The Prediction and Control of Organized Crime: The Experience of Post-Soviet Ukraine by James O. s> Finckenauer Jennifer L. Schrock (review)

Abstract

I76 SEER, 85, I, 2007 an insecurityof tenurewhich speltterriblehardship'.Although some squatters earned enough to buy houses and land legally, the majority could not, and resistedgovernment officialswho tried to evict them. The book gives a good account of education in Albania and notes that educational experience has a strong impact on life outcomes. Depressingly, post-Communist Albania has not sustained the Communist regime's impressive investment in education. Many teachers have been forced to leave Albania because their wages are too low. Many children fail to attend school and school-books are in poor supply. Without the safety valve of large scale emigration to Greece and Europe and the sending of remittances from abroad, conditions would have been even worse. The author's sobriquet, 'agitated stagnation', accuratelyconveys the Albanian reality of this decade. The book is very well written and its judgements are sharp and wry. But readers who want to find the big themes laid out analyticallywill have to excavate among the detailsfor themselves.It is not even easy to find the parts of the book dealing with the towns, the villages and the shanties.The organization follows the author'stravels,but there is little structureotherwise. The index is of limited value. Chapter headings such as 'Developments' and 'Village Life' give little away. Despite this, the book gives a strong and richly observed impressionof life during this grim decade. It needs to be read in conjunction with other accounts to get the picture from the top down. But only an ethnographic portraitcould have provided so vivid an account of the characterand feel of post-Communist Albania. Department ofPoliticsandInternational Relations HUGH MLALL University ofKent Finckenauer,James 0. and Schrock,Jennifer L. (eds).7The Prediction andControl of Organized Crime: 7he Experience of Post-Soviet Ukraine. Transaction, New Brunswick,NJ, 2004. 20I pp. Tables. Notes. Index. /22.95 (paperback). SINCE the collapse of the Soviet Union, the majorityof the post-Soviet states have been beset by burgeoning organized crime and corruption. Whilst the roots of organized crime can be traced back to the Soviet period, it is generally accepted that certain elements of the environment created by the post-Soviet transitionprocess combined to facilitate an upsurge in organized criminal activity across the successorstates, which was quicklyrecognized as a seriousimpedimentto the successfultransitionto democracyand a functioning market economy. This study of post-Soviet Ukraine provides us with valuable insight into how events since I99I have 'created numerous opportunities for criminals' leading to 'a formidable proliferation of crime and corruption'(p. I). Since the early I990S Ukraine has received significantassistancefrom the USA in the fight against organized crime. Not only was a stable independent Ukraine deemed to be in US political interests, but the increasingly transnationalnature of organized crime in Ukraine (includingsignificantties REVIEWS 177 with emigre communities in the US) was an influentialfactor in the level of assistance offered. A better understanding of the development of organized crime in Ukraine and of possible solutionsto the crime problem was therefore deemed critical. Originally published in the journal Trends in Organized Crime (Spring/Summer 2001), this book is a collection of original research papers, resulting from a working partnership established in I998 between legal scholars and criminologists at the US National Institute of Justice and their counterparts,at the UkrainianAcademy of Law Sciences, with the aim of 'advancing knowledge related to transnational organized crime and corruption' (p. 3). This collection consists of ten chapters, written by numerous authors involved in the researchpartnership.Chaptersconsist of independent articles relating to various key aspects of organized crime in post-Soviet Ukraine, and the potential threats posed, both in terms of Ukraine's own future development and on an internationallevel. Jay Albanese begins by presenting a model for a risk assessment of organized crime in Ukraine to allow for a more proactive response by law enforcement, by exploring the 'opportunity factors' that can influence the development of organized crime in a given area or market. Contributions by Tatyana Denisova and Donna Hughes address the increasing criminal involvement in the traffickingof women and children from Ukraine. Denisova states that profit margins for human traffickingin Ukraine are currentlysurpassedonly by traffickingin armsand narcotics,and uncoversthe surprisingfact that 6o per cent of gang leadersin this...