Criminal constitutions

Global Crime

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 279-297

  Leeson, Peter T ^a   Skarbek, David B ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

^b GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Constitutions; Criminal organisations; Organised crime

Indexed keywords

EID: 77955140582     PISSN: 17440572     EISSN: 17440580     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2010.490632     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Islands in the Streets: Gangs and American Urban Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 78-82.
2. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
3. Alfred Lubrano, 'Unconventional Wisdom: Get Real Rules for American Mobsters', The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 2007, E1.
4. Marek Kaminski. Games Prisoners Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004).
5. Peter T. Leeson, 'An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization', Journal of Political Economy 115, no. 6 (2007): 1049-94.
6. Peter T. Leeson, 'The Calculus of Piratical Consent: The Myth of the Myth of Social Contract', Public Choice 139, no. 3-4 (2009): 443-59.
7. Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
8. George W. Knox, An Introduction to Gangs (Peotone, IL: New Chicago School Press, 2006), 22-5.
9. As Leeson and Rogers point out, some criminal organizations come closer to approximating this latter situation than others. However, even the most 'boss-driven' criminal organization, the Sicilian Mafia, is regulated by a constitution at some level. Peter T. Leeson and Douglas B. Rogers, 'Organizing Crime', Mimeo, 2009.
10. The parallels between criminal organizations and nation states extend beyond written constitutions. The literature on organized crime argues that they provide services traditionally performed by governments - enforcement of contracts and protection of property rights - when legitimate governments cannot or will not do so (see, for instance, Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia.
11. Gianluca Fiorentini and Sam Peltzman, eds., The Economics of Organised Crime (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
12. Skaperdas Stergios, 'The Political Economy of Organized Crime: Providing Protection when the State does Not', Economics of Governance 2, no. 3 (2001): 173-202.
13. Russell Sobel and Brian Osoba, 'Youth Gangs as Pseudo-Governments: Implications for Violent Crime', Southern Economics Journal 75, no. 4 (2009): 996-1018.
14. There is an extensive literature that examines self-governance theoretically and empirically (see, for instance, Bruce Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State (San Francisco, CA: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990).
15. Robert C. Ellickson, Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
16. Peter T. Leeson, 'Trading with Bandits', Journal of Law and Economics 50, no. 2 (2007): 303-21.
17. Peter T. Leeson, 'Efficient Anarchy', Public Choice 130, no. 1-2 (2007): 41-53.
18. Peter T. Leeson, 'Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse', Journal of Comparative Economics 35 no. 4 (2007): 689-710.
19. Peter T. Leeson, 'Social Distance and Self-Enforcing Exchange', Journal of Legal Studies 37, no. 1 (2008): 161-88.
20. Peter T. Leeson, 'The Laws of Lawlessness', Journal of Legal Studies 38, no. 2 (2009): 471-503.
21. Emily C. Schaeffer, 'Remittances and Reputations of Hawala Money Transfer Systems: Self-Enforcing Exchange on an International Scale', Journal of Private Enterprise 24, no. 1 (2008): 95-117).
22. The difficulties of criminal enterprise extend beyond cooperation within the organization and to strategic cooperative and non-cooperative games with victims, other criminals, and the police. See, for example, important work by Kai A. Konrad and Stergios Skaperdas, 'Credible Threats in Extortion', Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 33, no. 1 (1997): 23-39.
23. Kai Konrad and Stergios Skaperdas, 'Extortion', Economica 65, no. 260 (1998): 461-77.
24. Diego Gambetta, 'Inscrutable Markets', Rationality and Society 6, no. 3 (1994): 353-68.
25. Alastair Smith and Federico Varese, 'Payment, Protection, and Punishment: The Role of Information and Reputation in the Mafia', Rationality & Society 13, no. 3 (2001): 349-93.
26. The organizational issues confronting criminals are part of a larger literature on the economics of crime that examines the determinants of crime (Steven D. Levitt, 'Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six That Do Not', Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 1 (2004): 163-90.
27. Edward L. Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote, and Jose A. Scheinkman, 'Crime and Social Interactions', Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, no. 2 (1996): 507-48.
28. its social costs David A. Anderson, 'The Aggregate Burden of Crime', Journal of Law and Economics 42, no. 2 (1999): 611-42.
29. optimal deterrence theories, (Steven D. Levitt, 'Juve- nile Crime and Punishment', Journal of Political Economy 106, no. 6 (1998): 1156-85. policy implications.
30. John J. Dilulio Jr., 'Help Wanted: Economists, Crime and Public Policy', Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1996): 3-24.
31. Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zweibel, 'The Economic Case Against Drug Prohibition', Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, no. 4 (1995): 175-92.
32. This literature was pioneered by Gary Becker, 'Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach', Journal of Political Economy 76, no. 2 (1968): 169-217.
33. See also, Annelise Anderson, The Business of Organized Crime: A Cosa Nostra Family (Palo Alto, CA: The Hoover Institution, 1979).
34. Peter Reuter, Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.).
35. William Jennings, 'A Note on the Economics of Organized Crime', Eastern Economic Journal 10, no. 3 (1984): 315-21.
36. Pino Arlacchi, Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
37. Andrew R. Dick, 'When Does Organized Crime Pay? A Transaction Cost Analysis', International Review of Law and Economics 15, no. 1 (1995): 25-45.
38. Konrad and Skaperdas, 'Extortion'; Nuno Garoupa, 'The Economics of Organized Crime and Optimal Law Enforcement', Economic Inquiry 38, no. 2 (2000): 278-88.
39. Juin-Jen Chang, Huei-Chung Lu, and Mingshen Chen, 'Organized Crime or Individual Crime: Endogenous Size of a Criminal Organization and the Optimal Law Enforcement', Economic Inquiry 43, 3 (2005): 661-75.
40. Leeson and Rogers, 'Organizing Crime'.
41. On the role of common knowledge in facilitating criminal behaviour by eighteenth-century merchant sailors, see Peter T. Leeson, 'Rational Choice, Round Robin, and Rebellion: An Institutional Solution to the Problems of Revolution', Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 73, no. 3 (2010): 297-307.
42. Successful criminal cooperation within the organization is necessary but not sufficient for the organization to succeed. Characteristics of life outside of the criminal organization, such as the local economy, also affect their ability to thrive. For example, examining the 'Ndrangheta in Northern Italy, Federico Varese, '(How Mafias Migrate: The Case of the 'Ndrangheta in Northern Italy', Law & Society Review 40 no. 2 (2006): 411-44.) argues that construction companies' reliance on illegal workers provided an important opportunity for the 'Ndrangheta to establish itself. These two spheres - one within the organization and the other, the environment the organization acts in - can affect each other too.
43. For example, the reciprocal influence between the Yakuza and Japanese films on organized crime led to the latter's decline and reduced the former's reputational capital ('The Secret History of Japanese Cinema: The Yakuza Movies', Global Crime 7, no. 1 (2006): 105-24.
44. For an excellent discussion of the rules governing inter-criminal communication, see Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
45. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 256.
46. Angus Konstam, The History of Pirates (Guilford: The Lyons Press, 2002), 9.
47. Jennifer G. Marx, 'The Golden Age of Piracy', in Pirates: Terror on the High Seas-From the Caribbean to the South China Sea, David Cordingly, ed. (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1996), 103.
48. Kinkor, Kenneth, 'Black Men under the Black Flag,' in Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader, C.R. Pennell, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 200.
49. Italics here and in quotations from Roberts' crew's constitution below are in original. Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, From Their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the Present Time, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (New York: Dover [1726-28], 1999).
50. Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, 342.
51. Clement Downing, A Compendious History of the Indian Wars (London: T. Cooper, 1737), 107.
52. Ibid., 211-2.
53. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts Subject file: La Nuestra Familia, 2008, http://foia.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/lanuestrafamily/lanuestrafamily_part01.pdf.
54. California Department of Justice, Organized Crime in California: Annual Report to the California Legislature 2003, 2003 (accessed June 2, 2010).
55. The NF constitution has changed over the years. We focus on the constitution as it was originally written. It is taken from a recent history of the Nuestra Familia (Nina Fuentes, The Rise and Fall of the Nuestra Familia (Jefferson, WI: Know Gangs Publishing, 2006) and reproduced in the Appendix.
56. George Lewis, 'Social Groupings in Organized Crime: The Case of La Nuestra Familia', Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 2 (1980): 129-43; 133
57. Fuentes, The Rise and Fall of the Nuestra Familia, 297.
58. Fuentes, The Rise and Fall of the Nuestra Familia, 10.
59. Ibid., 5.
60. Ibid., 6.
61. Ibid., 28.
62. Fuentes, The Rise and Fall of the Nuestra Familia, 4.
63. Julia Reynolds, 'Gang Leader Took Unusual Route to the Top', Monterey County Herald, February 10, 2008.
64. Fuentes, The Rise and Fall of the Nuestra Familia, 8.
65. Gang members who are not directly harmed by a rule violator's behaviour are willing to aid gang members who are directly harmed because at some point the former expect to seek the punishment assistance of the latter when a rule violator does directly harm them. Gang members who refuse to help their colleagues now will be refused help by their colleagues in the future. Gang members are therefore led through repeated interaction to find it in their interest to assist others in enforcing constitutional rules even when they do not immediately or directly benefit by doing so.
66. George W. Knox, An Introduction to Gangs (Peotone, IL: New Chicago School Press, 2006), 22-5.
67. Jankowski, Islands in the Streets, 82.
68. Though monitoring production activities was probably more difficult in pirate organizations than in the NF despite pirate organizations' smaller size and more physically concentrated membership. As Leeson and Rogers (2009) point out, piracy's production activities were necessarily jointly produced and therefore harder to monitor. In contrast, many of the production activities of the NF are individually produced and thus easier to monitor.
69. Fuentes, The Rise and Fall of the Nuestra Familia.