Counterproductive Punishment: How Prison Gangs Undermine State Authority

Lessing, Benjamin

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2644812

Cited by 14 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…Under this framework, authors study how policies can eliminate collusion by shortening criminals’ horizon on illegal activities. Our results on cooperative behavior, on the other hand, hold on a two-stage model and are sustained by the prison gangs’ influence studied by Skarbek (2011) and Lessing (2010) and extensively documented by Lessing (2014, 2017b, 2017c) and Lessing and Willis (2019). Our simpler model allows us to study the cooperative behavior using the mechanism design approach .…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Property rights’ emergence in illicit drug markets

Bertolai

Scorzafave

2020

Rationality and Society

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Governance rules are efficient mechanisms in the sense that they increase people’s welfare. They emerge even when the state is unable or refuses to create and enforce them. We study a situation in which this demand for governance manifests itself through the emergence of property rights in illicit drug markets: a privately-provided governance. Specifically, we propose a model for property rights emergence in illicit drug markets as predicted by the theory on governance provided by prison gangs. It is studied a situation in which an agreement among criminals, resembling property rights enforceability on its allocative effect, can emerge in illicit drug markets. Our Mechanism Design approach shows that a change inside the prison system, from a competitive environment to the hegemony of a group of criminals, implies the equilibrium in illicit markets to shift from warfare to peace: the hegemonic group is shown to desire to promote the collusive agreement when it is able to do so. This contrasts with the equilibrium under no hegemony, in which the possibility to conquer consumers/territories drives violence up to a positive level. The novel empirical perspective implied by the model is explored using data from Brazil, a context for which the theory of governance provided by prison gangs has been pointed as a key explanation.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Property rights’ emergence in illicit drug markets

Bertolai

Scorzafave

2020

Rationality and Society

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“…Some inmates build criminal networks and social capital that increases post-release criminality (Bayer et al 2009). Gangs that rise to power behind bars wield tremendous influence on the outside (Denyer Willis 2015;Lessing 2015;Skarbek 2011). Incarceration weakens the foundations of democracy by undermining trust in the government and reducing civic engagement (Lerman and Weaver 2014;Weaver and Lerman 2010).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Covenants without the Sword? Comparing Prison Self-Governance Globally

Skarbek

2016

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Why does prison social order vary around the world? While many of the basic characteristics of prisons are similar globally, the extent and form of informal inmate organization varies substantially. This paper develops a governance theory of prison social order. Inmates create extralegal governance institutions when official governance is insufficient. The size and demographics of the prison population explain why inmates produce extralegal governance institutions in either decentralized ways, such as ostracism, or through more centralized forms, such as gangs. Comparative analysis of Brazil,

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“…First, it is inadvertently aided by the state, which—through its mass incarceration policies—directs significant resources to arresting dealers and bringing them to places where the PCC can easily punish them: the prison system. Crackdowns that drive up incarceration rates (and at 530 per 100,000 residents in 2016, São Paulo state’s is very high) raise dealers’ expected probability of being sent to a PCC-controlled prison and hence increase the downside risk of running afoul of its disciplinarians (Lessing 2017). 19…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is an enduring irony that trustworthy, efficient, “Weberian” governance should arise among the targets of a state coercive apparatus guided by a brutal and corrupt “unrule of law” (Mendez, O’Donnell, and Pinheiro 1999), in a country long hamstrung by bureaucratic inefficiency and patrimonialism (Evans 1995). More ironic still, PCC governance depends on the state’s own mass-incarceration policies, which swell the PCC’s ranks and—by raising the chances of eventual incarceration—give it leverage over criminals on the street (Lessing 2017). In São Paulo, these policies inadvertently, perversely helped create a criminal “pocket of efficiency” (Geddes 1990) capable of governing a sprawling prison system, a decentralized criminal network, and a vast, impoverished urban periphery.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars

2019

Self Cite

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States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.

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Counterproductive Punishment: How Prison Gangs Undermine State Authority

Cited by 14 publications

References 63 publications

Property rights’ emergence in illicit drug markets

Property rights’ emergence in illicit drug markets

Covenants without the Sword? Comparing Prison Self-Governance Globally

Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars

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