Sticking to the script? Innovations in organised crime reduction

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

Twenty years on from Levi and Maguire’s seminal article transposing script analysis into debates over the prevention of organised crime, this panel considers the continued relevance of this approach. How has script analysis, concerned with the multiplicity of actors and activities implicated in the organisation of serious crimes, fared in shaping both research and policy agendas on the reduction of organised crime? Relative to the predominant preoccupation with core nominals in ‘Organised Crime Groups’ (OCGs), what impact can script analysis have on understanding the multi-faceted organisation of serious crimes? How has the shift in analytical focus from actors to scripts reframed the explanation of serious crime? In turn, how does this shift open-up further fruitful avenues for policy and research on serious crime ‘scenes’ (the conditions enabling or frustrating scripts) and ‘scenarios’ (the prospects for forecasting improvisations on scripts in conditions of accelerated social change)?
These issues are considered within the frames of presentations on the UK's Joint Intelligence Programme - an in-prison scheme for organised crime offenders; Countering electronic surveillance; maritime piracy; and 'organised white-collar crimes'.

Subtopic

• Topic 2: Types of Offending / Transnational Crime (Organized Crime WG)

Chair

• Mike Levi, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Individual Presentations

• From offender management to serious crime reduction: lessons from the Joint Intelligence Programme - Adam Michael Edwards, Cardiff University; Mike Levi, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University; Bronwen Frow-Jones, Cardiff University

• Countering surveillance: Using actor-network theory to understand how organised criminals subject to electronic monitoring avoid detection to commit new offences - Carl Berry, UWE; Mark Berry, Bournemouth University

• Crime scripts as basis for harm assessment: The case of piracy - Letizia Paoli, KU Leuven Faculty of Law and Criminology; Bryan C Peters, KU Leuven, Faculty of Law and Criminology

• Not Keeping to the Script: the case of organised white-collar crimes - Nicholas Lord, The University of Manchester, UK; Mike Levi, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University