“Less here than meets the eye,” a Venusian documentary maker calling home might say. Books, films, and mass media portray organized crime as larger than life, a fearsome monster among us, an awesome moneymaking machine. Reality is different. Organized crime organizations are life-size, understandable outgrowths of local cultures, political systems, and markets. In some times and places, they control markets and peoples’ lives, just as state institutions do in other times and places, but that too is understandable and can be explained. Organized crime organizations are not enormously profitable. Frightening,malevolent, and lethal, sometimes yes. Practically useful to ordinary law-abiding people, sometimes also yes. Economically important in any larger scheme of things, almost never. Novelists, filmmakers, journalists, law enforcement officials, and policy makers have long paid attention to organized crime; scholars not so much. Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather and Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up films on the AmericanCosaNostra exemplify long lines of popular novels and films in many languages and countries. Organized crime is a regular topic on the front pages of newspapers and a recurring subject of in-depth investigative reporting, exemplified by Roberto Saviano’sGomorrah on the Campanian Camorra and its eponymous film version. Organized crime is blamed for many modern ills, ranging from contraband cigarettes in Britain, high condominium prices in Miami, and the impossibility of conducting business honestly in Albania, to human smuggling, drug epidemics, and destabilization of communities and countries. Organized crime has not, however, been a longtime, mainstream subject of research by social scientists. Part of the explanation is intellectual fashion. Criminologists traditionally focused on understanding crimes by

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有组织犯罪：比目睹少

一位叫回家的维纳斯纪录片制作人可能会说：“在这里比在眼前少。” 书籍，电影和大众媒体将有组织的犯罪描绘为超越生活的犯罪，这是我们中间一个令人恐惧的怪物，是一个了不起的赚钱机器。现实是不同的。有组织犯罪组织是与当地文化，政治制度和市场相当的，可理解的产物。正如国家机构在其他时间和地点所做的那样，在某些时间和地点，他们控制市场和人民的生活，但这也是可以理解的并且可以解释。有组织犯罪组织获利不高。令人恐惧，恶意和致命，有时是。对于遵守普通法律的人实际上有用，有时也可以。在任何更大的方案中，从经济上讲都是很重要的，几乎从来没有。小说家，电影制片人，新闻工作者，执法人员，决策者长期以来一直关注有组织犯罪；学者没有那么多。马里奥·普佐（Mario Puzo）的小说《教父》和弗朗西斯·福特·科波拉（Francis Ford Coppola）在AmericanCosaNostra上的后续电影充分体现了许多语言和国家的长篇小说和电影。有组织犯罪是报纸头版的常规话题，也是反复进行的深入调查报道的主题，例如坎帕尼亚卡莫拉（Campanian Camorra）及其同名电影版本的罗伯托·萨维亚诺（Roberto Saviano）的《戈莫拉（Gomorrah）》就是一个例子。许多现代疾病都归咎于有组织的犯罪，从英国的违禁香烟，迈阿密的公寓价格高昂，不可能在阿尔巴尼亚诚实开展业务到人口走私，毒品流行以及社区和国家的不稳定。但是，有组织犯罪已经很久了，社会科学家的主流研究课题。部分原因是知识型时尚。犯罪学家传统上专注于通过