Organized crime, situational crime prevention and routine activity theory

Mainstream criminology traditionally focuses on offenders instead of criminal events and criminal activities. Furthermore, crime is explained by motivations and special characteristics of offenders. The prevailing line of reasoning is roughly that there is something wrong about offenders who continue along the path of crime, either in a biological sense (for example, a lack of self-control) or in a social sense (for example, a lack of conventional ties or stakes in conformity). However, organized crime research shows, first, that some offenders are quite normal in many respects, though they are involved in serious forms of crime; and, second, that not all crimes are the same or just symptoms of latent characteristics such as low self-control (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990).