Influence Of Organized Crime On Society

I have done my research on "The Influence of Organized Crime on Society." Organized crime is a global enterprise, a well oiled business machine that reaches all around the world from Japan to Russia to North America. The purpose of my research is to show the influence of this crime on the everyday lives of people who are not involved in it. In North America there are so many organized crime groups it is hard to keep up with them and even harder to fight their influence, from the Sicilian Mafia to Hells Angels to Chinese Triads it would take an army to fight them all.

All organized crime groups operate in basically the same fashion, they are "nonideological, hierarchical, limited or exclusive in membership, perpetuitous, organized through specialization or division of labour, monopolistic and governed by rules and regulations." (Abadinsky, Howard) They are like the army with their hierarchy and have their own government that rewards and punishes the members. Punishment is necessary in the hierarchy of an organized crime group to keep order, they can not have members becoming government witnesses because that would sink their whole enterprise. That is also why there is limited membership with these groups, to lower the risk of "rats." Most organized crime organizations have rules that state a member can not kill a police officer or regular citizen, so most of the murder that goes on in these organizations is within the members. The criminals kill other criminals, not innocent people. This makes you think if you should actually try to stop this if they are just getting rid of themselves. Their goal is to have a monopoly over certain industries so that they can more easily control them. If they control a whole industry then nobody can stop them from doing what they want to do, like raising prices for instance. An example of this is the waste removal industry in New York city and the surrounding area, the residents of New York pay the absolute highest rates in North America to get their garbage removed. The reason behind this is that the Mafia controls all of the garbage disposal companies; they have a monopoly over the industry. Because of the monopoly they can do anything they want, they have no competition that will charge lower prices because they control the competition.

The cost of organized crime on society is very large yet most people do not even know about it. The reason people don't know about it is because the cost of organized crime is an impossible task to gauge. We will never know exactly how much the cost of organized crime is to society because the goal of organized criminal groups is to not be visible. Their goal is to hide how much they are changing costs to society because this makes them much harder to discover and arrest. One way these criminal groups are raising taxes for average people is because they don't pay taxes on their illegal revenues. A legal business will re-invest their revenues in their business or pay dividends to stock holders but illegal business take those revenues and invest them in legal businesses to cover up the fact that most of their money is made illegally. This makes property taxes and business taxes go up for average honest people who have nothing to do with organized crime. The government also has to raise taxes to pay for all the extra police enforcement and task forces that try to deal with organized crime but "it is difficult to assign these costs to organized crime because (with the exception of extortion and loansharking) it is the private consumers who seek out the criminals, not the criminals who seek out victims." (Witte, Anne) If there were no consumers then there would be no organized crime and that is the problem, most of the crimes organized groups commit are supplying the demand of the people. So the police should try to lower that demand and that could help the fight against organized crime.

The most profitable and popular forms of global organized crime that cross into North America are, drug trafficking, extortion, money laundering, fraud and arms smuggling. After the cold-war era the government really started discovering how much global organized crime was affecting the country and the economy. In the United States organizations such as the FBI and the CIA didn't have to concentrate on Russia so much anymore and they noticed they were ignoring the global organized crime problem. The former director of the CIA R. James Woolsey said, "Although we do negotiate with our key allies and friends to better attack the problem, there is no negotiating table where we can try to work out a compromise or reach a consensus with criminals."