Organized Crime Families

Abstract

From Margaret Thatcher to Norman Dennis and most popular staging posts in between and beyond, the family constitutes a powerful rhetorical tool in discourses regarding social order. Further, the family unit is often located as flawed in the post-mortems of notorious violent criminals careers, and while white collar felons seldom find the relationship between themselves and mater and pater examined with the same fervour as that afforded to their proletarian cell mates (“They only sent me to Eton, then it was downhill all the way: Oxford, Household Cavalry and finally guv, House of Lords and a seat on the board of a multinational corporation. I never stood a chance”), an examination of how the family unit can actually enable and enhance serious criminal activity is a way of bursting one of the many polite bourgeois assumptions that floats aimlessly above the collective milieu of criminological endeavour.