For much of the 26 years she spent as a special agent and criminal investigator, Deb Dreisbach specialized in financial crime—money laundering, public corruption, and the like—and counter-terrorism. This experience has been integral to her concurrent academic career: She launched Penn State Berks’ criminal justice program and last fall, she was asked to do the same at Penn State Lehigh Valley.
That effort includes Crim 225N: Organized Crime in Film and Society, a new take on a class Dreisbach, assistant teaching professor at Lehigh Valley, had initiated some years ago at Penn State Berks. CRIM 225N students will spend four weeks in Italy studying the mafia as it's depicted in such classic films as The Godfather and Goodfellas and understanding its socio-economic impact on real life.
“We don’t glorify the mafia, or the violence,” Dreisbach says, “we’re looking at the cultural aspect. We also talk about criminological and sociological theories and how they apply to the movies.”
For Dreisbach, the most important part of CRIM 225N is its focus on grassroots, anti-mafia movements like Adiopizzo in Palermo, Sicily—how such movements begin, their importance to local communities, and the social change they result in.
“We study [Adiopizzo] because it was a really successful social change movement that brought a community together,” Dreisbach says. “I want students to really think about change and what it takes for change to happen. Sometimes, it is not a straightforward process.”
Her students get to walk the streets of Palermo with important figures of the Adiopizzo movement and meet different stakeholders. They attend lectures on mafia crimes given by Italian professors. They tour an anti-mafia museum. The course then moves to Rome, where students meet U.S. government officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Agency official who are based in the Italian capital, “so they can hear from Americans who are working with Italian officials,” Dreisbach says.
She encourages her students to express their thoughts and feelings in a journal and students take turns to be the “travel blogger,” using a Go Pro to film the day’s activities, then post them online for family and friends to follow along with their journey.
