Juvenile Crime and Organized Crime Groups — The Strategic Prevention Perspective

Abstract

Numerous studies have shown that criminal organizations in their mode of operation are mostly local. The local context directs the expansion and diversification of their criminal activities as well as their “entrepreneurial” risk management. Children are being targeted for criminal exploitation by organized crime groups as a mode of risk management given that they are perceived to be more likely to evade police detection or the sanctions. Continued increase of juvenile perpetrators of acts associated wtih organized crime activities points towards setting of a new trend. Children are being included into criminal entrepreneurship in a number of modalities ranging from distribution of narcotics and transformation of profits from illegal activities and corruption into ostensibly “legitimate” assets. In general terms, criminal justice does not target the causality of crime. As criminal justice phenomena stem from social processes, the roots of crime prevention policy ought to be embedded in measures of social policy as much as to rely upon repressive and control measures of criminal law. In this article the authors discuss juvenile behavior in organized criminal activities from a number of perspectives in order to outline various facets of contemporary social prevention response to this type of crime.