Models of Organized Crime Executive Summary

Models of Organized Crime Executive Summary

Cornelius Looper

CJA/325

April 10, 2017

Edward Rafailovitc

There are two diverse types of organizations within organized crime, and these organizations are called the bureaucratic and patron-client organizations. In this paper, we will compare distinctions between the bureaucratic and patron-client organizations and this will include some similarities and differences between the main models of organized crime and why these models are important for understanding organized crime.

        Bureaucratic organizations are official and consist of regulations, rules, protocols, and procedures that will ensure the lower ranked members from making choices without their leader’s approval. This is also known as the red tape rule. The formal documentation must be processed by administration before any certain decision will be made. In the patron-client organization, the lower ranking members can decide if they want to obtain outside contacts, conduct business, outside resources. They do not need the approval of the organization. This is the reason why the associates involved in bureaucratic organization blame failures and financial issues on the management, and the patron-client group are held accountable for success or failure of the organization.

        The models of organized crime have their similarities and their differences. As a people, we must fully understand them so that we may get a better understanding of how important they are to organized crime. In 1991, Jonathan Turner proposed the casual and analytical models. His casual model was aimed at determining and explaining different variables to present a simple view of the situation. His analytical model on the other hand portrayed the complex variables and their connectivity. Casual models are deemed to be implicit in the various works of organized crime. Casual models also tend to focus on just area of organized crime, and it tries to make organized crime one dimensional (Lampe, 2003).

        Another example of casual models came in 1969 when Donald Cressey wrote the Theft of a Nation. Within this novel he spoke of how the need for illegal goods and services fed the emergence and success of organized crime syndicates’. His theory proposed of four important elements. Those elements were the government, society, illegal markets, and organized crime. In his figure, it shows how society was stuck either supporting a corrupt government or a corrupt organized crime family. After reading both theories on casual models, it showed that their shortcomings were to focused on being one dimensional. This in turn cast down on the other variables involved in the equation (Lampe, 2003).