Tackling the Developing World of OCG’s through a multiagency strategy

Project Description

Increasingly organised gangs and criminal networks are treating prisons as a place for potential lucrative activities, like to recruit new members, to create joint venture with other organisations and to expand their activities towards new markets. According to that, prisons have emerged as a new frontline in fighting organised crime. Therefore, when two-thirds of all convicted criminals with a known link to organised crime go on to reoffend, it becomes critical to track and manage organised criminal gangs (OCG) within and beyond prison. Recent successes in fighting criminal networks shed light to the relevance of a new coordination between police and prison intelligence on OCG to consolidate disruption and dispersion interventions that lead to an organised criminal or group being unable or less able to operate.
At present, intelligence data resource coming from the different law enforcement agencies is not systematically shared or jointly collected, and there is little cooperation among these agencies but its potential value in developing consistent disruption strategies is large. The proposed project, through the analysis of secondary and primary data, seeks to lay the ground for a new and innovative multi-agency strategy to cope with criminal network. This will create new protocols and practices for data sharing between the different law enforcement agencies and academic partners. As well as serving the purposes of the project, this approach will also open a new pathway for the introduction of innovative way to investigate OCGs or other criminal networks such as Social Network Anlysis (SNA) both in its qualitative and quantitative development. Overall, the project outcomes will help to protect people at risk of becoming victims, to preserve community safety reducing OCG’s related serious violence, to prevent vulnerable segments of the population to get involved in and exploited by criminal networks, and to prevent the association and expansion of OCG capabilities.
The project brings together criminologists with expertise in policing, prison and organised crime with CJS practitioners and officers with expertise in investigating OCG to push the boundaries of crime prevention and criminal network disruption. We will work with members of HMP – HP (insert) to a project structured on three main domains:
• Understand of the profile of the relationship between recognised OCG’s and the recruitment and development of new members within the custodial setting and the level of grooming / radicalisation that takes place;
• Understand the harm caused by Serious Organised Crime Teams in prison in the wider community following release and re-locating their prison-based activity into the local community of Hull;
• Test out the prison service’s ‘disrupt and disperse’ protocol in terms of impact and outcomes with the aim of identifying how we develop our interventions beyond this model considering the CT model of behaviour change or a wider social model involving children and families.
The objectives of Workstreams 1, 2 and 3 will be delivered by prison/police (PP) and university (U) partners in collaboration. The project manager, which will be identified from within prison/police staffing structure, will coordinate the project alongside the Principal Investigator (PI).
The project will last one year, and its activities are:
Workstream 1 (months 1-3): Protocol Evaluation – 1.1.Analysis of policies and protocols deployed in coping with OGC in prison and probation and compare them with other strategies of radicalisation prevention (PP; U) – documentary data analysis; 1.2.Identify informal practices in managing OGC prisoners (U) with input from PP colleagues – in depth interviews; 1.3.Codification and anlysis of the data (U). Workstream 2 (months 3-9): Database Analysis and SNA – 2.1.Organisation of the HMPPS and HP intelligence database (PP, U); 2.2.Selection of relevant data (PP, U); 2.3.Map the OCG prison population (PP, U); 2.4.Train research assistant to qualitative (social) network analysis (QNA) (U); 2.5.QNA focused on personal, social and criminal networks (U); 2.6.Co-produce best practice model in using SNA for intelligence purpose (PP, U). Workstream 3 (Months 9-12): Strategies redefinition and interagency work consolidation: 3.1.Define possible new approaches to disruption and dispersal strategies (PP, U); 3.2.Prepare best practice guidance for police-prison data sharing collaboration (PP, U); 3.3.Definition of data sharing protection guideline (PP, U); 3.4.Set up protocol and policy recommendations for OCG prisoners (PP, U).