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Towards a Theory of Organized Crime: Some Preliminary Reflections

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Illegal Entrepreneurship, Organized Crime and Social Control

Part of the book series: Studies of Organized Crime ((SOOC,volume 14))

Abstract

Given the public concern about organized crime and the vast array of legal and institutional reforms adopted to control it, it is important to reflect upon the determinants of organized crime. Without a better understanding of these determinants and the causal models linking them to the different forms of organized crime policy, interventions risk selecting unrealistic goals or even obtaining counterproductive results. The current chapter intends to start identifying the most relevant promoting macro-factors of organized crime, drawing from two main alternative conceptualizations of organized crime. It concludes by showing the limits but also the possibilities of government interventions and by arguing that the ultimate goal of organized crime control policies should be the minimization of the total harms of crime and its control policies.

This chapter is to a large extent based on material from Paoli (2013) and Paoli (2014a).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The recent shift of emphasis from organized to serious crime in the EU policy debate does not contribute to conceptual clarity (Dorn, 2009). In fact, the term “serious crime” is left undefined and merely associated with a list of offenses (Paoli, Adriaenssen, Greenfield, & Conickx, 2015).

  2. 2.

    Currently National Crime Agency.

  3. 3.

    Organized crime official reports and scholarly studies (e.g., Edwards & Levi, 2008) also often include different forms of “illegal transfers” (e.g., robberies, extortions, embezzlement, and frauds). Unlike the provision of illegal goods and services, these transfers do not create value but merely transfer it from one person to another. Not least for this very reason, though, the harm they generate is more evident than the harms accruing from the provision of illegal goods and services (see Paoli, Greenfield, & Zoutendijk, 2013 for an assessment of the harms associated with cocaine trafficking in Belgium). Due to length restrictions, these forms of predatory crimes are not discussed here.

  4. 4.

    Founded on premodern status and fraternization contracts, mafia-type organizations have historically been used by their members to achieve a plurality of goals and to accomplish a variety of functions. As Dian Murray puts it, the members of the first Chinese secret societies “originally organized for one purpose, sometimes found themselves mobilized for different ends, and simultaneously involved in activities where the distinctions between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, ‘protection’ and ‘predation’, or ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ blurred” (1994: 2). Only by sacrificing empirical evidence it is possible to single out an encompassing function or goal that can characterize mafia-type criminal organizations throughout their lives.

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  1. School of Law, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Letizia Paoli

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  1. Teesside University, Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

    Georgios A. Antonopoulos

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Paoli, L. (2016). Towards a Theory of Organized Crime: Some Preliminary Reflections. In: Antonopoulos, G. (eds) Illegal Entrepreneurship, Organized Crime and Social Control. Studies of Organized Crime, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31608-6_1

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