Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

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NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998 Grønland" Søndag 24. maj Brottsprevention - Plenum Ordstyrer: Kauko Aromaa Side 232 Ingrid Sahlin (S): Inverterad prevention Side 251 Nils Christie (N): Forebyggelse Side 261 Deltagerliste Bilag Sherman, Lawrence W. et al.: "Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising". In: Research in Brief, National Institute of Justice, July 1998. 4
Michael Levi, Professor of Criminology University of Wales, Cardiff 50 Park Place, CF1 3AT, Wales, UK e-mail: Levi@cardiff.ac.uk NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998 Analysing ‘Organised Crime’ and State Responses: Some Reflections on Murky Waters The author is grateful to the Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology for the grant that made attendance at the Criminology conference possible. General Introduction It has become commonplace to observe that the term ‘organised crime’ is frequently used but difficult to define, shifting as it does between discourses about activities – as in the term ‘crime’ – and discourses about evil associations, as refracted through the common usage of the term ‘Mafia’, which has long since lost its purely Italian origin and can be prefixed by a nationality such as Russian, Colombian, or Chechen. (Interestingly, the Chinese are typically described as ‘Triads’ and the Japanese as ‘Yakuza’, demonstrating the equal symbolic efficacy but cultural differentness from Europe and America.) Organised crime is generally applied to describe a group of people who act together on a long-term basis to commit crimes for gain though, as A.K. Cohen (1977) observed, it is important to separate out the distinction between structures of association and structures of activity. Maltz (1976) gave readers a list of ‘organised crime’ distinguishing features, including four essential characteristics: violence, corruption, continuity, and variety in types of crime engaged in. As observed by Alice in Wonderland, ‘I can make things mean whatever I want them to mean: the questions is who’s master – that’s all’, this list is tenable, it has the disadvantage that intelligent people who reduce police interest in them by not using violence and who specialise in one form of crime thereby cannot be termed ‘organised criminals’. It might make sense to distinguish professional criminals from organised ones, but the above seems to be a rather strange result, and one that is re-inforced by the binary nature of the ‘organised’/‘not organised’ dichotomy. For there may be nothing at all disorganised about professional criminals: they may find it simply convenient to side-step the moral panic surrounding organised crime, as well as the predatory and often ill-disciplined attentions of psychopathic gangsters. The notion of organised crime as a continuing criminal enterprise is embodied in the popularly accepted (in Europe) definition employed by the German Federal police, the BundesKriminalAmt: Organised crime is the planned violation of the law for profit or to acquire power, which offences are each, or together, of a major significance, and are carried out by more than two participants who co-operate within a division of labour for a long or undetermined time span using a. commercial or commercial-like structures, or b. violence or other means of intimidation, or c. influence on politics, media, public administration, justice and the legitimate economy. 5
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