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theses

In April 2008 the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) developed a strategy to combat international organized crime. Within its strategies, the DOJ identified eight criminal activities, including—but not limited to—the trafficking of humans, contraband, and illicit narcotics, to be among the greatest threats emanating from transnational organized criminals. Besides identifying these threats, the DOJ sought an assessment of the criminal organizations engaged in these activities for resource allocation. To date, only a traditional organized crime threat assessment has been conducted by federal law enforcement agencies. This threat assessment focused exclusively on evaluating known criminal organizations believed to pose the greatest threat—defined by their characteristics. Few, if any, assessments have considered the actual or estimated harm caused by criminal organizations, yet an untested hypothesis in the organized crime literature suggests the degree of a criminal organization’s structure, sophistication, self-identification, stability, size, and reputation impacts the organization’s capacity for harm—the so-called “harm capacity thesis.” This exploratory study was the first known assessment of the harm capacity thesis. To assess the hypothesis, the content of 14 closed criminal cases, consisting of thousands of pages of interviews, surveillance logs, administrative updates and other investigative documents, derived from FBI criminal investigations of transnational crimes were analyzed. Through the content analysis, the harm capacity and harm variables were assigned values ranging from one (minimum) to three (maximum). These were used to calculate harm capacity and harm indices. A cross-comparison of these indices suggests criminal organizations commit a level of harm commensurate with their harm capacity. Nine of the fourteen criminal organizations were found to have committed a level of harm commensurate with its harm capacity. However, the research was limited on identifying which particular harm capacity characteristics contributed to an organizations overall level of harm. The findings from this study have implications for future research to include comparative studies of criminal organizations operating in the same criminal market to more accurately assess which characteristics are contributing to an organizations level of harm and longitudinal studies to evaluate the factors most important in the structural development of criminal organizations.

ETD_4862

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10002600001.ETD.000068736

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

David A. Marvelli

doi:10.7282/T34J0CR8

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.