Assessing the Effectiveness of Organized Crime Control Strategies ...

Assessing the Effectiveness of Organized Crime Control Strategies:
A Review of the Literature
exercised here again, however, due to the tendency of these accounts to be sensationalistic and
speculative. Furthermore, journalistic works tend to focus more on OC figures and their
activities, than on the effectiveness of control strategies.
3.3 Crude and Varied Performance Measures
A variety of measures have been proposed in assessing the impact of OC control strategies
(Peterson, 1994:381; Maltz, 1990). A study may, of course, adopt several measures. Some of
the key measures used or proposed have been:
• Body-count measures (e.g., the number and nature of cases opened, arrests, prosecutions,
convictions, and prison terms imposed);
• Size of the illicit market (e.g., changes in the volume of drugs trafficked/sold, number of
usurious loans);
• Volume and scope of organized crime groups (e.g., the impact of control efforts on
criminal organizations or their leadership);
• Efficiency of criminal justice units (e.g., strike forces);
• Harms produced by OC (e.g., the impact of control efforts on the physical, economic, and
other harms occasioned by OC);
• Seized and forfeited assets and recovery of unpaid taxes.
Body-Count Measures
Among the most common measures of the impact of OC control strategies are tallies of arrests
and convictions achieved. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (1993) for example,
provide a breakdown, by province, of the number of charges and arrests for various activities in
which criminal organizations are thought to be involved. However, such reports provide no
indication as to the proportion of acts of prostitution, illicit gambling, drug trafficking, and
related activity that are linked to OC. Also, police data of this kind tend to seriously
underestimate the volume of such activities, as there is a massive “dark figure” in relation to
consensual crimes, extortion, and many other activities associated with OC.
Furthermore, simple body-counts of this type provide no indication of the justice system inputs
required to generate them (i.e., no cost-benefit analysis) and no information on the impact of the
law enforcement activity on the relevant criminal organizations. Maltz (1990:39) argues that
counting convictions and computing average sentence lengths is tantamount to determining the
battles won with no indication of how the war is going. Since all convictions are given the same
weight, such data provide no information on the significance of the battles won. A strike force
can conceivably run up an impressive tally of convictions by pursuing the easiest cases. In some
contexts, this may even assist more powerful criminal organizations, as more vulnerable
competitors are put out of circulation.
Moreover, what is one to make of a reduction in the number of charges following the
introduction of a new enforcement initiative Is such a reduction an indication of failure or an
indication of the deterrent effect of the new measures (Marx, 1988:109) Many police reports
trumpeting a large arrest tally, or the conviction of some high profile offenders, imply that more
12 | Research and Statistics Division / Department of Justice Canada