Francesco Calderoni,Tommaso Comunale,Gian Maria Campedelli,Martina Marchesi,Deborah Manzi and Niccolò Frualdo

There is relatively strong evidence that being male and having committed prior criminal activity and violence are associated with future organised crime recruitment. There is weak evidence that prior sanctions, social relations with organised crime-involved subjects and a troubled family environment are associated with recruitment. This systematic review examines what individual-level risk factors are associated with recruitment into organised crime. Despite the increase of policies addressing organised crime activities, little is known about recruitment. Existing knowledge is fragmented and comprises different types of organised criminal groups.Recruitment refers to the different processes leading individuals to stable involvement in organised criminal groups, including mafia, drug trafficking organisations, adult gangs and outlawed motorcycle gangs. This systematic review excludes youth (street) gangs, prison gangs and terrorist groups.

Oslo, Norway: Campbell Collaborative, 2022. 68p.

By Thomas Friis Søgaard Marie Højlund Bræmer Michael Mulbjerg Pedersen

This report provides an analysis of current drug supply models and the related violence and exploitation of vulnerable groups in Denmark. Recent years have seen a growth in criminals’ exploitation of vulnerable groups for drug-related crimes. This development appears to be driven by several structural factors, including increased drug market competition and a proliferation of more labour-intensive supply models. Based on the findings of this study, we identify some priorities for future research to understand the impact of digital developments in retail-level drug distribution on vulnerable individuals and to inform responses to reduce criminal exploitation.

Lisbon: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), 2021. 55p.

By European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)

Our overall assessment is that drug availability and use remain at high levels across the European Union, although considerable differences exist between countries. Approximately 83.4 million or 29 % of adults (aged 15–64) in the European Union are estimated to have ever used an illicit drug, with more males (50.5 million) than females (33.0 million) reporting use. Cannabis remains the most widely consumed substance, with over 22 million European adults reporting its use in the last year. Stimulants are the second most commonly reported category. It is estimated that in the last year 3.5 million adults consumed cocaine, 2.6 million MDMA and 2 million amphetamines.

Lisbon: EMCDDA: 2022. 60p.

By Jason Eligh

The flow of heroin from Asian production points to the coastal shores of eastern and southern Africa is not new. Whereas the first heroin transit routes in the region in the 1970s relied heavily on maritime transport to enter the continent, a number of transport modes and urban centres of the interior have increasingly become important features in the current movement of heroin in this region. Interior transit hubs and networks have developed around air transport nodes that use regular regional and international connections to ship heroin. As regional air routes proliferated and became more efficient, their utility and value for the heroin trade increased as well. Heroin is also consolidated and shipped over a frequently shifting network of overland routes, moving it deeper into the African interior in a south-westerly direction across the continent.

Consequently, a shallow flood of heroin has gradually seeped across the region, and this has had a significant impact on the many secondary towns found along the continent’s transcontinental road networks. These places, in turn, have spawned their own small local heroin markets, and become waypoints in rendering sustainable the now chronic, metered progression of heroin’s resolute geographic diffusion across the region.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2020. 100p.

By Simone Haysom

The heroin economy has shaped the growth of coastal villages, border towns and megacities across East and Southern Africa.

The trafficking of heroin is a crucial component of urban politics and development in East and Southern Africa. The heroin economy has shaped the growth of small coastal villages, border towns and megacities along the Southern Route – a network moving Afghan drugs south across the Indian Ocean and onward through Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique to South Africa. Rapid and dysfunctional urbanisation, the migration of low-skilled youth throughout the region, unemployment and the inability of local governments to cope with service delivery needs have contributed to the spread of the drug, building fortunes for a few ‘big fish’ and promoting corruption among police and politicians.

ENACT (Africa) 2020. 60p..

By Simone Haysom

The heroin route that crosses South Africa has created a regional heroin economy, with severe social and political repercussions. Heroin use has developed in both major cities and small towns – an important shift in local drug markets that is taking a toll on thousands of people. This policy brief sheds light on the domestic heroin economy, analyses its implications and proposes responses to its drivers and consequences. An effective response will need to consider political factors and must be regionally coordinated. Market dynamics and harm-reduction approaches should also be included. The most sustainable strategies address root causes, disrupt markets and tackle corruption.

ENACT (Africa) 2019. 12p.

By Simone Haysom, Peter Gastrow and Mark Shaw

This report examines the characteristics of the heroin trade off the East African coast and highlights the criminal governance systems that facilitate drug trafficking along these routes.

In recent years, the volume of heroin shipped from Afghanistan along a network of maritime routes in East and southern Africa appears to have increased considerably. Most of this heroin is destined for Western markets, but there is a spin-off trade for local consumption. An integrated regional criminal market has developed, both shaping and shaped by political developments in the region. Africa is now experiencing the sharpest increase in heroin use worldwide and a spectrum of criminal networks and political elites in East and southern Africa are substantially enmeshed in the trade. This report focuses on the characteristics of the heroin trade in the region and how it has become embedded in the societies along this route. It also highlights the features of the criminal governance systems that facilitate drug trafficking along this coastal route.

ENACT (Africa), 2018. 54p.

By Vanda Felbab-Brown

This paper explores policy options for responding to the supply of heroin and synthetic opioids from Mexico to the United States. Forced eradication of opium poppy has been the dominant response to illicit crop cultivation in Mexico for decades. Forced eradication appears to deliver fast results in suppressing poppy cultivation, but the suppression is not sustainable even in the short term. Farmers find a variety of ways to adapt and replant after eradication. Moreover, eradication undermines public safety and rule of law efforts in Mexico, both of high interest to the United States….Unless security and rule of law in Mexico significantly improve, the licensing of opium poppy in Mexico for medical purposes is unlikely to reduce the supply of heroin to the United States. Mexico faces multiple feasibility obstacles for getting international approval for licensing its poppy cultivation for medical purposes, including, currently, the inability to prevent opium diversion to illegal supply and lack of existing demand for its medical opioids. In seeking to establish such demand, Mexico should avoid setting off its own version of medical opioid addiction.

Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution,2020. 28p.

By Vanda Felbab-Brown, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Carol Graham, Keith Humphreys, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, Bryce Pardo, Peter Reuter, Bradley D. Stein, and Paul H. Wise

This Brookings opioid project, “The Opioid Crisis in America: Domestic and International Dimensions,” has analyzed policy options for reducing demand, providing treatment, designing regulatory frameworks, and implementing domestic law enforcement and international supply control measures. It has explored local impacts on communities as well as state and federal level responses and international actions. It has paid special attention to vulnerable communities, such as politically and economically disenfranchised Americans, women and children, and military veterans.

Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 2020. 15p.

By Phyllis Dininio

The USAID Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation (DCHA/CMM) commissioned Management Systems International (MSI) to conduct research on the relationship between organized crime, conflict and fragility. The year-long research project included a literature review and country case studies in Guatemala, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that examine the interaction between organized criminality and USAID conflict and fragility programming in both causal directions—with regard to how criminality affects USAID implementation and results, and how assistance affects criminality. ..The report concludes with a set of key findings and recommendations. Organized crime is both facilitated by, and contributor to, state fragility.

Arlington, VA: Management Systems International, 2015. 61p.

By Rachel Locke

Transnational organized crime (TOC) is a global challenge posing serious threats to our collective peace and security. But in conflict-affected and fragile states the threats of transnational organized crime present particular and insidious challenges requiring new and innovative responses. Not only does TOC undermine the strength of the state, it further affects the critical and often contested relationship between the state and society. In fragile and conflict-affected states it is precisely the degraded nature of this relationship that often prevents progress toward greater peace and prosperity. While there is now an established correlation between conflict and state fragility, much less is understood about the relationship between transnational organized crime, conflict, and fragility. This report examines the dynamics between conflict, state fragility, and TOC, demonstrating how the three fit together in an uneasy triumvirate, and it presents ideas for a more effective response. Roughly half of all illicit transactions in the world are taking place in countries experiencing a range of weak enforcement mechanisms, low levels of economic well-being, insufficient government capacity, and significant societal divisions. In these contexts, transnational criminal networks further erode state legitimacy by incentivizing corruption, infiltrating state structures, and competing with the state in the provision of services. Yet the dominant approach to tackling organized crime, what I term a “law-and-order” approach, frequently fails to account for the complex dynamics associated with criminal networks in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. This approach, which is primarily focused on security, sanctions, and the rule of law, is rarely tailored to the needs of countries suffering from severe governance deficits or those with a history of conflict. On the contrary, it has the potential to reinforce historical enmities between the state and its citizens and notions of state power as coercive control rather than legitimate representation

New York: International Peace Institute, July 2012. 24p.

By ENACT Africa

Lives are lost, forests and oceans are pillaged beyond the point of replenishment, animals are slaughtered, women, men, girls and boys are held in situations of violent abuse and exploitation. Customs officials receive bribes to turn their backs to a shipment of drugs. Police officers and soldiers sell their weapons on to street gangs. Politicians accept kickbacks, fix contracts and sell concessions to criminal groups and unethical corporations, so that they can profit from resources that were intended to improve the development opportunities of citizens. The harms caused by organised crime are widespread and profound. Yet because it is almost always obscured in the 'underworld', hidden in the shadows of remote borderlands, concealed in secrecy jurisdictions or felt most keenly by underserved communities, organised crime is a threat too easily overlooked. 'Organised crime' is not a term that has tended to be used in the African context. However, as the political economy of the continent is evolving and intertwining with other geopolitical and globalisation dynamics, the term is currently being applied to the continent with increasing frequency – and urgency. It describes everything from a range of illicit activities and actors, from human smuggling by militia groups along the North African coast, to the consorts and cronies aligned with heads of state.

ENACT Africa; 2019. 130p.

Edited by Corinna Elsenbroich, David Anzola and Nigel Gilbert

This book presents a multi-disciplinary investigation into extortion rackets with a particular focus on the structures of criminal organisations and their collapse, societal processes in which extortion rackets strive and fail and the impacts of bottom-up and top-down ways of fighting extortion racketeering. Through integrating a range of disciplines and methods the book provides an extensive case study of empirically based computational social science. It is based on a wealth of qualitative data regarding multiple extortion rackets, such as the Sicilian Mafia, an international money laundering organisation and a predatory extortion case in Germany. Computational methods are used for data analysis, to help in operationalising data for use in agent-based models and to explore structures and dynamics of extortion racketeering through simulations. In addition to textual data sources, stakeholders and experts are extensively involved, providing narratives for analysis and qualitative validation of models. The book presents a systematic application of computational social science methods to the substantive area of extortion racketeering. The reader will gain a deep understanding of extortion rackets, in particular their entrenchment in society and processes supporting and undermining extortion rackets. Also covered are computational social science methods, in particular computationally assisted text analysis and agent-based modelling, and the integration of empirical, theoretical and computational social science.

Cham, SWIT: Springer, 2016. 250p.

By Louise I. Shelley Dr.; John T. Picarelli; Allison Irby; Douglas M. Hart; Patricia A. Craig-Hart; Phil Williams Dr.; Steven Simon; Nabi Abdullaev; Bartosz Stanislawski; Laura Covill

The report presents three case studies of regions that are hospitable to transnational crime-terrorism interactions: Chechnya; the Black Sea region; and the tri-border area of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina. The analysis of links between criminal and terrorist groups in these areas used a military intelligence method called "intelligence preparation of the battlefield," which involves the identification of areas where terrorism and organized crime are most likely to interact. Such areas are expressed not only in geographic terms but also conceptual terms; for example, the analysis identifies the way groups organize themselves, communicate, use technology, deploy their members, and share cultural affinities. Within each of these areas, investigators can identify indicators that suggest whether or not cooperation between specific terrorist and criminal groups are likely to occur. The general principle that previous research in this domain has developed is that terrorist and criminal groups have links via methods but not motives. This report concludes that although the motives of terrorists and organized criminals are most often different, the links that separate such groups are growing increasingly complex, such that the separation of motives is no longer unequivocal. This study identifies an evolutionary pattern whereby the sharing of methods leads to more intimate connections within a short time. Factors that influence this evolution are failed states, war-torn regions, and alliances developed in penal institutions and urban neighborhoods. The central recommendation is to incorporate crime analysis in the intelligence analysis of terrorism.

Washington, DC: U.S. National Institute of Justice, 2005. 115p.

By Eduardo Sáenz Rovner and Russ Davidson

A comprehensive history of crime and corruption in Cuba, The Cuban Connection challenges the common view that widespread poverty and geographic proximity to the United States were the prime reasons for soaring rates of drug trafficking, smuggling, gambling, and prostitution in the tumultuous decades preceding the Cuban revolution. Eduardo S?enz Rovner argues that Cuba's historically well-established integration into international migration, commerce, and transportation networks combined with political instability and rampant official corruption to help lay the foundation for the development of organized crime structures powerful enough to affect Cuba's domestic and foreign politics and its very identity as a nation.S?enz traces the routes taken around the world by traffickers and smugglers. After Cuba, the most important player in this story is the United States. The involvement of gangsters and corrupt U.S. officials and businessmen enabled prohibited substances to reach a strong market in the United States, from rum running during Prohibition to increased demand for narcotics during the Cold War.

Chapel Hill, NC:University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 247p.

By Marc Mauer

For more than a quarter century the “war on drugs” has exerted a profound impact on the structure and scale of the criminal justice system. The inception of the “war” in the 1980s has been a major contributing factor to the historic rise in the prison population during this period. From a figure of about 40,000 people incarcerated in prison or jail for a drug offense in 1980, there has since been an 1100% increase to a total of 500,000 today. To place some perspective on that change, the number of people incarcerated for a drug offense is now greater than the number incarcerated for all offenses in 1980. The increase in incarceration for drug offenses has been fueled by sharply escalated law enforcement targeting of drug law violations, often accompanied by enhanced penalties for such offenses. Many of the mandatory sentencing provisions adopted in both state and federal law have been focused on drug offenses. At the federal level, the most notorious of these are the penalties for crack cocaine violations, whereby crack offenses are punished far more severely than powder cocaine offenses, even though the two substances are pharmacologically identical. Despite changes in federal sentencing guidelines, the mandatory provisions still in place require that anyone convicted of possessing as little as five grams of crack cocaine (the weight of two sugar packets) receive a five-year prison term for a first-time offense

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2009. 23p.

By Nazgol Ghandnoosh and Casey Anderson

More people died from opioid-related deaths in 2015 than in any previous year. This record number quadrupled the level of such deaths in 1999. Unlike the heroin and crack crises of the past, the current opioid emergency has disproportionately affected white Americans—poor and rural, but also middle class or affluent and suburban. This association has boosted support for preventative and treatment-based policy solutions. But the pace of the response has been slow, critical components of the solution—such as health insurance coverage expansion and improved access to medication assisted treatment—face resistance, and there are growing efforts to revamp the failed and costly War on Drugs.

This report examines the sources of the opioid crisis, surveys health and justice policy responses at the federal and state levels, and draws on lessons from past drug crises to provide guidance on how to proceed.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2017. 35p.

By The Strategic Response Group (SRG)

The Strategic Response Group (SRG)is a partnership set up to address public substance misuse and perceived anti-social behaviour in Dublin city centre. This report - Report of the Strategic Response Group to build sustainable street-level drug services and address related public nuisance - acknowledges that for historical reasons there is a clustering of drug treatment and homelessness services in or adjacent to the inner city. While these services play a major role in the provision of effective treatment to problematic drug users, the report recommends that there should be greater access to prompt provision of treatment options nationally and that people should be treated and accommodated in the most appropriate setting for their circumstances and provided with support services as close to their home as possible.

The report takes a holistic approach to address the issues of the city centre. The group have set out their recommendations in the short, media and long term and under the headings of treatment, rehabilitation, homelessness, policing responses, planning and urban design, legislation and regulation and implementation.

Dublin: The Strategic Response Group, 2012. 24p.

By European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)

Our overall assessment is that drug availability and use remain at high levels across the European Union, although considerable differences exist between countries. Approximately 83.4 million or 29 % of adults (aged 15–64) in the European Union are estimated to have ever used an illicit drug, with more males (50.5 million) than females (33.0 million) reporting use. Cannabis remains the most widely consumed substance, with over 22 million European adults reporting its use in the last year. Stimulants are the second most commonly reported category. It is estimated that in the last year 3.5 million adults consumed cocaine, 2.6 million MDMA and 2 million amphetamines.

Around 1 million Europeans used heroin or another illicit opioid in the last year. Although the prevalence of use is lower for opioid use than for other drugs, opioids still account for the greatest share of harms attributed to illicit drug use. This is illustrated by the presence of opioids, often in combination with other substances, which was found in around three quarters of fatal overdoses reported in the European Union for 2020. It is important to note that most of those with drug problems will be using a range of substances. We are also seeing considerably more complexity in drug consumption patterns, with medicinal products, non-controlled new psychoactive substances and substances such as ketamine and GBL/GHB now associated with drug problems in some countries or among some groups. This complexity is reflected in an increasing recognition that drug use is linked with, or complicates how we respond to, a wide range of today’s most pressing health and social issues. Among these issues are mental health problems and self-harm, homelessness, youth criminality and the exploitation of vulnerable individuals and communities.

Lisbon: EMCDDA, 2022. 60p.

By John Walsh

More than half a century after the advent of a global drug prohibition regime and the launch of the U.S. “war on drugs,” the results have been disastrous for Latin America and the Caribbean, and for the United States itself. Even worse, prohibition’s consequences are exacerbating other grave problems—corruption and organized crime, violence perpetrated with impunity, forest loss and climate change, and displacement and migration—making solutions to these challenges even more difficult to achieve. The Biden administration’s historic embrace of harm reduction represents an enormous, lifesaving advance for U.S. drug policy. But even with harm reduction services, moves to decriminalize drug possession, and shifts underway to legally regulate recreational cannabis, the brunt of drug prohibition remains intact and the drug war rages on in the Americas. The principal victims of government repression in the name of drug control and of the predations of organized crime have always been and continue to be the most impoverished and marginalized communities…. Regulatory models must prioritize the interests and inclusion of those communities most harmed by the punitive enforcement of drug prohibition. Such regulatory frameworks will be far better suited than prohibition to protecting human rights and promoting health, gender and racial equality, security and environmental sustainability.

Washington, DC: WOLA, 2022. 28p.