Ernesto Ugo Savona

Italian Mafias’ Asymmetries

Italian organized crime groups—namely, Cosa Nostra, the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta—have often been identified with the single name “mafia”. However, despite some similarities especially in the business of private protection, Italian mafias present several differences which become asymmetries due to a centralized anti-mafia legislation and a centralized law enforcement and judicial system. They have had a different impact on criminal organizations with different cultures, traditions and power over the territory, as well as different regard by the State and civil society. After a brief outlook on the main features of the three criminal organizations and the changes they have experienced in the last decades, this chapter focuses on the broad spectrum of illegal activities conducted and the business opportunities exploited by each of them in order to highlight the main differences. On the basis of these differences, reactions of the State and the civil society are then examined, pointing out how the same legislation has had a different impact on the existence and the activities of the three Italian mafias.

Organised crime numbers

This special issue of Global Crime is devoted to estimation of the proceeds of crime and mafia revenues in Italy. The articles in this special issue have been inspired by a study conducted by Transcrime for the Italian Ministry of Interior, which analysed the investments in the legal economy of the Italian mafias. The study estimated the revenues from nine criminal activities: sexual exploitation of women, illicit firearms trafficking, drug trafficking, counterfeiting, the illicit cigarette trade, illicit gambling, illicit waste disposal, loan sharking and extortion racketeering. For this special issue, each estimation was revised and updated. Five of the following articles (Mancuso on sexual exploitation, Giommoni on drugs, Calderoni on illicit cigarettes, Lisciandra on extortion racketeering and Scaglione on loan sharking) focus on criminal activities for which the literature provided some previous attempts of estimation. The article by Calderoni, Favarin, Garofalo and Sarno presents exploratory estimations for counterfeiting, illicit waste trafficking, illegal gaming machines and illicit firearm trade. These estimations are exploratory because of the lack of previous experiences in the literature. The last article by Calderoni explores a possible methodology to attribute a share of the criminal revenues to the Italian mafias. Overall, the articles in this special issue may contribute to the discussion on what to measure in regard to criminal activities and organised crime and how to do so. After considering how the need to measure organised crime has responded to different policy needs (Section 1), this article discusses the uncertainty of estimates (Section 2), analyses possible distortions in the numbers relative to the supply of and demand for organised crime activities and advocates better methodologies and better data collection procedures (Section 3). Section 4 concludes by introducing the next logical step: examination of the impact/harm of organised crime, a topic not covered by this special issue.

Proofing Legislation Against Crime as Situational Prevention Measure

This chapter discusses the main characteristics of the crime proofing of legislation as a situational prevention measure to reduce the opportunities for crime inadvertently created by legislation. After outlining the precedents and framing it inside the European Union approach for crime prevention developed in the middle of 2000, the different steps of this approach are outlined together with and an example of its implementation. Even though it has been until now neglected and not completely developed, the author believes that proofing legislation against crime could be a successful challenge to reduce opportunities for crime deriving from the increasing number of laws and their complexity at different levels.

Theft of Medicines from Hospitals as Organised Retail Crime: The Italian Case

Theft of medicines is emerging as the new frontier of pharmaceutical crime and of organised retail crime. It is attractive to criminals due to the high profits and the relatively low risk, and it is facilitated by many asymmetries of the legal market. Using data retrieved from open sources and institutional reports, this chapter focuses on the theft of medicines from hospitals that occurred in Italy between 2006 and 2014. It describes what types of medicines are stolen, where and how, and it tests two hypotheses: (1) that stolen medicines are ‘laundered’ and resold on the legal market, exploiting the vulnerabilities of the pharmaceutical supply-chain; and (2) that organised crime—especially Italian mafias and Eastern European groups—plays a crucial role in this criminal activity, supported by a network of corrupt officials and white-collar criminals.

Crime Prevention in the Twenty-First Century

Over the years, a number of innovative approaches to learn about crime patterns for guiding and supporting crime prevention initiatives have been developed. In this collection we cover seven approaches: (1) offender-based research; (2) crime script analysis; (3) crime mapping and spatial analysis; (4) social network analysis; (5) agent-based modelling; (6) crime-proofing legislations; and (7) the technologies of crime prevention. Specifically, theoretical and empirical/applied contributions have been included for each approach. Theoretical contributions aim to introduce and explain the approach and discuss under which circumstances it could better assist crime prevention initiatives. Empirical/applied contributions attempt to illustrate the potential of the approach for crime prevention through its application to a particular crime problem. Efforts have been made to include approaches that we thought would be most relevant for the future of crime prevention at the time this collection was developed.