Research Paper
Comparative Criminal Justice System
Professor Dave Sanchez
Strayer University
July 11, 2015

Transnational crimes are illegal acts that are performed, and the impact involvement affects more than one country. These crimes usually involve illicit good, services or the infiltration of businesses or of government. There are many different types of crimes that fall under transnational crimes and which I will identify them using the conduct that they violate. First you have the provisions of illicit goods they are, drug trafficking, trafficking in stolen property, counterfeiting. Next you have the provision of illegal services that are, human trafficking, cybercrime and fraud, commercialized vices. Last we look at the infiltration of businesses including government they are, extortion and racketeering, money laundry and corruption. My transnational crime that I will focus on in this paper will be human trafficking from both countries the United States and Cuba (Dammer & Albanese, 2014).
The United States defines Human Trafficking as the illegal movement, recruitment or harboring in an individual for the purpose of exploration, forced labor or commercial sexual exploration. The most common human trafficking types we hear a lot about are sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and debt bondage. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that at least 12.3 million people are victims of forced labor at any given time, 2.4 million of whom toil in forced labor as a result of trafficking. The U.S. Department of State estimates that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States each year. Traffickers recruit most of their victims both woman and children that are in poverty, low educated, and immigrants many of whom are looking for work to provide for their family (Human Trafficking: Modern Enslavement of Immigrant Women in the United States, 2015).
The United States is considered a Tier 1 when comparing us to other countries on human trafficking. Tier 1 is considered the countries whose governments fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards to help prevent and possibly put an end to this crime. The tool that is used in the U.S. to measure the crime of human trafficking is the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. These crimes are reported to police and collected by each police agency and are compiled by the FBI annually. In 2013, the U.S. added trafficking onto its already skilled approach of measuring crime through the UCR. The UCR program began collecting offense and arrest data concerning human trafficking from its users as authorized by the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Reauthorization Act of 2008. Under the act, two additional offenses in both the Summary Reporting System and the NIBRS were created: Human Trafficking/Commercial Sex Acts and Human Trafficking/Involuntary Servitude (Initial Human Trafficking, Cargo Theft Data Released Through UCR, 2015).
The next country I have chosen for my transnational crime of human trafficking is Cuba. Under the United Nations their definition of human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation" (Moore, 2015). Cuba has been considered a Tier 3 for over a decade which is countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do according to the annual trafficking in person report. The risk age in becoming part of prostitution rings and human trafficking is 13- 20 and as young as 14 is considered legal to consent to these actions because the act prostitution is legal in Cuba it can be a difficult process to maintain. Cuba being placed under tier 3 means that there is not a resourceful set tools being used to make this illegal act disappear (Hadro, 2015).The United States is in the process of taking Cuba from the worst watch list tier 3 to level 2 where it has languished for 12 years due to allegations of sex trafficking and what U.S. authorities have previously described as “coerced labor with Cuban government work missions abroad” (US expected to upgrade Cuba in annual human trafficking report, 2015).
The United States legal traditional is the common law, and Cuba is considered a Socialist legal tradition. English common law emerged from the changing and centralizing powers of the king during the Middle Ages. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, medieval kings began to consolidate power and establish new institutions of royal authority and justice. America’s legal tradition is defined as a body of law developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in England based on decisions of the judges of the King’s Court, incorporating Canon Law, feudal custom and Roman Law. As for Cuba their law is defined as a family of law with its origins in socialism, a system that was characterized by the absence of social class and common ownership of the means of production and livelihood; the emphasis is on communal values at the expense of the individual. This law was influenced by Karl Marx and by the end of the twentieth century, Cuba was the country most committed to the principle of communism (Dammer & Albanese, Families of Law, 2014).
After examining my countries and their statistics, I believe the United States can adequately be compared to other countries with all the information it produces from The UCR, NIBRS, police reports, and surveys. There seems to be no problem with us producing our finding and trying to prevent human trafficking from happening in America. A few years from now with Cuba stepping up to the plate in order to put laws in place and prevent human trafficking we will be finding their reports under the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes so that the United States can compare to Cuba and possibly work together to stop the transporting between their countries. Hopefully, once Cuba becomes a country that complies to help with human trafficking their measurements could help control their crime rate in this matter and even changing laws of prostitution can assist the cause of the improvement.

Reference
Dammer, H. R., & Albanese, J. S. (2014). Defining Terms. In H. R. Dammer, & J. S. Albanese, Comparative Criminal Justice System (p. 3). Belmont: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Dammer, H. R., & Albanese, J. S. (2014). Families of Law. In H. R. Dammer, & J. S. Albanese, Comparative Criminal Justice System (pp. 48-53). Belmont: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Hadro, M. (2015, February 12). US pushing Cuba to improve record on human trafficking: State Dept. Retrieved from The Washington Times: of http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/12/us-pushing-cuba-to-improve-record-on-human-traffic/?page=all.
Human Trafficking: Modern Enslavement of Immigrant Women in the United States. (2015). Retrieved from American Civil Liberties Union: https://www.aclu.org/human-trafficking-modern-enslavement-immigrant-women-united-states.
Initial Human Trafficking, Cargo Theft Data Released Through UCR. (2015, April 6). Retrieved from Federal Bureau of Investigation: of https://www.fbi.gov/news/news_blog/initial-human-trafficking-cargo-theft-data-released-through-ucr.
Moore, A. E. (2015, January 27). Special Report: Money and Lies in Anti-Human Trafficking NGOs. Retrieved from Truth-Out: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28763-special-report-money-and-lies-in-anti-human-trafficking-ngos.
US expected to upgrade Cuba in annual human trafficking report. (2015, July 16). Retrieved from Latin America & Caribbean Wire: http://lacwire.com/us-expected-upgrade-cuba-annual-human-trafficking-report.