Cultures of Illegality in the National Hockey League

Abstract

1. IntroductionThe economic model of crime demonstrates how an individual might decide to engage in illegal activity. It demonstrates that such activity may be motivated by incentives associated with a person's human capital skills, the availability of legitimate activity, preferences for risk, the potential sanction, and the probability of detection. But individualized as it may be, illegal activity still takes place in a social context. Fundamentally, a person who commits a crime has violated laws or other institutions formed by the larger social group. By the same token, society's collective experiences, fears, expectations, and reactions in relation to crime may well influence the individual decision to commit crime. Given crime's social content, can we disentangle the influence of social environment, or culture, from the individual factors that determine crime?1 This article addresses this question.In the economic model of crime, hypothetical agents consider the various benefits and costs of legal and illegal activity and then decide how much time to devote to either activity. A more criminalized culture of illegality might enhance the potential benefit of crime through tacit or overt encouragement of crime and might reduce the potential cost of crime by relieving some of the stigma (social cost) associated with it.2 If individuals experience a more pronounced culture of illegality, they might engage in more illegal activity on that basis; in principle, if we could remove them from that culture, they would less likely engage in illegal activity. But many factors complicate this possibility.Over time and over space, societal crime rates appear to vary in the opposite direction as overall wealth, whether measured in terms of legal wage opportunities or income level.3 Therefore, any hypothetical change in a person's culture of illegality would almost certainly imply a change in his wealth or his opportunity to engage in legal time allocation. Furthermore, an individual who experiences a cultural change carries along a set of personal characteristics (e.g., tastes for illegality or for risk) that likely do not vary across cultures. Testing empirically for the influence of culture on individual-level crime thus requires a sample of individuals who engage in both legal and illegal activity, data on their personal incentives to engage in legal and illegal behavior (including their wealth), data on their cultures of illegality, and some exogenous cultural change that affects some subset of them. The data used in this study, relating to players in the National Hockey League (NHL), possess each of these features.As illustrated by Allen (2002), the NHL provides a useful setting for analyzing the economic model of crime, especially when one follows the legal and illegal behavior of a sample of players over a period of time, in a panel setting. Like citizens in society, hockey players react to a number of factors interpretable as benefits or costs associated with committing illegal activity (on-ice rules violations, which result in penalties). For example, a player's own history of involvement in illegality, such as measured by his career penalty minutes, likely indicates the manner by which he generally achieves success in the sport, while deficiencies in his current team at penalty killing (defending against goals while shorthanded) likely act as costs and, hence, as deterrents.Because hockey players have team-based objectives, their behavior may be influenced by the values and expectations of a larger social group (the team, the league, fans) with respect to physically aggressive play. In ice hockey, the culture of illegality may even have a situational character: In a given game, the degree to which one player's illegality is accepted may emanate in part from the level of illegality or violence demonstrated by the opposing team in that game. Also, because some players get traded from one team to another during the course of a season, we can observe economic agents who experience exogenous change in the culture of illegality around them. …