Organized Crime Essay - 2750 Words

Organized Crime (Research Paper Sample) Content: ORGANIZED CRIME:OPERATIONS AND TRENDS NameCourseDateBackground As per common knowledge organized crime is an outcome of assimilation due to the exchange of global ideas and other features of culture. Criminals are really adaptable operators that easily move around even securely guarded states. In order to understand their basic nature it is very essential to adopt that the borders that separate the world amongst ethnic and dialectal barriers are obstacles for the effectiveness of organized criminals all across spheres. Organized crime is the crime that is very much consolidated and somehow goes above borders. In reality, the term is complex due to the obscurity of the word organized. Criminals, illegal activities, groups and the illegal authority are the foremost elements of organized crime. This paper will emphasize on organized criminal operations and the establishment of illicit goods and services. IntroductionOrganized crime is similar to other criminal operatio ns but the fact that organized criminals exploits prospects characterized by a profitable objective where there is not enough protection. Consistent with some aspects, the organization of a crime might be supportive of the criminals, making it smooth, worthy and safer to violate the law whereas in other situations, the organization aspect creates more problems. As per this perspective, criminals are generally the answer to the problem, as they undergo challenges that are specific and noticeable. Actually, it is not an easy task to presenting organized criminals as solutions to crime because firsthand material is not easily available on the daily activities of organized crime. In fact, most of the available materials focus on awareness raising and description of organized crime whereas the information to be extracted from the existing empirical works along with journalistic source is rather varying. Subsequently, organized crime is extremely diverse that it is challenging to control general patterns as there are various forms and measures of operation and challenges arising from variations in the category of crime and geographic location. In due course this paper will provide a collection of information well-ordered along with of a rough and extremely definite sorting scheme presenting two major facets: operation of criminals, and the current trends of organized crime groups and finally provide solutions and recommendations. Operation of Organized Crimes Cataloging organized crime puts emphasis on the ethnicity of the criminal, specially their loyalty to a certain ethnically distinct criminal group. These criminal organizations are alleged to have the flexibility look for the most cost-effective prospects for crime, but then after the crime has been committed they retreat to a safe haven that provides shield from the consequences of breaking the law. In addition, it has been found that organized crime can carefully conceal in legitimate businesses and foreign c ommunities. Global crime appears in a different light taking into account of the problems that organized criminals may encounter when penetrating borders and working in odd and dangerous environments. Also these criminals are always used to circumventing law enforcement inspection as compared domestic criminals. As it happens, organized crime is not subject to these issues. As such, the deviation can be utilized through differentiating organized criminal operations as per what these criminal enterprises offer in the market, as information, goods and people. In the meantime it has been implicated the most of the organized crime is reputable in smuggling operations. For the most part this means the transportation of contraband across borders, highly taxed goods such as liquor, stolen vehicles, illegal drugs, endangered animals, firearms, verboten technology or even human organs. In human smuggling, people are brought across the border rather than contraband. Criminals may accompany t he smuggled goods depending on the mode of operation or may not. Even so, criminals do cross borders as an essential typical of some organized crimes, i.e. voracious crimes such as gangs involved in armed robbery in one country may operate from a location in a foreign country so as to they cross the border when they go on criminal mission. Crossing Borders (to commit crime)Despite the fact that the level and nature of the organized crime varies, there appears to be certain kinds of problem patterns that are distinctive of most crimes, concerning to the identification of crime opportunities, the utilization of these opportunities, and the controlling of the risks offenders encounter during and after the execution of an organized crime.Awareness Beneath the hypothesis that crimes are the outcome of striving and capable criminals utilizing opportunities, the first key challenge for organized criminals is to be aware of prospects that that exist in the international sphere. Such opport unities take account of lucrative objects such as cultural artifacts, vulnerabilities due to lack of physical or legal protections, such as cross-border price variances in legal or illegal markets e.g. cigarettes and drugs ForagingAs matter of fact, the common notion that criminals come across crime opportunities accidently in the course of daily activities does not completely explain organized crime more generally for that matter. As is happens, sophisticated criminals are capable of taking the edge and looking for and generating crime opportunities. A good example is human traffickers that undertake informal market analyses to pinpoint the most strategic market, calculating risks, costs and profits. Kenney has described Colombian drug trafficking networks as learning groups that carry out research on crime prospects by collecting information concerning shipment methods and testing options that are capable of moving massive goods (Desroches, 2007). Actually this sort of conduct tri es to expand the access to other crimes and acquire new object markets.Crossing the BorderActually criminals who forage across borders encounter similar challenges as the actual execution of the crime. Nonetheless the risk involved in seeking tendency seems to be somewhat low so long as laws are not broken at this stage. In point of fact, the actual encounter of organized crime simply emerges when offenders leave to utilize the openings that they have established. As mentioned earlier and will be discussed in more detail later, limited organized crimes certainly require the criminals to physically cross international borders. On the other hand, wherever offenders travel from one country to another to commit a crime, crossing the borders is the, major barrier. And so, international organized criminals remain with two choices: Using legitimate transportationSneaking across the borderAs the advance of technology take effect in the society, progresses in law enforcement and collaboratio n have resulted in improved monitoring and identification of organized criminals while borders have increased and become reliable. All together outdated border structures have been close down in most vulnerable borders. As a result the regulation movement across these borders is more difficult as time goes by every day.Outside OperationsOrganized criminals breaking the law in foreign soil incline to be immigrants operating in a distant environment. As an outcome of language, cultural and legal barriers in the foreign country organized criminals are not as efficient as the local offenders more familiar to use the legitimate arrangements, such as assets of technical significance for the criminals such as typical transportation, banking and cable. On the other hand unusual behavior can attract undesirable attention and can as well interfere with criminal operations. As such, that is the reason the Cali cartel allegedly produced a manual for their operatives providing practical advice f or managing a stash house to be conventional in the context of the United States. Additionally, it can be hypothesized that criminals functional in a foreign country as outsiders are limited in the crimes they can commit. It is undoubtedly not a concurrence that criminals without a social support structure in the country of operation tend to specialize in open hit-and-run crimes like armed robbery and theft that do not require mixing into orthodox behavior patterns. NetworkingAs a matter of fact sustaining, creating and organizing relationships that are exploitable across countries is challenging for organized criminals prior to the actual execution of crimes. Initially, there are many ways in which cross-border networking can be favorable to organized criminal activities. Secondly, cross-border networks tend to be dynamic and fragile, rather due to law enforcement intervention or opportunistic behavior so that organized criminals constantly need to capitalize in building and foster ing relationships.Contingencies Actually the value of cross-border networking varies regarding the category of crime. In operation, it is natural in the international illegal markets, linking suppliers and customers from foreign countries. Also, the need for cross-border networking seems to be reliant on the scale of a criminal venture. In accordance with a research conducted on the link between the mass of smuggling shipments and the size and range of criminal networks. In consequence, the ability of organized criminals to create links that are functional appears to be randomly distributed, depending on the available social skills, social capital and psychological personalities.It is reported that...

Epistemology and Explicitation in a Selection of the Prose and Poetry of Jonathan Swift - Literature Essay Samples

I want to outline in this essay some of the ways in which Swifts texts in particular the shorter prose works and the poetry concerned with the female body take up and make explicit contradictory philosophical positions. Much time and critical effort has been spent attempting to trace some unifying philosophical thread through the maze created by these and other of Swifts writings, when such a thread may be elusive to the point of vanishing altogether.1 It seems possible that one cause of this critical need to establish consistency in Swift is the influence of Postmodernist thought, which tends to cause a conditioned response to eighteenth century literary works in which the instinctive move is to look for that which totalizes, compartmentalizes, reveals a master narrative or supplies a clearly defined linear teleology. If, however, this kind of pre-imagined consistency proves unavailable, the critic is left with the notion of a multi-vocal, polychromatic Swift which should not, pe rhaps, be so surprising as there seems nothing alien to the intellectual trends of early-eighteenth century England in Swifts assumption of positions that appear radically opposed to one another. Periods of transition necessarily involve the existence of contradictory positions in constellation often within the work of a single writer or thinker. Even Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest of all icons of Enlightenment rationality, can be represented in such a way: Newton was a Janus figure, emblematic of the new, rationalist, scientific and secular future, yet also using his mathematical skills for abstruse astrological and biblical calculations. (Corfield, 11).Clearly any attempt to attribute a definitive philosophical position to Swift is fraught with difficulty.2 Not only must the reader attempt to penetrate multiple levels of irony at a micro-level, but at a macro-level the fact that Swift was an Anglican clergyman complicates any philosophical interpretation. The origins of the deba tes on this issue are contemporaneous with the publication of the texts themselves (William Wottons observations, for example), and criticism up to the end of the nineteenth century continued, predominately, to insist on an irreligious Swift an approach that survived into the twentieth century: no defence of Swifts fundamental religious orthodoxy can stand the test of such writings. He is a sceptical humanist who again and again tilts at Christian belief. (Wilson Knight, on The Tale of a Tub,124). This strain of criticism has been long overtaken, however, by the notion that throughout Swifts texts there is an obvious tendency towards a defense of, and apology for, the Anglican Church: for Swift the world can only be properly interpreted in a context of moral truth enforced by divine authority. (Williams, 137). Or: That Swift inherited, and loyally struggled for, a traditional Anglican solutioncan be seen demonstrably in his life. (Hall, 43).As an illustration of the complications a ttending any study of Swift, it would be possible to make the case that the time has now arrived for an analysis that seeks to resurrect Swift as a sceptical humanist. Such an approach put here in a very reductive form might begin from the position that critics baffled by the heterogeneous nature and multiplicity of works like The Tale of a Tub have a tendency to return to the sermons, and the other works of Swift-the-churchman, and finding there only Anglican orthodoxy proclaim Swift a pillar of the church. The fact remains, however, that the richness, variety, and multiplicity of meanings contained in works like Gullivers Travels or The Tale of a Tub continue to indicate, at the very least, a lack of absolute conviction in the teachings of the Anglican Church. Such arguments begin to uncover the potential complexities and paradoxes in which an analysis of Swifts writings can enmesh the critic seeking to smoak out (Norton, 446) a biographically consistent interpretation, and are precisely the kind of hermeneutics I wish to avoid. Attempts, therefore, to ascertain what Swift actually thought are set aside here; what matters for my purposes in this essay is the philosophical positions Swifts texts assume and the resulting explicitation and unraveling of complex epistemological positions.An example of such a position, easily overlooked in Swift, is empiricism used nearly always in the texts in juxtaposition with epistemologies antagonistic to it. The fable of the bee and the spider in The Battel of the Books offers a particularly strong instance, in which the text uses an empirical epistemology to attack individual human reason: 3Whether is the nobler Being of the two, That which by a lazy Contemplation of four Inches round; by an over-weening Pride, which feeding and engendering on it self, turns all into Excrement and Venom; producing nothing at last, but Fly-bane and a Cobweb: Or That, which, by an universal Range, with long Search, much Study, true Judgm ent, and Distinction of Things, brings home Honey and Wax. (Norton, 383).Or, in a similar vein, concerned only for that which is within, the spider is represented as furnisht with a Native Stock within my self. This large Castle (to shew my Improvements in the Mathematicks) is all built with my own Hands, and the Materials extracted altogether out of my own person. (Norton, 383). And, perhaps most barbed of all, the spider is portrayed as wisely gathering Causes from Events, (for they knew each other by Sight). (Norton, 382). Similarly the textually privileged ancient, Aesop, is given the empirical position: was ever any thing so Modern as the Spider in his Air, his turns, and his Paradoxes?, nothing but Dirt spun out of your own Entrails (the guts of Modern Brains), and, whatever we have got, has been by infinite Labor, and search, and ranging thro every Corner of Nature. (Norton, 384). The text uses a sophisticated empirical position to challenge individual human reason with appar ent disregard for empiricisms potential to undermine metaphysics generally. By appearing to embrace an essentially empirical epistemology it is at least arguable that The Battel of the Books opens a space for further critiques along lines philosophically similar to its own. The unraveling of previously implicit positions thus becomes a real possibility.There are, of course, differing opinions on the philosophical positioning in The Battel of the Books. An example is the view of Warren Montag who seeks to isolate the reasons why thinkers like Hobbes, Gassendi, and, most notably, Descartes,4 should be targets for Swift. Montag, in reflecting on the fable of the bee and the spider, argues that Swift believed that the community of learning with its archive of eternally valid works was prior to the individual. The community and its generality and commonality was a bulwark against the peculiar weaknesses of an individual thinker. (57). Evidently, on these grounds, the Swift posited by Mon tag could not tolerate a thinker like Descartes who sought to demolish these pillars of knowledge and begin anew. For Montag, Swifts antagonism towards the spiders valorization of innate reason is a result of Swifts insistence on dismissing an epistemology that is produced by the individual alone; an epistemology that fails to offer due recognition to the accretions of a centuries-old communality of knowledge. Clearly this leads to a dichotomy in the fable of the bee and the spider, as empiricism is an epistemology that defines itself by its refusal of a prori knowledge and that refers, always, for its sources of knowledge to the senses and experience of the individual; the notion of a transcendent and eternally valid work is diametrically opposed to such a position. If we accept both Montags point concerning the communality of knowledge (detached, of course, from Swift the person) and mine, concerning empiricism, there emerges an unresolvable philosophical paradox in Swifts use of the fable. Such paradoxes demand, and have received, explicitation. Whether or not it was simply convenient for Swift to expose innate reason to the strictures of empiricism, and to make, simultaneously, the point concerning the communality of knowledge is hard to establish. What is certain, however, is that the effect has been to stimulate vigorous debate. Unresolvable contradictions within the same critique lead to potentially endless reverberations of meaning and interpretation.Another area of Swifts texts in which empiricism is particularly evident is in the poems that discuss the bodies and bodily functions of women: The Ladys Dressing Room, A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, Strephon and Chloe and Cassinus and Peter. Here the texts expose the idealistic notions of Petrarchan love poetry to truth claims available from sense impressions. Shit (empirical truth), for example, is brought into direct opposition to the flawless woman (glorification of an empirically insupportable idea). It is not she who shits who is mocked, but he who cannot face the empirical realities of shitting. Bodily realities are posited as the antithesis of the standard, and highly abstracted, figurations of the classic romance: the odours of sour, unsavoury, streams (The Ladys Dressing Room, Norton, 536), the sight of handkerchiefsAll varnished oer with Snuff and Snot (536) and Caelias shit, (Cassinus and Peter, Norton, 550) are set against Pigeons billing, Hymen with a flaming torch and infant Loves with purple wings. (Strephon and Chloe, Norton, 541). The truth of the admonition to Strephon that fine Ideas vanish fast,/While all the gross and filthy last (Norton, 545) is inescapable within the context of the poem. The poetry takes the satire on romantic-Platonic love (Norman. O. Brown, Norton, 617) a stage further in its presentation of the itemization and separation of the clothing and the bodily residues of the female as the empirical analogue of the idealizing central metaphor of the blazon, which dismembers the love object behind an obscuring screen of spirituality. Everything that is presented as spiritual in Petrarchan love poetry has its true foundations in the material argue the poems: Such Order from Confusion sprung,/Such gaudy Tulips raisd from Dung. (The Ladys Dressing Room, Norton, 538).Interestingly, however, this is not the whole story. The couplet: His foul Imagination links/Each Dame he sees with all her Stinks (The Ladys Dressing Room, Norton, 538) suggests a suspicion of nave empiricism. As does the advice to Strephon: On Sense and Wit your Passion found,/By Decency cemented round, since, Beauty scarce endures a Day (Norton, 547). The text insists that there is much beyond the realm of sense impressions. It becomes possible, therefore, to ask from which sense impression might an idea like decency or sense arise? Or, what is to prevent the sense impression stink from being applied, by the individual subjected to it, to every example of the thing that originally stank? Indeed, this could be read as a challenge to even the sophisticated empiricism of Locke: Let anyone examine his own thoughts, and thoroughly search into his understanding, and then let him tell me, whether all the original ideas he has there, are any other than that of objects of his senses; or of the operations of his mind, considered as objects of his reflection. (35). It is not impossible to see how a particular interpretation of a passage such as this from Locke might support the view of empirical epistemology as inadequate.5 So, within the same selection of poetry, and occasionally within the same poem, there emerges both a resistance to empiricism and the employment of that same empiricism to expose the falsity of other epistemological positions in this case the kind of airy idealism of Petrarchan love poetry. Exposing traditional poetic forms and tropes to empiricism brings two categories previously hermetically sealed from one another into cl ose proximity, allowing each to contaminate the other, facilitating the process of explicitation.Of all Swifts texts, however, The Tale of a Tub takes up the most profoundly anti-empirical stance:He that can with Epicurus content his Ideas with the Films and images that fly off upon his Senses from the Superficies of things; Such a Man truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the Sower and the Dregs, for Philosophy and Reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined Point of felicity, called, the Possession of being well deceived; The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves. (Norton, 352).The ambivalence or incoherence of the narrator is dazzling, however: and then comes Reason officiously, with Tools for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate, that they are not of the same consistence quite thro. Now, I take all this to be the last Degree of perverting Nature; one of whose Eternal Laws it is, to put her best Furniture forward. (352). Two potentially antagonistic philosophical positions are juxtaposed in such a way that neither can emerge the victor. Such techniques in The Tale of a Tub have the effect of magnifying the visibility of both positions and forcing debate: Many of Swifts contemporaries saw clearly, as William Wotton did, that Swifts satire returns against itself and demolishes the very position from which the attack was launched.. Swift had succeeded precisely in making visible and palpable what the age had only been able to contemplate negatively. (Montag, 92). The snowballing momentum of the explicitation process is, perhaps, exemplified best in Wottons responses to The Tale of a Tub and Swifts incorporation of them into the later version of his satire. Whether Wotton is right or wrong about Swifts text being anti-Christian, a space is opened by both authors in which the debate can continue, further exposing what is implicit in Anglican thought to explicitation. In the assumption of the various phi losophical and, particularly, epistemological positions I have begun to outline, Swifts texts are entirely in tune with an age of radical change and flux. The writing is engaged in an enterprize of explicitation that is highly volatile and potentially fatal to entenched positions including establishment Anglicanism. By opening these implicit positions to scrutiny the texts invite the kind of explicitation which allows the very establishment monotheism that many would argue Swift seeks to defend to crack and begin to disintegrate, thus hastening the progress of secularization that becomes an irresistible, if gradual, phenomenon in this period.Notes1 Warren Montag points out that a continuing tendency in Swift criticism is to identify Swift with a firm philosophical/political position and, particularly, to establish whether he was a Lockean liberal (Ehrenpreis, Irvin. Swift: The Man, his Works and the Age. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.142; Downie, J. A. Swifts Politics. Proceedings of the First Munster Symposium on Jonathan Swift. Ed. J. Hermann and Heinz. J. Vienken. Munich: Fink, 1985), or a Tory authoritarian who saw society as an organic hierarchy (Lock, F.P. Swifts Tory Politics. London: Duckworth,1983; Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke and his Circle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). (1).2 It is notoriously difficult to be certain of what Swift read. As William LeFanu notes:It is easier to define what books Swift owned than what he read. We know from the excellent indexes in Williamss edition of Swifts Correspondence and by Irvin Ehrenpreis for Herbert Daviss edition of the Prose Works that more than a hundred authors were named or quoted by Swift. Some of these, the combatants in The Battle of the Books for instance, were perhaps exemplary names rather than familiar reading, yet he certainly read many books which he never possessed. It has long been noticed that he had no edition of Shakespeare, yet could quote appositely from nine or ten of the plays. (3).Evidently, however, Swift had access to books other than his own. Sir William Temples collection at Moor Park would be one example.3 The texts of Swifts sermons, particularly On the Trinity, document a deep mistrust of human reason:If they can pick out any one single Article in the Christian Religion which appears not agreeable to their own corrupted Reason, or to the Arguments of those bad People, who follow the Trade of seducing others, they presently conclude, that the Truth of the whole Gospel must sink along with that one Article. (Davis, 9:159).The text emphasizes the dubious nature of human reason, warns of the dangers inherent in reasoning from the particular to the general and posits scripture as the only real truth. The text offers yet more positions on reason to be considered alongside the fable of the bee and the spider and the animal rationale/rationis capax (Norton, 585) opposition of Gullivers Travels.4 Montag insists on a unifie d philosophical position in Swift. This consists of the defence of an Anglican Aristotelian world in which nothing exists without a divinely ordained end. (87). Gassendi and Hobbes present problems for Swift because Aristotles cosmoswas ruled by first principles and ultimate ends and possessed a design that was prior to it, the Aristotelian system as a totality remained superiorto the Democritical systems associated with the ancient materialists and with Gassendi and Hobbes. (63). Descartes, however, is threatening to Swift-as-churchman because: From the theoretical position occupied by Swiftonly the pattern of human learning together with the understanding common to all men could support a search for truth, because this alone can correct the infirmities of any given individual. The cogito therefore was no foundation at all but the opening of an abyss. (59).5 Such a reading might derive its force from the Anglican rationalist tradition that saw reason as a separate source of kn owledge, superior to and independent of the senses. (Harth, 146).Works CitedCorfield, Penelope. J. Rev. of A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727, by Julian Hoppit. Times Literary Supplement 8 Dec. 2000: 11.Davis, Herbert. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. 14 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939-68.Greenberg, Robert. A., William. B. Piper, eds. The Writings of Jonathan Swift. New York: Norton, 1973.Hall, Basil. An Inverted Hypocrite: Swift the Churchman. The World of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1968.Harth, Phillip. Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of A Tale of a Tub. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.Knight, G. Wilson, Swift and the Symbolism of Irony. The Burning Oracle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939. 114-30.LeFanu, William. A Catalogue of Books Belonging to Dr. Jonathan Swift. Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1988.Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Kenneth. P. Winkler. Indi anapolis: Hackett, 1996.Montag, Warren. The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man. London: Verso, 1994.Williams, Kathleen. Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958.