Transcrime, Università Cattolica

Description

Transcrime is an interuniversity research centre on crime and innovation, run jointly by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and the Università degli Studi di Perugia. It is based in Milan, directed by professor Ernesto Ugo Savona, and has a staff of about 30 people. Its funding comes entirely from contracts and grants awarded by private bodies and by local, national and international public institutions.

The centre’s mission is to facilitate the prevention and control of crime through innovative ideas, advanced analysis, cutting-edge techniques and international cooperation. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining criminology, law, economics, statistics, sociology, forensic accounting and information technology, to analyse criminal phenomena such as organized crime, economic crime, money laundering, illegal markets and urban crime, and to evaluate crime prevention policies. It identifies criminogenic opportunities within legislation through crime proofing analysis, and develops risk assessment models and applications for public users such as police forces and public bodies, and for private users such as banks, professionals and companies.

Its research areas also cover cybercrime, terrorism, environmental crime, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and illegal trafficking in arms and tobacco. Transcrime also supports the teaching activities of Università Cattolica in Milan. It coordinates the Criminology curriculum of the bachelor’s degree in Sociology, the Crime & Security Analysis curriculum of the master’s degree in Public Policy, and an international doctoral programme in Criminology, alongside a summer school.

Transcrime was founded in November 1994 as a research group on transnational crime at the University of Trento’s Department of Legal Sciences. It grew through European Union projects, became an interdepartmental centre in 2000, and became an interuniversity centre with Università Cattolica in 2004, moving its administrative seat to Milan in 2010. In 2015 it founded Crime&Tech, a spin-off, and in 2016 took its current three-university structure. Thirty years later, Transcrime works on projects across Europe, Latin America and Africa, and describes itself as an international point of reference in criminological research.