Organized crime, culture, and social institutions in Europe

Abstract

Organized crime activity is one form of transnational crime that is at the forefront of concerns for the global community. Organized crime quickly adapts to new social environments, illustrating its flexible and dynamic qualities. As the United Nation's Organized Crime Threat Assessment (2011) noted, "More than ever before, strong levels of cooperation exist between different organized crime groups, transcending national, ethnic, and business differences" (8). Despite these alarming global trends, criminologists have not routinely applied a socio-cultural approach to an empirical study of organized crime. With Europe identified as the global "hotspot" for consumption of illicit goods and services provided by criminal organizations around the world, this study conducts an empirical assessment of macro-level organized crime trends in Europe through the theoretical guidance of Institutional Anomie Theory. Official and annually reported data were collected from fourteen countries in Europe from 1995 to 2009. Organized crime was operationalized using four measures of drug seizures (cannabis, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines). The fourteen countries were grouped into six country clusters representing different national contexts, in addition to being divided into two groups representing developed countries and countries in transition. The single country of Poland was further examined due to its international recognition as a source country for amphetamine production (DEA, 2004). The main findings indicate that: 1) Institutional Anomie Theory was not found to predict high levels of organized crime or homicides in this sample as well as originally anticipated; 2) cultural-institutional configurations were found to vary between countries and groups of countries, and each configuration differentially impacted the four measures of organized crime in Europe; 3) the four proxies for organized crime were found to behave differently from each other in the given settings in this study; 4) intentional homicide rates (i.e., the traditional dependent variable that has been used in the majority of past empirical studies of Institutional Anomie Theory) did not operate well under the theory's restrictions; and 5) some combinations of variables were found to be connected through common elements, which indicate policies aimed at one of the variables will have a similar impact on other variables. This will arm policymakers with additional tools to combat organized crime prevalence in this region. These findings have several implications for future studies of organized crime, as well as future applications of Institutional Anomie Theory in criminology, which include maximizing the scope and applicability of this criminological theory in different cultural-institutional settings.