A Law and Economics Approach to Criminal Gangs

Liza Vertinsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138608870
• eBook ISBN: 9780429876486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Law

First published in 1999. This book provides a law and economics approach towards criminal gangs which integrates the tools of economic modelling with criminal law in order to understand and address a contemporary law enforcement problem. The book draws upon ideas from economics, law and law enforcement to investigate the nature and organizational structure of criminal gangs. Law and economics are employed in varying combinations and at varying levels of specificity to generate insights into the organization and behaviour of criminal gangs. These insights are applied to evaluate alternative legal approaches and to inform the design of a new criminal law approach towards criminal gangs. Attention is focused on the organization of criminal street gangs, both because the growth and increasing sophistication of these gangs offer special challenges for law enforcement and because of the potential contributions which such an understanding could yield for economists who have traditionally focused on the organizational structure of legitimate enterprises.

1 A Law and Economics Approach to Group-based Criminal Laws and Criminal Street Gangs

Introduction

Criminal gangs are forming a new and increasingly powerful level of organized crime in America, and law enforcement efforts have been ineffective at controlling their growth, proliferation and development.¹ Many of these organized criminal gangs start out as loosely structured, ethnically homogenous social groups whose primarily teen-age and young adult members face few if any alternative income earning prospects and little economic or geographic mobility.² The gang structure provides the vehicle for successful entry into illegal income generating activities and allows for more sophisticated responses to illegal market opportunities and law enforcement strategies. The legal system has not been designed to address the special problems created by these new criminal groups,³ and recognition of this inadequacy has prompted both federal and state governments to increase the scope and the use of older group-based criminal statutes and to enact new statutes targeted explicitly at criminal organizations.⁴ Major changes at the federal and state level include the use of racketeering and criminal enterprise statutes that allow for an expanded range of evidentiary and sentencing options, joint trials, affiliative and compound liability. Some states have tried to address the problem of gang-related crimes even more directly through the enactment of anti-gang statutes and carefully tailored loitering and nuisance laws.⁵

While policy makers have made a concerted effort to address criminal groups, little attention has been paid to the organization of these groups in rule design. This chapter employs an economic model of a criminal street gang to illustrate the potential dangers of adopting group-based liability without consideration of the organization and incentive structure of the criminal group. It is based on the premise that when dealing with criminal groups, efficient legal rules and strategies must incorporate information about the economic structures of the target criminal organizations. The first part of the chapter provides an overview of the current statutory framework governing group-based crimes, including recent developments in statutory approaches towards criminal street gangs. The second part develops a simple economic model of a criminal street gang that is used to demonstrate some of the ways in which policy variables might impact upon the activities of a criminal group. The model shows that under certain circumstances group-based sanctions may actually increase rather than decrease a gang’s criminal capabilities. Selected applications of this model to specific criminal law provisions and law enforcement problems are considered in the third part. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the need for a closer integration of legal and economic analysis in the design of effective group-based criminal laws.

I. The American Criminal Law Approach to Group-based Crimes

American criminal law has developed around the paradigm of an individual wrongdoer who is held responsible for a single event attributable to his own intentional or reckless conduct, the severity of the punishment tailored to the reprehensibility and harmfulness of the act. In this “transaction-based” model of criminality, prosecution ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 A Law and Economics Approach to Group-based Criminal Laws and Criminal Street Gangs
• 2 Modeling Criminal Street Gangs as Organizations
• 3 The Economic Organization of Drug Selling Gangs