By: Heather Saunders,
on 8/31/2016
The recently published ‘guidelines’ on police undercover operations prove to be just ‘business as usual’. The guidelines consist of 80 pages in which a new ‘alphabet soup’ of abbreviations describes each of a set of roles to be fulfilled by officers of given ranks.
The post Is undercover policing worth the risk? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: [email protected],
on 5/11/2015
I have to admit I was a little thrown by Dennis Lehane’s last book in the Coughlin series, Live By Night. The Given Day is Lehane’s best book and when he wrote it he said it was the first in a series which would follow multi-generations of a police family through Boston in the 20th […]
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By: Alice,
on 5/26/2014
The mafia never dies; the state can destroy mafiosi but not the mafia – such proclamations are common, especially among mafiosi, who believe the Thing, the Organization, is always out there ready to sanction them. Few law enforcement officials or criminologists are prepared to declare any mafia dead either. For the former, the mafia makes for a colourful enemy, while the latter would have a hard time knowing whether a mafia, as a secretive organization that attempts to sell protection and regulate illegal and legal markets, truly has died. Police departments can get extra funding and government support by playing up to the threat of a conspiratorial, hydra-headed mafia monster. Governments can blame shadowy mafia figures or immigrant alien conspiracies for problems of crime and violence and other failings, while ‘transnational organized crime’ can be invoked to demonize and justify meddling in other countries, particularly in the age of the ‘war on terror’.
Nevertheless, states do occasionally attack mafia-like organizations. There are numerous examples of anti-mafia policies from different countries all with varying levels of success. One such case is the post-Soviet republic of Georgia. An anti-mafia campaign launched there in 2005 has been heralded an overall success. This is curious given how weak the Georgian state is and the supposed embeddedness of organized crime in the post-Soviet part of the world. This leads to a puzzle then: what factors might weaken the strength of mafias and cause their decline, if not their death?
Many studies focus on state-centric factors to explain decline. Governments must make strategic decisions about when to attack the mafia as it may prove to be an expensive activity which reaps few gains in crime control or at the ballot box. In some countries, governments face violent backlashes if the mafia is challenged. In Brazil for example, the First Command of the Capital (the PCC, a prison gang that controls illegal markets on the streets) is able to virtually shut down the city of Sao Paolo if it chooses to oppose the state. Thus, mafias and states often simply exist in wary equilibrium of each other, often maintaining a negotiated connection through corrupt links on local levels. Still, at certain moments states can launch full out attacks on mafias, though success is rarely a given.
In Italy and the United States, anti-mafia legislation has enabled greater punitive measures against those who order the commission of crime and engage in patterned acts of racketeering. In Italy, law enforcement reform as well as civil society mobilization, emerging after the mob killings of the judges Falcone and Borsellino in 1992, has been relatively effective, at least in Sicily. These measures include new law enforcement techniques and heightened police coordination, including longer investigation times, the greater use of wire-tapping, entrapment, state’s witnesses, and confiscation of mafia assets and the criminalization of activities that aid the mafia. Such state policies have been recreated elsewhere, for example and most recently, in post-Soviet Georgia.
However, a simple emphasis on the policies of the state and the changes in the socio-economic environment does not account for the vulnerabilities or resilient qualities that decide whether a mafia survives or succumbs to state attack. In Georgia, I argue that, regardless of the state’s anti-mafia policy, internal contradictions within a group called the ‘thieves-in-law,’ a particularly fearsome mafia, was the real reason for the decline of this network of mafiosi there.
Strength in recruitment, for example, is a key variable in survival. Just like any organization mafias require a flow of high quality individuals to reproduce themselves. The thieves-in-law failed to do this. This failure was due to maladaptive institutional change in difficult conditions: wider criminal conflict in conditions of state-collapse led to quicker recruitment and lower quality human capital. The video embedded below discusses this in more detail.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Similarly, internal and external structuring of relations is vital for robust organization, effective adaptation, flows of information, and efficient monitoring and sanctioning. Yet the organization of criminal activities is often risky, and constantly changing in conditions of permanent insecurity and uncertainty. The thieves-in-law in Georgia did not negotiate the violent, difficult conditions of state collapse that occurred in Georgia in the 1990s at all well. It affected their ability to coordinate and regulate their network. All that was then required was the political will to go on the offensive against what was in fact disorganized crime.
The general conclusions from the Georgian case then are: rather than enjoying a vacuum of state power as we might expect, the mafia actually abhors one. Moreover, focusing on organizational vulnerabilities of organized criminals might aid our understanding of how best to tackle established and seemingly indestructible mafia groups, helping to explode the myth that the mafia is forever.
Dr Gavin Slade is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at the University of Toronto, Canada, having gained his PhD in Law from the University of Oxford in 2011. He is primarily interested in organized crime and prison sociology; in particular, criminological questions arising from post-Soviet societies, having lived and worked in Russia and Georgia for almost seven years. He maintains a broad interest in criminal justice reform in transitional contexts and has also worked on such issues in the non-governmental sector in Georgia. He is the author of Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia.
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Image credit: Historical building in the center of Batumi, Georgia. © Kenan Olgun via iStockphoto.
The post Does the mafia ever die? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: sketched out,
on 3/14/2014
(click to enlarge, or fugget about it.)
BADA-BING BADA-WHOOOOOO!
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By: fishgirl182,
on 4/9/2013
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By: Joan Enders,
on 10/1/2011
Have you ever read the first couple of pages of a sequel, smiled to yourself and felt like you had come home again? Well, when I cracked open Al Capone Shines My Shoes I was immediately transported back to Choldenko's world of Alcatraz and into the Flannagan's apartment.
We pick up right where we last let off. Natalie is getting ready to head into San Fransisco to go to the Esther P. Marinoff School. Moose knows that one of the only reasons that she is going is that he asks inmate #85 (also known as Al Capone) to help him get her in. Moose is still confused as to why #85 would help him. Moose has been thinking about this when he heads over to Annie's place. When he gets there, Annie is looking peculiar, and she tells Moose that she got his laundry...and that there was a note in the pocket of his shirt. The note simply says, Your turn. By the way, the con who does the Flannagan's laundry is #85. What can Capone mean?
As if Moose didn't have enough to worry about, Piper is acting out, Mr. Flannagan gets put on probation, Scout seems to be eyeing up Piper, Jimmy is mad at Moose, and staying out of Darby's way is getting harder and harder. Even baseball, which used to make Moose feel better, is getting all political with Annie refusing to play with Moose until he tells about the note in his laundry. Moose is so stressed he is breaking out in hives and itching to beat the band.
Gennifer Choldenko is in her element in this story. It's so masterfully told that it seems effortless and completely believable. The cast of characters from children to adults are spot on and coexist in such a way that readers will feel like they know each and every one of them. Moose's growing pains are palpable, and his need to please will have you reading through your fingers, after-school-special-style. Simply delightful, fans of Al Capone Does My Shirt will be pleased, and new readers can easily pick up the plot and will enjoy this story as well.
I've needed to practice drawing characters and faces as they're a huge weakness where my overall drawing is concerned, so when I received a special request to draw some for a Mystery Murder project (more on that later!), I jumped at the chance. I'm a huge fan of detective, criminal investigation and murder mystery stories anyway, whether on paper or on the screen, so this was tons of fun to do!
So here's the first one, the Mob Boss. Once I'd scanned it in I felt it was a bit too light and perhaps had too delicate a touch for the subject matter, so I played with levels and contrast on photoshop and this was my final result:
Better, I think ... off to work on the next character now :)
Mob Boss cards and products at zazzle.com
I've needed to practice drawing characters and faces as they're a huge weakness where my overall drawing is concerned, so when I received a special request to draw some for a Mystery Murder project (more on that later!), I jumped at the chance. I'm a huge fan of detective, criminal investigation and murder mystery stories anyway, whether on paper or on the screen, so this was tons of fun to do!
So here's the first one, the Mob Boss. Once I'd scanned it in I felt it was a bit too light and perhaps had too delicate a touch for the subject matter, so I played with levels and contrast on photoshop and this was my final result:
Better, I think ... off to work on the next character now :)
Mob Boss cards and products at zazzle.com
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LOVE!!!! Hahahaha!
This is fabulous!
These guys are great!
Wise owls. Ha, ha, ha!
I think you’re a wise owl for being so clever in thinking all this up. Hugs, Lorlinda
Thanks so much!
Thanks Nita and thanks for stopping by!
Thanks Laura!
Awww, thanks Lor! Wise or a goofball? Walking a thin line there, hee hee!
love these guys