Social Institutions and Organized Crime, Essay Example

Social institutions are the shaping factors in people’s life that help define ones character through growth. The social institutions therefore are responsible for nurturing ones character and they help shape the attitudes, ideas and thoughts that permeate ones actions throughout their lives. The period of exposure to ones social institutions determines the depth to which the culture of these institutions permeates their thinking as well as the actions they take. The organized crime therefore fits the bill of a social institution perfectly because it is a way of life of a given society. The inhabitants of such a society make serious efforts towards attaining acceptance in these societies as well as gaining recognition in these societies. It is due to these efforts that one gets eventually lured into organized crime not ignoring the fact that these organized crime outfits have a lot to offer.

Organized crime can be defined as a systematic illegal activity whose goal is to get profit or power. The meaning has eventually  evolved and today organized crime refers to gangsters who have now acquired a lot of power by corrupting greedy, weak and passive public officials or even through violence According to Jay Albanese 1989 there are three models of organized crime which are hierarchical model, enterprise model and patron-client model all originally known as American Cosa Nostrica. Jay Albanese has emphasized, these “models” are a representative of different ways of explaining different paradigms of organized crime. The view of Cosa Nostra as a bureaucratic entity with a national wide organizational structure and framework was attributed to the Hierarchical model of organized crime. On the other hand, other people have described the same as being a patron client model that has asymmetric networks that is characterised by a mesh of ties.  A social institutional perspective perceives communities as a collection of social institutions with the community residents as their members. Sociologists also use the term organization to refer to healthy social organization and disorganization to refer to the absence or existence of weak social institutions.

The speculative theories are based on such believes like that it is possible to determine in the progress of human history a clear cut course, some general scheme or design as well as a pattern that is all encompassing. The continued existence has its reasons stemming from numerous arguments, however there are two considerations that though quite very general have been viewed as having exerted a fairly sustained influence (Jesusi.com). This theory seeks therefore to set that the society has socialized through a given pattern that has pervaded its settings over time and thereby dictated the manner in which people interact and integrate in these societies. The theory therefore seeks to state that with the forces that these different societies faced in their historical development, events led to the development of criminal activities. These criminal activities grew into organized gangs that eventually bred organized crime. This theory is the more applicable of the speculative theory since it looks at the eventual need of the criminal gangs to protect them as the force that propelled them into evolving into organized rings.

The empirical theories seek to explain a systematic development of these informal groupings to form well organized gangs. Informal controls exist in neighbourhoods with healthy social institutions and hence reduce the possibility of gang formation.  Such informal controls are provided to the youth by family members, leaders of faith institutions. In contrast there is a high likelihood of gang members’ existence in neighbourhoods where there is social disorganization. In such neighbourhoods the social institutions which should provide informal control to the youth fail to do so and therefore the justice system is needed  to impose its social control(formal)  through formal processing, arrests, punishment and court mandated treatment. A social institutional perspective leads to perceive communities as a collection of social institutions with the solutions to community’s social problems in dependent on the health of the social institutions. The reasons for gang formation are attributed to the social structure institution found in the communities neighbouring the gangs’ home and solutions are viewed as being related to the social institutions in addition to existence of health families (Michael 2002). This empirical set up therefore equates the evolution of organized crime to the development of other social institutions like schools and churches.

Organized criminal models are vital in understanding organized crime in that they represent the reality in a clear and simple manner. This  helps in understanding the reasons to why organized crime exist and thus the government and law enforcement bodies are able to make plans to  deal with it. All efforts to unravel as well as combat crime should be reinforced with intensive study and analysis of the way it is organized as well as controlled. This not only makes the job of crime busters easy but also enables them to fight organized crime with efficiency and thereby wipe out organized crime on the long term.

References

Michael K.  (2002). Into the Abyss: A perspective on Gangs.Retrieved in September 11, 2009. Available : <http://www.faculty.missouristate.edu/m/MichaelCarlie/Orientation/perspective.htm>.

Philosophies of the Branches of Knowledge. Retrieved 10 September 2009: Available <http://cyberspacei.com/jesusi/inlight/knowledge/history.htm>.