Between 1983 and 2017, the number of homicides related to mafia in Italy decreased. In the years between 1988 and 1992, 2.6 thousand homicides were committed by mafia organizations. From 2013 to 2017, the number of homicides amounted to 233.

In the last years, the number of reported mafia associations also experienced a decrease. In particular, in the year 2005, there were 153 organizations in Italy which were classified as mafia crime groups. In 2018, 93 mafia associations were known in Italy.

In 2019, the Southern province of Naples had the largest number of homicide carried out by mafia organizations. Eleven of 28 voluntary manslaughters occurred in Naples. That year, all 28 homicides happened in the Southern regions or on the islands.

Matteo Messina Denaro, a Mafia boss convicted of organizing a slew of reprehensible crimes, was arrested in January 2023 after spending almost 30 years on the lam and becoming one of the most wanted people in Europe. A chief of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra family, 60-year-old Messina Denaro was detained by police while receiving treatment in a private clinic in Palermo. The criminal was convicted in absentia of dozens of Mafia-related murders, including his involvement in the 1992 assassinations of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The Mafia chief was awarded his most recent life sentence in 2020 for his role in deadly bombings that beset Milan, Florence, and Rome in 1993, as well as for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of the 12-year-old son of an enemy who testified against Cosa Nostra.Messina Denaro's arrest came almost 30 years to the day since police detained Cosa Nostra's "boss of bosses" Salvatore "Totò" Riina, who was nabbed in a Palermo apartment after spending 23 years on the run. Riina eventually died in prison in 2017, having never repented.The Cosa Nostra boss who set the record for the longest time on the run was Bernardo Provenzano, who spent 38 years as a fugitive before being caught in a farmhouse near Sicily's Corleone in 2006. Provenzano died in jail in 2016, and similarly to Riina, never chose to collaborate with investigators. The decline of Cosa Nostra and the rise of the Calabrian Mafia With the clampdown that began against Cosa Nostra in the 1990s, the Sicilian Mafia began to lose its dominance in Italy, amid the rise of other organized crime syndicates on the mainland. The 'Ndrangheta syndicate, based in the southern region of Calabria, has since then surpassed Cosa Nostra in both reach and influence. The 'Ndrangheta has supplanted Cosa Nostra in the drugs trade and has become one of the leading cocaine traffickers in the world. The Calabrian crime syndicate is estimated to rake in as much as 60 billion U.S. dollars per year – more than the GDP of countries such as Lebanon and Uruguay – and has a tight clan-like structure that is more difficult to penetrate than that of Cosa Nostra. Organized crime: controlling one-tenth of Italy's economy Organized crime has been reported to be the biggest business in Italy, controlling an estimated nine percent of the country's economy. The value of assets seized from mafia organizations in Italy between 2020 and 2021 amounted to almost two billion euros. In addition to the 'Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra, the mafia groups of Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita – based in the southern regions of Campania and Puglia, respectively – complete the top four of Italy's main crime syndicates.

This statistic shows the number of murder cases committed by the Mafia in Italy from the firstsemester of 2015 to the second semester of 2017, by organization type. According to the study results, the Campanian Mafia committed the most killings over the selected period, and was responsible for 28 murder cases in the second half of 2017.

Once described by US President Herbert Hoover as "a great social and economic experiment", we now know that Prohibition was ultimately a failure, that led to increased crime and violence and gave way to a new era of mafia and mob influence in the United States. On January 17, 1920, the Volstead Act came into effect and the manufacturing, transportation, importation and sale of alcohol became federally prohibited across the United States, and while consumption was not a federal offence, it was sometimes prohibited on a state level. Opposition to Prohibition remained strong throughout the 1920s, and the Great Depression (starting in 1929) led many to advocate for the sale and taxation of alcoholic beverages in order to ease the US' economic woes. One of the reasons why Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 was due to his promise of ending Prohibition, which he did with the Ratification of the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933.

Impact on homicide rate

In the two decades before Prohibition, the recorded homicide rate in the United States was growing gradually, although often fluctuating in the 1910s. When Prohibition came into effect, the homicide rate continued on it's previous trajectory, but without fluctuating. While homicides related to alcohol consumption may have declined, some historians speculate that the total number could have continued to rise due to the increase in criminal activity associated with the illegal alcohol trade. The homicide rate in the US reached it's highest figure in the final year of Prohibition, with 9.7 homicides per 100,000 people in 1933, before falling to roughly half of this rate over the next ten years (this decrease in the early 1940s was also facilitated by the draft for the Second World War).

Impact on suicide rate

Alcohol's contribution to suicide rates has been significant throughout history, however it is only through more recent studies that society is beginning to form a clearer picture of what the relationship between the two actually is. In the first half of the twentieth century, there was no record of alcohol's role in individual suicide cases, however there was a noticeable change in the US' suicide rate during the 1920s. Prior to Prohibition, the suicide rate had already fallen from over 16 deaths per 100,000 people in 1915 to 11.5 in 1919, however this decline has been attributed to the role played by the First World War, which saw millions enlist and contribute to the war effort (a similar decrease can be observed in the lead up to the Second World War). After an initial spike in 1921, the suicide rate in the US then increases gradually throughout the 1920s, spiking again following the Great Depression in 1929. It is unclear whether the reduction in the US suicide rate in the 1910s and 1920s can be attributed to Prohibition, or whether it should be attributed to a variety of socio-economic factors, however the changing figures does suggest some correlation when compared with other decades.

The present dataset contains all the killings by domestic terrorist groups in Western European countries during the period 1965-2005. The unit of observation is the victim, not the attack. We include all victims in Europe as long as there is information about the political orientation of the killing and/or information about the group responsible for the killing. We only consider to be victims of terrorist violence those deaths that are a direct consequence of a terrorist attack. For instance, we exclude people who die of a heart attack that could be related to terrorist at tacks. Terrorists who die manipulating their own explosives are also excluded, because they are not considered victims (no one kills them). However, terrorists who are killed by members of their own organization or by rival organizations are included. The operational criterion that it is used to distinguish terrorist killings from other killings is the following: terrorist violence is that carried out by underground groups with political motivations. This excludes killings by underground g roups without political motivations (e.g. the mafia, narco groups) and killings by organizations that liberate territory from a state’s control and become guerrilla insurgencies, as they have different dynamics of violence to that of underground groups