Al Capone and the Internal Revenue Service: State-sanctioned criminology of organized crime

The story of Al Capone's rise and fall as a Chicago gangster has always depended upon selective dissemination of federal agency records, particularly records of the Internal Revenue Service. Capone history, therefore, is state-sanctioned history. The IRS view of the Capone organization, and of the tax evasion conviction, cannot be easily challenged without access to the corpus of the IRS records. Unfortunately, these records remain sealed from public access, despite the fact that selective releases were made prior to 1977 to journalists, popular authors, film producers and historians. Continued secrecy over the Capone records perpetuates a state-sanctioned criminology of organized crime. Calder v. Internal Revenue Service ¹ attempted without success to unlock the corpus of IRS-Capone records to investigate the state-sanctioned view.     

Imperialism, crime and criminology: Towards the decolonisation of criminology

Cohen (1988) once concluded that it is ironic that critics in the West are identifying forms of social control that are more traditional in the Third World as better alternatives to the neo–classical and positivistic repressive traditions in the West while some suggest that what they found malignant in the West should be exported to the Third World as benign. In this paper, I am going beyond Western crime control models to examine the character of criminology itself as an imperialist science for the control of others.     

有组织犯罪的概念及特征探究

有组织犯罪的产生最早可以溯源到1282年意大利西西里岛首府巴勒莫市产生的家族式的犯罪集团,意大利被称作"Mafia"(中文称其为"玛啡亚"),即黑手党之意,自此有组织犯罪渐渐在世界范围内获得发展,并渐成蔓延之势.     

The paradoxes of organized crime

The paper argues that the concept of organised crime inconsistently incorporates the following notions: a) the provision of illegal goods and services and b) a criminal organization, understood as a large-scale collectivity, primarily engaged in illegal activities with a well-defined collective identity and subdivision of work among its members. Against this superimposition, the author's contention is twofold: (1) The supply of illegal commodities mainly takes place in a `disorganized' way and, due to the constraints of product illegality, no immanent tendency towards the development of large-scale criminal enterprises within illegal markets exist. (2) Some lasting large-scale criminal organizations do exist, but they are neither exclusively involved in illegal market activities, nor is their development and internal configuration the result of illegal market dynamics.For Susan Strange: mentor and friend     

证券犯罪主体特征的犯罪学分析

在客观环境基本相同的条件下,为什么只有少数人实施证券犯罪,为什么是这些人而不是其他人实施证券犯罪,这从刑法学犯罪构成的角度是难以回答的。而从犯罪学的视角看,则不难发现证券犯罪的主体在智能结构、需要结构和道德法律意识等方面均具有显著的特征,正是这些特征构成了证券犯罪的主观基础。     

The phantom and threat of organized crime

Organized crime is often perceived in terms of extended, hierarchical crime “families” that extend not only their activities but also their authority structures across national boundaries. However accurate such a view may or may not have been in the United States, where it originated, evidence from a Dutch survey of organized crime enterprises reveals a different picture. For organized crime in northwestern Europe, it is more helpful to think of crime markets of two kinds: those in which the goods and services are themselves forbidden, and those in which legal goods and services are handled in illegal ways. Case studies of the drug trade, and of organized crime in the business realm, offer a detailed look at these two kinds of markets. The evidence suggests that while organized crime enterprises conduct trade across national boundaries, they do not constitute an international authority structure. Crime entrepreneurs constitute a challenge, not to the basic structure of society itself, but rather a more subtle kind of challenge to basic values and morals, particularly when criminal enterprise is linked to power at higher levels of society.     

The interdisciplinary dimensions of the study of organized crime

This essay and review systematically charts the various influences from other areas of scientific research, including economy, psychology, and neurobiology, on the study of organized crime. Drawing on an analysis of American and international literature, metaphorical, and substantive references to other disciplines are highlighted on five levels of observation: the individual “organized criminal,” the activities these individuals are involved in, the associational patterns through which they are connected, the power structures that subordinate these individuals and collectives to common or particular interests, and the relations between these individuals, structures and activities on the one hand, and the legal spheres of society on the other. It is argued that a research program aiming at building up a cumulative body of knowledge is needed to overcome the shortcomings of the current eclectic use of concepts and theories from other disciplines.     

The uniform crime reports revisited

Of all criminal justice statistics in the United States, the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) are the most widely known, used, and criticized. While the criticisms leveled at the UCR have been many and varied, attempts to assess the effects of the shortcomings of the UCR have been rare. Unfortunately, national sources of data against which the UCR can be gauged are very limited. There are, however, two such sources which may be used—homicide statistics collected by the Center for Health Statistics and the 1967 National Opinion Research Center victimization survey. While only very crude comparisons can be made between the UCR and data from these two sources, the results suggest that for homicide trends and the geographic distribution of “index” offenses, UCR and non-UCR sources depict similar patterns.Finally, procedures which various researchers have proposed for constructing a “crime index” are compared to the simple-sum method used by the UCR. When counties are used as the unit of analysis, most of the weighting schemes examined are found to order the counties in similar fashion. The implications of these results are briefly discussed.     

The roots of Russian organized crime: from old-fashioned professionals to the organized criminal groups of today

This study focuses on the development of persons and organizations in the successor states of the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on Russia. It examines the development of criminal professionalism in Russia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and argues that exiling peasants to Siberia contributed to the development of a criminal underworld and the creation of a professional criminal underclass. In the early to late Soviet periods, vory v zakone, or “thieves-in-law,” evolved together with criminal groups as a means to survive in the GULAG, these criminal groups operating within the Soviet prisons and penal colonies. Inadequacies of the Soviet system of central planning led to the criminalization of the Soviet economy and the emergence of the thieves-in-law as critical players. Activities such as racketeering, robbery, and other crimes were dangerous but predominantly secondary. The roots of the Russian mafia lie in the innermost depths of the Russian shadow economy. Some of the key aspects of the post-Soviet privatization process are analyzed together with the interaction between various levels of the Russian government and organized crime groups. It is argued that the state was not corrupted by organized crime groups, but rather the organized crime groups became the state. In the new Russia, organized crime groups and corrupt government executives work together to generatea new criminal state.     

The legislative recreation of RICO: Reinforcing the ``myth' of organized crime

This paper uses historical content analysis to examine the implementation ofthe Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). It is argued thatthe historical events leading to the definition of organized crime as an alienconspiracy still affect RICO's use some 30 years after its passage. This paper applies state-centered theory to the theoretical frameworks of sociology of knowledge and innovation diffusion. This approach is used to relate the current implementation and controversy of RICO to the alien conspiracy view. Thought of in this context, legal implementation is the result of a knowledge creation and diffusion process. This paper demonstrates how one knowledge diffusionprocess (the acceptance of organized crime as a national conspiracy in 1970) leads to a new knowledge diffusion process (the use of RICO).     

证券、期货犯罪的成因及防范透视

证券、期货犯罪的成因探讨是有效防范证券、期货犯罪的重要内容。本文认为,证券、期货犯罪产生的个体原因就在于人们在投资时的图利目的;社会原因在于重利轻义的观念;客观原因则是有关法律制度的不完善。对于证券、期货犯罪的防范需要树立与证券、期货市场相适应的刑法观;理顺证券、期货市场管理体系,强化查处证券、期货犯罪的职能;并加强对证券、期货违法犯罪的研究。     

跨国有组织犯罪的主要类型

随着全球一体化进程的加深,跨国有组织犯罪出现了多样化的趋势,并且,其中有些类型的发展日益猖獗,其危害性亦愈来愈严重。系统研究当今跨国有组织犯罪的主要类型,对有效打击这类犯罪无疑有着重要的实践意义。     

The dualism of business victimization and organized crime

Conclusions Businessmen victimized by organized crime are chosen based upon their economic condition and their involvement in activities of interest to organized criminal groups. The level of victimization is determined not only by the level of involvement of organized crime, but also by the victims' perceptions of how business should be operated. The responses of businessmen surveyed for this research reflect their association of business victimization with organized crime. Those surveyed, however, seriously underestimated the level of victimization of the population as a whole.