Criminal Enterprise Research Articles

Gangs and Modern-Day Slavery in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala: A Non-Traditional Model of Human Trafficking

Trafficking in persons, also known as human trafficking or modern-day slavery, is a criminal enterprise that affects virtually every country in the world. Although coercion and force are often employed, the traditional model of human trafficking commonly involves victims being duped with fraudulent offers of travel, study, and employment and moved across international borders to supply international market demands for sex, forced marriage, labor, domestic servitude, illegal adoptions, and human organs. In contrast, as opposed to using fraud to entice victims, gangs in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala rely primarily on coercion and force to establish and maintain control over them and are far more likely to exploit them within the gang’s immediate area of control in ways that reflect the desires and needs of the gang rather than transporting them across borders in response to international market demands. In this paper, we provide an overview of gangs’ practices of coercing young males into criminal servitude and young females into ultra-violent, exploitative relationships and argue that such practices constitute a non-traditional model of human trafficking and modern-day slavery. We also argue that these practices demand a fundamental shift on the part of the governments of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and international partners to investigate and prosecute gang related cases of human trafficking and to protect victims.

Anti-money laundering: The world's least effective policy experiment? Together, we can fix it

This paper uses anti-money laundering as a case study to illustrate the benefits of cross-disciplinary engagement when major policymaking functions develop separately from public policy design principles. It finds that the anti-money laundering policy intervention has less than 0.1 percent impact on criminal finances, compliance costs exceed recovered criminal funds more than a hundred times over, and banks, taxpayers and ordinary citizens are penalized more than criminal enterprises. The data are poorly validated and methodological inconsistencies rife, so findings cannot be definitive, but there is a huge gap between policy intent and results. The scale of the problem not addressed by “solutions” repeatedly “fixing” the same perceived issues suggest that blaming banks for not “properly” implementing anti-money laundering laws is a convenient fiction. Fundamental problems may lie instead with the design of the core policy prescription itself. With an important policymaking function operating largely as an independent silo of specialist knowledge, this paper suggests that active engagement with critical, diverse perspectives, and deeper connections between the anti-money laundering movement and other disciplines (notably, policy effectiveness, outcomes and evaluation principles of public policy) should contribute to better results.

Targeted Groups, Rape, and Dolus Eventualis: Assessing the ECCC’s Contributions to Substantive International Criminal Law

This article discusses a number of substantive law developments at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) after the issuance of the trial judgment in Case 002/02 against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. It focuses on three themes emblematic of the Khmer Rouge era’s unique set of facts: the identification of targeted groups, male victims of rape in the context of forced marriage, and the mens rea standard of indirect intent or dolus eventualis. These themes are distilled from the most pertinent jurisprudential developments regarding a number of specific crimes and a mode of liability: persecution on political grounds, genocide, other inhumane acts through conduct characterised as rape in the context of forced marriage, extermination, and joint criminal enterprise. This article posits that these substantive law developments have an important place in international criminal law’s corpus as a rare steppingstone between the post-World War II trials and the modern-day international criminal courts and tribunals.

Bringing the Bosses to International Criminal Trials: The Problems with Joint Criminal Enterprise and the “Control over the Crime” Approach As a Better Alternative

Bringing the Bosses to International Criminal Trials: The Problems with Joint Criminal Enterprise and the “Control over the Crime” Approach As a Better Alternative

Mafia organizations: the visible hand of criminal enterprise by Maurizio Catino

Mafia organizations: the visible hand of criminal enterprise by Maurizio Catino

Living in Fear: The Dynamics of Extortion in Mexico’s Drug War

Why do drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) sometimes prey on the communities in which they operate but sometimes provide assistance to these communities? What explains their strategies of extortion and co-optation toward civil society? Using new survey data from Mexico, including list experiments to elicit responses about potentially illegal behavior, this article measures the prevalence of extortion and assistance among DTOs. In support of our theory, these data show that territorial contestation among rival organizations produces more extortion and, in contrast, DTOs provide more assistance when they have monopoly control over a turf. The article uncovers other factors that also shape DTOs’ strategies toward the population, including the degree of collaboration with the state, leadership stability and DTO organization, and the value and logistics of the local criminal enterprise.

Criminal Intimacies: Psycho-Sexual Spatialities of Jamaican Transnational Crime in Garfield Ellis’s Till I’m Laid to Rest

How might we understand the sexual body as a significant site for tracing the spatial imaginaries of Jamaican transnational crime? Garfield Ellis’s novel of transnational crime Till I’m Laid to Rest tracks the extended terrain of Jamaica’s criminal activity beyond the inner-city scenes and the shores of Jamaica to Miami, USA, dubbed Kingston 21. In so doing, Ellis is less interested in the macro-spatialities of the geographical landscape of crime, and more interested in the micro-spaces of intimacies which engender criminal activity. In reading criminal intimacies in this novel, I draw connections between work on “postcolonial,” “proximate,” “homosocial” and “monstruous” intimacies. While smaller material sites such as the car, the vault and briefcases and bags of money work as motifs of criminality in Ellis’s novel, the major geographical sites of Sufferer’s Heights and the cityscapes of Miami are shrouded in secrecy, while the criminal enterprise is primarily registered in the sonic spaces of ghetto-grapevine gossip. By turning attention to the emotional geographies of these novels, this essay mines rapes and coerced intimacies as well as homosocial friendships and romantic intimacies as a way of mapping the psycho-sexual dimension of Jamaican transnational crime.

No Safe Space: Neoliberalism and the Production of Violence in the Lives of Central American Migrants

AbstractThis paper explores the ways in which neoliberal policies enacted by elites across the Northern Triangle have led to increased violence in Central America, a lived experience that continues as individuals migrate to Mexico and the United States. In this work, I examine how neoliberal polices in the region have created limited economic opportunities and means of subsistence for the poor in Central America, as well as the rise of extra-legal actors and criminal enterprises. Together these conditions leave Central Americans with no choice but to migrate north. This paper then explores the violence migrants experience as they move through Mexico. In this stage of the journey, migrant bodies are objectified and then commodified as cheap labor for the global market as well as local economies of violence. Lastly, I discuss the multiple zones of violence that migrants experience at Mexico's border with the United States. This project relies on in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n= 99) with Central American migrants over the course of 4 years (2014–18). Ultimately, I find that for Central American migrants, violence can be a seemingly inescapable reality as neoliberal forces maintain and normalize violence in order to preserve an established social order at the expense of these migrants.

Book Review: Mafia organizations: The visible hand of criminal enterprise

Book Review: Mafia organizations: The visible hand of criminal enterprise

Industrial Soundscape between Fiction and Documentary Film in Italy’s Long 1960s

During the long 1960s, which includes the culminating phase of the “economic miracle” and the beginning of the protest movement in 1968, the industrial imagination took forceful hold of the collective mind of the Italian people. While corporate films adopted the rhetoric of industrial progress, feature films offered a negative view of industrialization and underlined its problematic aspects: the exploitation of the working class, class struggle, alienation, pollution, the role of criminal enterprise. In both cases music and sound profoundly influenced the representation of the industrial contexts. Corporate films had a tendency to extol the virtues of labor and industrial production and used music extensively to this end. The wide circulation of these films in this period encouraged a critical approach to industrial contexts from feature film directors: in their films music and sound offered critical readings during the industrial sequences: they posed questions, encouraged ironic or tragic reflection, or gave the sequences grotesque or sinister overtones. This article analyzes film music and sound options in feature films against a backdrop of corporate film communication in order to trace the history of industrial imagination in Italian cinema.

“There Is NoNewBlack Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

A Call to Prosecute Drug Company Fraud As Organized Crime

This article argues that drug companies operate like the Mafia and that the government should therefore prosecute prescription drug fraud as organized crime under the Racketeering Influenced and Criminal Organizations Act (RICO). RICO provides prosecutors with procedural and evidentiary advantages that specifically target and help combat organized crime. Currently, Food and Drug Administration rules tempt drug company executives to engage in criminal fraud related to the testing, advertising, and sale of prescription drugs. As a result, prescription drugs are the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S. and kill more than 100,000 Americans every year. Despite these tragic outcomes, pharmaceutical executives and other complicit parties face few (if any) criminal sanctions for conducting these fraudulent schemes. Like the Mafia, drug companies utilize organized structures to delegate crimes (and criminal intent) throughout a strict hierarchy in order to avoid meaningful government sanction. A recognition that these executives, researchers, and doctors are engaged in organized crime would help stem this rising tide of corruption by triggering RICO. RICO treats everybody in the crime syndicate equally and does not allow high-ranking members to escape liability simply by having underlings carry out the enterprise’s overt criminal activity. Using RICO, the government joins complicit parties together and prosecutes the defendants for the same offense of participating in a criminal enterprise. A RICO conviction carries a 20-year prison sentence and a mandatory forfeiture of assets. These serious sanctions would force executives and sales representatives to think twice before misrepresenting clinical trial data and bribing doctors to prescribe harmful and ineffective drugs. Potential RICO liability would also dissuade doctors from accepting kickbacks and might even force politicians to reconsider accepting quid-pro-quo campaign contributions from drug company executives.

Joint Criminal Confusion: Exploring the Merits and Demerits of Joint Enterprise Liability

In February 2016, the UK Supreme Court fundamentally changed the criminal law principles of accessorial liability when it handed down its decision in R v Jogee. The Court abolished the head of liability known as 'joint criminal enterprise' (JCE) and replaced it with the ordinary principles of aiding and abetting, which it re-stated for this purpose. JCE features prominently in international criminal law (ICL) where it has an equally contentious status. The full implications of Jogee remain at present uncertain, underexplored and divisive. In this chapter, I evaluate the merits and demerits of joint enterprise by comparing JCE in English law and ICL. A cross-jurisdictional analysis of joint enterprise reveals more deeply the role the notion plays in the overall taxonomy of criminal responsibility. There are different concepts of joint enterprise with different theoretical groundings. By not recognising this, past debates of joint enterprise liability have failed to appreciate the concept’s merits alongside complicity liability.

Understanding cross-border crime: the value of international business research

PurposeBased on a considerable degree of commonality between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and cross-border criminal organisations, the purpose of this paper is to identify ways and areas in which international business (IB) research could be of value in improving understanding of the operations of cross-border criminal organisations and in the development of effective countermeasures to global crime.Design/methodology/approachA review of the characteristics of legitimate MNEs and cross-border criminal organisations is undertaken to assess the applicability of IB research approaches in understanding the strategies and structures of organised criminal groups.FindingsDespite some obvious differences there appears to be sufficient commonality between legitimate and illegitimate international commerce so that the firm-centric focus of IB research could provide valuable insights complementing the policy-oriented approach of criminology. Some adaptation of IB research tools may be required. The exchange is not one-way: studies of cross-border crime also offer lessons for IB scholars.Research limitations/implicationsIB scholarly work on cross-border crime could enrich both the fields of IB and transnational criminology. Better understanding of criminal enterprises could also facilitate the design of more effective interdiction policies.Originality/valueDespite their commonalities and interactions, the two sectors of international enterprise have developed separately, and this paper identifies and explores possible synergies between the two.

The Osland ‘Wrong Turn’ and the Problems that Fictions Produce

While much academic attention has been devoted to whether the doctrine of extended joint criminal enterprise (‘EJCE’) can be justified, the basic joint criminal enterprise doctrine (‘JCE’) has escaped much scrutiny. The extraordinary recent case of IL v The Queen (2017) 262 CLR 268, however, has demonstrated that JCE is more problematic than was thought. It is argued here that the difficulties exposed in IL arose because of a ‘wrong turn’ in Osland v The Queen (1998) 197 CLR 316. The High Court’s insistence in that case that all JCE participants are principals in the first degree might have been convenient, but it was also fictitious and unprincipled – as Sir John Smith argued at the time. For as long as the law proceeds as though JCE participants have struck blows that they have not in fact struck, and fails to acknowledge that they are accessories, the Australian common law of complicity will be dishonest, obscure and unnecessarily complex.

Gouverner C’est Prévoir – Trappings of Value Distribution: a Prolegomenon to the African Union’s Hissène Habré Trust Fund for Victims

Abstract Since Hissène Habré’s Judgment by the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC), the world has anxiously awaited the processes that the African Union (AU) would put in place for the amelioration of the victims’ circumstances. Pursuant to the AU’s pledge and unfaltering support for the EAC, in early 2018 the AU Heads of State and Government Assembly adopted a Statute establishing the Hissène Habré Victims Trust Fund. It is anticipated that the Fund is likely to be an unsteady vehicle facing numerous challenges regarding law and policy formulation, interpretation and implementation, such as flawed decision-making processes, and a lack of proper policy direction and State cooperation, which have the potential of heavily impeding this international criminal justice enterprise. However, there exists an opportunistic trajectory for the Fund as the current trends, practices and rich jurisprudence of other criminal tribunals and courts can inform the Fund’s processes and positions. The Fund’s decision-makers should make a concerted effort in a sturdy and convergent direction that mirrors the victims’ potential values, consonant outcomes and responsibilities.

Pill mills, occupational offending, and situational crime prevention: a framework for analyzing offender behavior and adaptation

The national problem with the misuse of opioid pain relievers is fueled by overly lax and illegal overprescribing practices. In the state of Florida, so-called “pill mills” are clinics in which physicians prescribe opioids for non-existent or exaggerated pain, often with profit as a motivation, thus making such prescribing a criminal enterprise. This study draws from in-depth interviews with police officers in Florida to examine this practice. The analysis contextualizes illegal prescribing as a form of occupational offending and applies a situational crime prevention (SCP) framework. However, instead of viewing SCP from the lens of crime prevention, this study analyzes the ways in which offenders capitalized upon opportunities to thwart investigations and place obstacles in the paths of police and prosecutors. The results add to the literature by highlighting the processes by which offenders manipulate their social and physical environments to mitigate risks and maximize rewards. The findings also speak to the ongoing problem of criminal law enforcement against occupational offending.

Crime, Conflict, and the Legitimacy Trade-Off: Explaining Variation in Insurgents’ Participation in Crime

Insurgent organizations have become major players in criminal enterprises around the world. However, research examining why some participate in crime while others do not remains underdeveloped. Analyzing newly collected annual data on 140 insurgent groups from 1998 to 2012, we examine the conditions driving insurgents’ participation in drug crimes, extortion, smuggling, kidnapping for ransom, and robbery. We find that control of territory positively affects involvement in all types of crime. However, we also find notable differences in the conditions driving participation in episodic crimes versus crimes that require institutional investments. Institutional crimes are, with the exception of smuggling, more likely to occur as insurgent groups age, whereas efforts to cultivate legitimacy—as indicated by the ongoing provision of social services—substantially reduces the probability of involvement in episodic crimes. We discuss how this latter effect is reflective of a legitimacy trade-off that emerges for groups pursuing both social support and material resources.

Joint Criminal Enterprise on the Decline: A Step Further in the ‘Self-Becoming’ of International Criminal Law?

This article uses the legal construct ‘joint criminal enterprise’ (jce) as a focal point of the tensions between international criminal law (icl) and common criminal law. Drawing on the assumption that an over-arching concept of the criminal law in genere is plausible, and that icl is a special branch stemming therefrom, the authors start by characterising jce and by assessing the possible incompatibility of some of its forms with the principles of legality, voluntary act and guilt. The authors then question whether jce could be validated under a different understanding of icl (as an autonomous legal branch, or, at least, as a special branch within criminal law abiding by different principles). Finally, it is argued that the apparent decline of jce might be another instance where icl becomes itself ‘more wholly’.

A Normative Case for Abolishing the Doctrine of Extended Joint Criminal Enterprise

It is submitted in this article that assisting/encouraging is normatively different from and less harmful and dangerous than perpetration, and that the unfairness and injustice of complicity is doubled in the context of extended joint criminal enterprise. The defendant’s participation in the underlying crime is constructed as participation in the collateral crime and such fictitiously constructed participation is further constructed as actus reus of the collateral crime; and the defendant’s foresight of the collateral crime is constructed as intention to assist/encourage the collateral crime and such fictitiously constructed mental state is further constructed as sufficient mens rea for the collateral crime. The double constructive nature of this doctrine cries out for legal reform, especially in jurisdictions where it is still retained as a sui generis doctrine. It is proposed that a new lesser offence of risking another’s collateral offending will serve better the purpose of fair labelling and proportionate punishment.