ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that strategic planning for controlling organized crime in its most advanced form must consider the use of innovative methods, beyond prosecutive activity, to stimulate responses from public and private non-criminal-justice institutions to make the societal environment less hospitable to organized crime. In order to analyze the effectiveness of strategic planning by law enforcement against organized crime, it is necessary to understand how organized crime groups change in form and function over time. It is helpful to conceptualize crime groups in biological terms progressing through three stages — the predatory, the parasitic, and the symbiotic -- in an evolving relationship with the social organism. All organized criminals, at all stages of their careers, probably are capable of acts of violence in extreme circumstances. The idea of "strategic" decision making in organized crime presupposes that law enforcement is prepared to play more than a purely reactive role.
