A network approach helps us better specify and model collaboration among people involved in organized crime. The focus on collaboration raises the boundary specification problem: Where do criminal organizations start, where do they end, and who is involved? Traditional approaches sometimes assume the existence of simple, rigid structures when complexity and fluidity are the norms....

What leads a minority of criminal groups to persist over time? Although most criminal groups are characterized by short life spans, a subset manages to survive extended periods. Contemporary research on criminal groups has been primarily descriptive and static, leaving important questions on the correlates of group persistence unanswered. By drawing from competing perspectives on...

Purpose: Target prioritization is routinely done among law enforcement agencies, but the criteria to establish which targets will lead to the most crime reduction are neither systematic, nor do they take into account the networks in which offenders are embedded. The purpose of this paper is to propose network capital as a guide for prioritization...

Gang violence and gang “wars” are often described as coming in waves, but little empirical work has been conducted to distinguish between actual “waves” of violence and the more common ups and downs that trends in homicides typically go through. We propose two approaches for the detection of waves of gang-related homicides in the Lower...

Definitional problems in the area of organized crime have traditionally led to measurement problems that trickle down the criminal justice system. This study quantifies the broad conception of organized crime in the Canadian legal context and examines the types of crimes in which criminal organizations (and organized criminals) are involved. To estimate incidents potentially related...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the effects of gang prevention programs on gang membership.  Design: The authors conducted a systematic literature review across 19 bibliographic databases and a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of these strategies.  Findings: The database search resulted in 3,850 hits. Of the 162 studies that were screened in...

The current report provides: 1) a measure of the proportion of criminal incidents that are associated with organized criminal activities (overall and for each offence type) in Montreal; 2) situates potential organized crime offenders within the wider population of co-offenders, that is, beyond the region under study and; 3) gauges the various types of resources...

Little is known about homicide co-offending networks at the individual gang member level. Of particular interest is whether and to what degree gang members who are selected to participate in murder are different from those who are not. The current study constructed the co-offense network of 18 participants from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young...

Amazon

The dynamic and sometimes diffuse nature of membership make gang boundaries sometimes difficult to discern for law enforcement officials or researchers, and even for members themselves. The current study draws on social network analysis of co-offending data to assess its utility in identifying the “core” membership of a youth gang active in a rural region...

Organized crime researchers have often referred to the mass of small and ephemeral groups that form in any given criminal market as opportunistic operators and less organized (or disorganized) forms of criminal operations. Indeed, such groups have been excluded, at times, from the organized crime category. In this essay, we demonstrate that such opportunistic structures...

We argue that inadequate frameworks to compare similar gang control strategies, and the scarcity of well-designed evaluations have hindered our ability to determine the effectiveness of existing programs. This article proposes a new typology of gang control strategies to use with logic models as tools to improve gang program evaluation. Link to full text on...

This systematic literature review and meta-analysis of evaluation studies on street gang control strategies focused on articles and reports from multiple bibliographic databases. The database search resulted in a total of 2,060 hits. Of the 297 studies that were examined, only 38 were retained for the systematic review after all screening procedures and inclusion criteria...

Typically, the development of gang typologies have used either behaviorally based or structurally based characteristics to develop a classification system of gangs. The current study aims to assess the results of typologies approached from both angles, drawing from the same data source. It also examines whether using a combination of both approaches would prove to...

A theoretical review of the way in which we categorize criminals based on experience and success. Ashgate Amazon

A consistent finding of research on delinquency has been that gang members show higher levels of delinquent behavior than non-gang members. However, research attempting to understand the mechanisms underlying this finding is lacking. The basic premise of the current article is that the level of organization found in delinquent groups and gangs matters in clarifying...

It is difficult to measure the size, influence and growth patterns of criminal organizations embedded in illegal markets. In this paper, we argue that measuring the influence of a criminal organization by its size (in number of employees, or ‘members’) may under- or overestimate its sphere of influence in illegal markets. Self-report survey and size...