos con gran precisión, unida a la indiscutible existencia de errores humanos y de sesgos en las decisiones judiciales, ha llevado desde hace tiempo a plantearse la utilización de sistemas actuariales basados en la gestión del riesgo tanto en el ámbito judicial y penitenciario, siendo las más conocidas las Herramientas de Valoración del Riesgo de violencia (en adelante, HVR). En una segunda fase más reciente, el aumento de la capacidad informática y la aparición de millones de datos ha llevado a explorar la utilización de técnicas de machine learning y otras de Inteligencia Artificial para mejorar las tomas de decisiones a nivel de justicia penal. Aunque los usos potenciales de unas y otras son múltiples y variados, destacan las soluciones algorítmicas aplicadas a la determinación judicial del delito o de la pena aplicable en general o en concreto en relación con el mismo, englobados dentro de términos (también discutidos) como predictive justice, predictive sentencing, o evidence-based sentencing. Además, se ha de tener en consideración las técnicas actuariales (TVR o Ris-Canvi), instrumentos de predicción de la conducta de los internos de prisiones, que objetivan la valoración individual que la norma reclama y permite en el proceso.
Financiado por: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.
NEXO. Criminology, empirical evidence, and criminal policy. On the incorporation of scientific data for decision-making regarding the criminalization of behaviors.
The penal legislative policy of recent decades, described by scholars as expansive and punitive, is usually argued based on supposed knowledge of reality concerning criminal trends, social demands for intervention, and the deterrent capacity of criminal law, which, however, is not supported by scientific evidence and, in some cases, even contradicts existing evidence. At a time when criminological knowledge is capable of providing adequate frameworks for understanding criminal phenomena and the effects of laws and penalties on people, when Europe demands greater control and evaluation of the rationality of laws, and when scholars, continuing their essential critical spirit, begin to encompass not only the evaluation of legislative outcomes but also the procedures adopted for them, it is essential to define appropriate procedures in legislative practice that increase the legislator’s and society’s knowledge about crime, its causes and effects, and the real preventive possibilities and limits of criminal laws.
Conducted by a research group that has already demonstrated its experience and ability to develop complex and fully applied methodologies to specific problems in previous national plan calls and other national and international projects, NEXO proposes a methodological design of tasks in work blocks adapted to the two general objectives: (1) effectively incorporating empirical evidence into the legislative process, and (2) reviewing the empirical assumptions of legislative decision-making regarding the criminalization of behaviors. These will be achieved through empirical studies on the compliance with norms and the deterrent capacity of penalties, punitive attitudes and the legitimacy of legislative policies, or the perception of crime and its influence on the creation of social alarms, among others. All of this will materialize in a protocol for the correct inclusion of scientific evidence in political-legislative decision-making on the criminalization of behaviors, aiming to improve legislators’ knowledge and, thereby, increase the rationality of laws, citizens’ trust in institutions in general and, particularly, in the justice of the criminal system, essential conditions for better compliance with laws and social well-being.
Funded by: Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness.
InfractorXs . "Who copies, who downloads, and why? Prevalence and gender differences in justice intuitions and compliance with intellectual property rights."
Funded by: Generalitat Valenciana
Ni1Fora. Legitimacy in Justice and Vulnerable Groups (2018-2020)
Funded by: Generalitat Valenciana
CiberHache. Incitement to Violence and Hate Speech on the Internet. Real Scope of the Phenomenon, Typologies, Environmental Factors, and Limits of Legal Intervention.
Funded by: Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness.
Cibercriminalidad: Detection of Deficits in Its Legal Prevention and Determination of Victimization Risks for Better Situational Criminological Prevention.
The hypothesis is that although the phenomenon has not yet reached its maximum level of development, significant preventive deficiencies are already evident, both from a legal and criminological perspective. The legal deficiencies are evidenced by the small number of existing judicial resolutions, and it will be necessary to determine whether this is due to the phenomenon’s limited importance or a concatenation of factors related to the difficulty of judicial prosecution of these offenses. The criminological prevention deficiencies, on the other hand, are related to the lack (or reduction) of formal or informal crime control instances and the consequent absolute dependence of the victim on their own security. Therefore, in addition to a criminological review of the phenomenon, which is not easy given its mutability, a dogmatic review of the legal norms will be necessary to determine which types of cyberattacks receive criminal responses and which do not, and to subsequently assess whether the response to new behavior modalities is sufficient and proportionate. Alongside this, two empirical studies will be conducted. The first, more qualitative, will involve analyzing the files of the Alicante Provincial Prosecutor’s Office related to crimes committed in cyberspace to specify which crimes reach the courts and which do not, as well as to begin analyzing criminological risk factors in the behaviors of victims and aggressors. The second, which will provide the main results of the project, will involve an initial survey on the use of ICT and victimization by cybercrime, for the subsequent construction and validation of a questionnaire on the prediction of the risk of becoming a victim of cybercrime. This study will relate the influence of ICT use with becoming a crime victim, based on the study of criminological opportunity theories and with special attention to modifying situational prevention parameters to the non-physical-spatial realm of the Internet.
With these cross-disciplinary, legal, psychological, and criminological research objectives, the project could only be carried out by a multidisciplinary research group led by a principal investigator (PI) expert in cybercrime from a legal and criminological perspective. This group is part of its own research group, Crímina, for the study and prevention of crime, with proven experience in conducting empirical research. Its objective in the coming years is to dedicate its resources almost exclusively to this new line of research on cybercrime, the criminal phenomenon that will be the focus of much of the legal and criminological research of the future, as it constitutes a new form of crime that cannot be addressed with preventive instruments designed for crime in physical space.
Funded by: Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness
RISKMENT. Environmental Risk Assessment of Accidents Involving Alcohol: Geographic Variables, Procedures, and Tools to Improve the Effectiveness of Controls
The project, based on the theoretical and practical knowledge of crime analysis through Geographic Information Systems (GIS), will implement two mathematical models that, using official accident and detected infraction data, along with environmental information and geosocial network data, will conduct a multi-criteria analysis. This analysis will identify and prioritize road segments with the highest probability of detecting these behaviors to globally classify those most successful in terms of their spatial-temporal location. RISKMENT builds on the initial findings of research conducted in the field of environmental criminology, which describe spatial-temporal patterns and the most suitable analytical techniques for identifying concentrations of infractions (Miró et al., 2016) and other epidemiological analyses on accident concentration patterns (Gómez-Barroso et al., 2015), where the data analyzed came from mobility and road safety agencies. The project aims to go further by systematizing, through a risk model that for the first time in our country analyzes the different geographical patterns of various types of offenders (occasional, repeat, multiple offenders), to identify the hotspots where influenced driving may occur and where police surveillance actions should focus. This will involve, in addition to classic variables about roads, vehicles, and users, data from geosocial networks like Waze or SocialDrive.
Furthermore, following the preventive process proposed by Ekblom (1998) and methodologies such as iRap (International Road Assessment Program), a classification system for control devices will be built, weighing different variables related to accident rates and the detection of offenders. The project will integrate, through the risk assessment model, geolocated data from three sources: information on the reporting of incidents on roads and the announcement of surveillance activity by the administration on geosocial networks; accident locations and their characteristics from DGT databases; and lastly, the locations of various environmental factors that contribute to road insecurity, such as establishments where alcoholic beverages are consumed or sold. This will provide road surveillance and supervision resource managers with a tool that offers essential support in decision-making under uncertainty, allowing the optimization of resource allocation to control points or road segments of interest.
Funded by: Directorate General of Traffic (Ministry of the Interior)
MAPVIAL. Environmental Criminology, Police Intervention, and Decision-Making for the Prevention of Influenced Driving and Accident Rates. Analysis in a Province
The MAPVIAL project proposes applying Crime Mapping techniques to road crime and accidents to understand the spatiotemporal patterns of these events and delve into various GIS techniques, selecting the most suitable ones for future widespread use. To this end, after an initial analysis of influenced driving regulation and its control, and a subsequent discussion group with traffic surveillance officers to understand the spatial distribution of these behaviors and the police supervision strategies used, information from accident and offender databases, as well as prosecutor procedures on alcohol-impaired driving in the province of Cádiz, will be obtained and geocoded. Specifically, four types of events will be analyzed, ranging from maximum to minimum control of location by the supervisor, such as: a) alcohol and drug checks, b) reports of influenced driving, c) traffic accidents with positive alcohol and/or drug levels, and d) accidents without alcohol. With this information, event maps and other techniques will be prepared using geographic information systems to reveal distribution patterns and, therefore, the places and times where these behaviors concentrate. The first result will be the development of a methodology for collecting this information and, secondly, key knowledge to establish the environmental conditions of these patterns, without which the origin locations of these behaviors cannot be known.
Funded by: Directorate General of Traffic (Ministry of the Interior)
XQIncumplen. Analysis of the Effective Compliance with Road Legislation and Detection of Risk Factors for Repeated Traffic Rule Violations in Spain
Funded by: Directorate General of Traffic (Ministry of the Interior)
+ÉTICOS. Evaluation of Transparency in Public Administrations (2016-2019)
Funded by: Generalitat Valenciana
Saf_e. Scope of Cybercrime Against Minors in the Community of Castilla y León
The specific objectives of the Saf_e project are as follows:
Analyze the Internet usage habits and derived risks of students in Castilla y León.
Specify the cybersecurity habits of students and the devices they use inside and outside the school environment.
Determine the protection and risk factors for preventing cybercrime.
Understand the response dynamics of schools to the phenomenon, obtaining information on how cybercrime is prevented and addressed.
Develop a comprehensive tool for preventing cyberbullying and cybercrime for non-university students in Castilla y León.
More specifically, the objectives of each phase are:
Phase 1:
Establish the prevalence of cybervictimization among minors.
Understand the risk and protection behaviors that influence the phenomenon.
Learn about the actions taken by schools in cases affecting school coexistence through dual sources: minors and teachers.
Phase 2:
Define specific tools for preventing ICT usage risks among minors based on the information obtained about school actions from Phase 1 questionnaires.
Provide schools in the autonomous community of Castilla y León with an action protocol containing a detailed sequence of guidelines to properly address the consequences of ICT misuse.
Overall, the project will enable an understanding of the reality to prevent the cybervictimization of minors and minimize existing risks in cyberspace for this group. It will also provide teachers with tools to adequately respond to cases of cybervictimization affecting the school environment.
Funded by: Junta de Castilla y León
CiberEduca2.0 Safe Internet Use in the Autonomous Community of Extremadura. Initial Analysis of Internet Habits, Usage Risks, and Victimization Factors Among Minors in Extremadura
Funded by: Junta de Extremadura
CiberApp. Study on the Scope of Cybercrime, Both Social and Economic, Against Minors in the Province of Alicante
Funded by: Provincial Council of Alicante
GrADeT "Traffic Crime Analysis Group"
Funded by: Special Prosecutor’s Office for Road Safety.
Legislative Evaluation and Reform of the Penal Code in Road Safety: A Study on the Real Preventive Effectiveness of Criminal Laws
Funded by: Ministry of Science and Innovation
Analysis, Perception, and Treatment of the Problem of Youth Gangs in the Community of Valencia
Funded by: Sindic de Greuges of the Community of Valencia.