A Brief History of Humans (Source)

What is science?

Our core goal is the accurate description of causal relationships (this is hard!)

• A change in X produces a change in Y
  • E.g., wearing a seatbelt reduces the probability of dying in a car crash
  • E.g., alcohol prohibition increased organized crime
• When X and Y merely move together without a causal link, this is a spurious correlation
  • E.g., ice cream sales and drowning deaths both rise in summer

The scientific process and good science

What is a theory? What makes a good theory?

• Theory: A body of statements that systematize knowledge of, and explain, phenomena
  • Not just what happened, a theory is a story that explains how and why things are related
  • Example: People get wet when it rains because water falls from the sky and hits them
• Theories generate hypotheses: testable, falsifiable predictions that follow from the theory
  • “If my theory is correct, then I should expect to see A, B, and C in the world”
    • If it rains, people without umbrellas get wet
    • If people use umbrellas, they stay drier
    • If there is no rain, people don’t get wet
  • If we observe A, B, and C, the theory is supported, if we don’t, the theory needs revision
• Theories are never fully proven, only supported or undermined by accumulating evidence
• In social science, theories are usually probabilistic
  • X increases the likelihood of Y, not that X always produces Y
• We make the most progress when competing theories make different predictions

Why does organized crime emerge?

• OC is not randomly distributed across space or time
• Three observable clustering patterns:

Supply and demand in criminal markets

• Before we can explain who supplies illegal goods, we need to explain why people want them
• Organized crime relies on illegal markets for its revenue
• Illegal markets exist because of the state:

1. Prohibition: the state bans goods or services that people still want
   • Alcohol (1920–33), drugs, gambling, sex work
2. Regulatory arbitrage: legal markets are taxed or regulated; illegal ones are not
   • Untaxed cigarettes, counterfeit goods, informal labor
3. State monopoly evasion: states restrict goods people want more of
   • Weapons trafficking, currency controls

Prohibition as the paradigmatic case

Why does organized crime attract particular people?

• Even if we explain why illegal markets exist, we need to explain who enters them
• Three broad families of theories from criminology and social science:

Individual explanations: rational choice theory

• Developed from the classical school of criminology
• Core claim: people who commit crimes do so after weighing the costs and benefits
• Gary Becker (1968) formalized this:

Individual explanations: rational choice theory example

Imagine you are choosing between two options:

1. Legal option: work retail for $20,000/year
2. Crime option: sell drugs for $40,000/year
   • 20% chance of arrest and costs of getting caught (no income, fees, prison): $50,000

Individual explanations: psychological traits

• Criminals are not rational calculators but have distinct personality traits
• The antisocial/sociopathic personality profile associated with chronic offending:
  • Superficial charm, grandiose self-worth
  • Need for stimulation or proneness to boredom
  • Pathological lying, manipulativeness
  • Lack of remorse or empathy
  • Shallow affect
  • Impulsivity, poor behavioral controls
  • Failure to accept responsibility

Think-pair-share: rational choice vs. psychological traits

• Both are individual-level explanations but they have very different implications
• For discussion:
  • Rational choice: anyone would commit crime if the math works
  • Psychological: only particular types of people commit crime
    • If criminal personalities are fixed, what does punishment deter?
    • Do criminal organizations recruit these traits, or produce them?
  • Can both be true at the same time? If so, how?
  • If criminal behavior is partly explained by personality, what does that mean for policy?

Social/network explanations: learning theories

• Criminal behavior is learned, not innate
• Learning happens through intimate personal contact: family, peers, neighborhood
• What gets learned:
  • Techniques for committing crimes
  • Attitudes and rationalizations that favor crime over law
• Criminals emerge when surrounded by more pro-crime than anti-crime definitions

Structural explanations: social disorganization

• Relative deprivation: inequality creates general feelings of anger, hostility, and injustice
• Blocked opportunity and anomie/strain theory: the gap between goals and means
  • Society holds up success (wealth, status, social mobility) as a universal goal
  • But legitimate means to success are not equally available to all
  • If legitimate opportunities are blocked \(\rightarrow\) some adopt illegitimate means to obtain success
• Cultural deviance: crime arises from conflict between marginal and dominant groups
  • What is “criminal” reflects whose norms get written into law

Which theory best explains criminal behavior?

Albanese’s opportunity model of organized crime

• Albanese (2000) focuses not on people but criminal groups
• Bridges elements across existing theories
• Proposes a model with three interacting components:

Opportunity factors in depth

Albanese identifies five types of opportunity factors:

The criminal environment, special skills and access

Even with strong opportunity factors, OC may require pre-existing social infrastructure

6. Are individual offenders already active in this market?
   • Former criminals who know the space
   • People with relevant contacts or knowledge
7. Are criminal groups already present?
   • Established networks that can expand into the new opportunity
   • Or that recruit new members to exploit it
8. Special skills or access needed: some criminal activities require specialized inputs
   • Technical skills (e.g., synthesizing fentanyl, cyberfraud)
   • Language and cultural access (e.g., exploiting community trust networks)
   • Geographic access (e.g., smuggling routes across the U.S.–Mexico border)
   • Connections to other criminal groups or corrupt officials

Evaluating Albanese’s model

Think-pair-share: evaluating Albanese’s model

• Is Albanese’s model an improvement over single-factor explanations? In what ways?
• What are its limitations?
  • Generalizability: it was developed primarily from North American/Western European cases
  • The model is correlational: does it tell us about causation?
  • Some factors are very hard to measure (enforcement effectiveness)

Theories in action: recent empirical tests

Synthesizing the theories and thinking of policy

• No single theory explains where OC comes from
• The evidence suggests an interactive model:
• Individual choice: explains whether specific people enter criminal markets given their options
  • Increasing the costs of crime (deterrence)
  • Reducing enforcement gaps
  • Reducing profitable criminal markets (expected gains)
• Social networks: determine who has access to criminal opportunities and needed skills
  • Disrupting recruitment and transmission: community intervention, gang exit programs
  • Reducing neighborhood OC presence breaks the learning pipeline
• Structural conditions: shape which illegal markets exist and who is relatively disadvantaged
  • Addressing inequality and blocked mobility matters
  • Treating OC as a pure law enforcement problem misses the root causes

For Monday: how criminal groups organize internally

• We now know why OC emerges
• Next question: once a criminal group exists, how does it organize itself?
• Questions?