.... by kinship (or a kinship relationship that is assumed when a man becomes a member) and by the Mafia code of omerta, which requires absolute silence about Mafia activities and absolute obedience to the hierarchical Mafia authority. Until recent years--and despite the efforts of the Italian Fascists to destroy the organization in the 1920sand '30s--the Mafia flourished in the Sicilian countryside. When the Fascists fled Sicily during the Allied invasion of World War II, the Mafia--the only remaining governing structure--worked closely with U.S. forces. Today it dominates much of the business and industry in Sicily's cities. With the Sicilian immigrations of t .....

.... have severe consequences. In most instances, white collar crime is, financially, more costly. This does not mean that white-collar crime does not inflict bodily harm upon people. Multi- million dollar corporations can be twice as deadly as a gang member. When a woman dies of lead exposure from her job, it is murder. Whether a man is murdered by a gun or by an unsafe gas tank in his car, it is still called murder. In both scenarios, there is a defined victim. The one answer that our politicians give for solving street crime is more money for the Justice system. More cops, more judges, and definitely more jails and prisons. There are shows, such as "C .....

.... crime rate. Between 1992 and 1997, the violent crime rate in states which kept strict CCW laws fell by an average of 24.8%. The 29 states that bought the NRA line that hidden handguns make them safer saw their violent crime rates drop by only 11.4%. Nationally, violent crime declined by 19.4% in that five year period. Violent crime actually rose in 12 of 29 states (41%) which liberalized their CCW laws over the five years beginning in 1992, compared to a similar rise in violent crime in only 4 of 22 states (18%) which did not change their CCW laws. From the above statistics it is obvious that access to firearms did not provide extra protection for the citize .....

.... this has become very easy. You simply take an original or even another copy of a tape, as well as a blank tape. Stick them both in to the stereo and bingo you have a new tape. You also just broke the law. Along with copying audio tapes, now we can copy video tapes almost as easily. If you hook two VCR's together, they can copy from one to the other. You could rent a movie form the video store, copy and return it, with no one the wiser. The problem with copying video and audio tapes is that for every copy you make the recording artist, the actors, producers and everyone else who collect royalties from the tapes lose money. If the co .....

.... and all importing, exporting, transporting, selling, and manufacturing of intoxicating liquor was put to an end. Shortly following the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, the National Prohibition Act, or the Volstead Act, as it was called because of its author, Andrew J. Volstead, was put into effect. This determined intoxicating liquor as anything having an alcoholic content of anything more than 0.5 percent, omitting alcohol used for medicinal and sacramental purposes. This act also set up guidelines for enforcement (Bowen, 154). Prohibition was meant to reduce the consumption of alcohol, seen by some as the devil’s advocate, and thereby reduce crime .....

.... down to the local gym and find sellers to obtain the drug that will make him the idol of all his classmates. Being such an attractive drug, as shown in the analogy above, and seeming harmless to the unaware user, steroids can have a potentially jeopardous effect. Consistently, users, new and experienced, have no knowledge to the dangerous consequences' steroids can have on their minds and bodies. Although steroids cause minimal deaths in our society, banning of steroids is purely justified because steroids have extremely perilous side effects on the unsuspecting user. Though steroids are known as a somewhat dangerous substance, they are legal to poss .....

.... noted that the wholesale price doubled in six months "due to crackdowns on producers and smugglers in Columbia and the U.S." The consequence of this drastic factory-to-retail escalation is a rise in crime. Addicts must pay hundreds of times the costs of their habit, and often turn to crime to finance their addiction. Also, those who deal in the selling of the drugs become prime targets for assault for carrying extremely valuable goods. The streets become battlegrounds for competing dealers because a particular block or corner can rake in thousands of extra dollars a day. Should drugs be legalized, the price would collapse, and so would the drug-related .....

.... may become subject to physical, sexual and mental abuse. While "When Families Are Torn Apart," is written by Mary Morrissey, the majority of the article is quoted from Geoffrey Greif and Rebecca Hegar. In the article, Greif and Hegar explain how they attempted to fill in the gap of information about the trauma of long-term abduction. Their findings appear in the book When Parents Kidnap. Each parent, child, and abductor may deal with the kidnapping differently. For some it is very frightful and requires years of psychological evaluation to overcome. According to Greif and Hegar, abducted children develop extremely close bonds with their abductors. Ofte .....