« Home

Home » Criminology & Criminal Justice » Hale et al: Criminology 2e » Student resources » Chapter synopses » Chapter 14

Hale et al: Criminology 2e

Chapter 14

This chapter looks at some of the problems of understanding organized crime. It looks into the problems with defining organized crime and the disagreement that surrounds such definitions. Indeed it is difficult to define 'organized crime' as a coherent term describing a well-understood set of arrangements to commit crime. The best the 'United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime' could come up with was in Article 2 on the convention which states that an organized criminal group must have 'at least three members operating in concert to commit a serious crime.' This does not provide much clarity to defining such crime. Indeed the public perception of organized crime tends to be associated with American gangsters, such as the Corleone family, the central characters of the Hollywood blockbuster films The Godfather, or more recently with the angst-ridden mobster, Tony Soprano, hero of the award winning TV series The Sopranos. Against such a varied and contentious background the promise by policy-makers to target organized crime primarily requires a greater effort in understanding the nature of this particularly elusive beast. The USA has a more extensive literature on organized crime spanning over 100 years and the chapter gives an overview of this literature from the Pioneer Days with "robber barons" to the more recent cases involving the Mafia.

The chapter then looks at the emergence of transnational organized crime that has emerged partly due to the rapid advance of technology. It looks at how global changes have affected the nature of organized crime and the way policy makers and law enforcement respond to it.

There are several theories of organized crime. As a social phenomenon organized crime can be explained in terms of a variety of relationships that the individual forges, or not, with society. Within these social explanations of organized crime are Robert Merton's "strain theory" which explains criminal behaviour as a way of resolving the tension between achieving the dominant goals of society and the obstacles that prevent certain individuals and groups from achieving these goals legitimately.

There are many ways in which data about organized crime can be collected. Those discussed in this chapter include media reports, police files and ethnographic research. The Chapter places a particular focus on the role played by the media in influencing the public's perception of organized crime which may lead to an explanation of why the public's perceptions tend to be of the American gangsters outlined above.