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"Organizing Crime: Mafias, Markets, and Networks provides the most exhaustive overview ever published of knowledge about organized crime. It provides intensive accounts of American, Italian, and Dutch developments, covers both national mafias and transnational criminality, and delves in depth into gender, human capital, and money laundering issues. The writers are based in seven countries. To a person they are, or are among, the world's most distinguished specialists in their subjects. At last, credible explanations and testable hypotheses are available concerning when, why, and under what circumstances mafias and other organized crime organizations come into being, what makes them distinctive, what they do and with what effects, and how to contain them"--

"Tobacco use has declined because of measures such as high taxes on tobacco products and bans on advertising, but worldwide there are still more than one billion people who regularly use tobacco, including many who purchase products illicitly. By contrast to many other commodities, taxes comprise a substantial portion of the retail price of cigarettes in the United States and most other nations. Large tax differentials between jurisdictions increase incentives for participation in existing illicit tobacco markets. In the United States, the illicit tobacco market consists mostly of bootlegging from low-tax states to high-tax states and is less affected by large-scale smuggling or illegal production as in other countries. In the future, nonprice regulation of cigarettes - such as product design, formulation, and packaging - could in principle, contribute to the development of new types of illicit tobacco markets. Understanding the U.S.Illicit Tobacco Market reviews the nature of illicit tobacco markets, evidence for policy effects, and variations among different countries with a focus on implications for the United States. This report estimates the portion of the total U.S. tobacco market represented by illicit sales has grown in recent years and is now between 8.5 percent and 21 percent. This represents between 1.24 to 2.91 billion packs of cigarettes annually and between 2.95 billion and 6.92 billion in lost gross state and local tax revenues. Understanding the U.S. Illicit Tobacco Market describes the complex system associated with illicit tobacco use by exploring some of the key features of that market - the cigarette supply chain, illicit procurement schemes, the major actors in the illicit trade, and the characteristics of users of illicit tobacco.This report draws on domestic and international experiences with the illicit tobacco trade to identify a range of possible policy and enforcement interventions by the U.S. federal government and/or states and localities."--Publisher's description

The first effort to provide a nonpartisan and objective analysis of how the US should approach the drug legalization question. The book shows that legalization involves different tradeoffs between health and crime and the interests of the inner city minority communities and the middle class

This paper reviews empirical evidence on drug prices and discusses implications for understanding of drug markets and for policy. The most striking characteristics of drug prices are their high levels and extreme variability over time and space. High prices deter consumption but have ambiguous effects on drug-related crime. The consequences of the variability are largely unexplored and are difficult to determine. Conclusions are mixed with respect to the ability of policy to influence prices. Prohibition plus some degree of enforcement can drive prices far above what they would be if drugs were legal. In certain circumstances, additional severity of enforcement can create transient spikes in price or alter the source of drugs by driving up prices from one source relative to another. However, increasing enforcement over and above an already strongly enforced prohibition appears to have only limited ability to drive prices up further.

During 2000-1 in Afghanistan, the Taliban achieved a longtime goal of national and international drug policy agencies - a large, sudden, and unanticipated reduction in world opium production. This cutback provided an unprecedented opportunity to study the world opiate market and determine what actions might reduce the flows of drugs.

FrontMatter -- Preface -- Contents -- Acronyms -- Summary -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Exploring the Budgeting Problem -- 3 Recent Patterns of Unauthorized Immigration -- 4 The Immigration Enforcement System -- 5 Budgeting for DOJ Immigration Enforcement -- 6 Budgeting Challenges -- 7 Conclusions and Recommendations -- Appendix A: Immigration Policy Timeline -- Appendix B: Efforts to Model Workload and Resource Requirements -- Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff -- References.