Mafia homicides and law enforcement

Abstract

The concept of deterrence emerged during the Enlightenment owing to the works of Beccaria and Bentham, who posited that the realistic threat of punishment deters people from committing crimes. In the nineteenth century, however, under the influence of positivism, this concept was discarded, and the offender’s constitution, mental disorders and/or socioeconomic conditions substituted deterrence as the primary crime determinants. Since the late 1960s, however, the deterrence theory has been revived, and new theoretical and empirical works have been dedicated to it. Despite this, the hypothesis that punishment is the key to crime control has not been consistently endorsed by empirical evidence. The present study intended to test this hypothesis by analysing the evolution of intentional homicide rates in Italy’s Mezzogiorno. In the past, this region has been well-known for its much higher rates compared to other European countries and the rest of Italy. Importantly, Mezzogiorno has also been the cradle of the most famous and feared crime organisations, the Mafia-type gangs. Since the 1990s, however, the fight against Mezzogiorno’s crime has benefited from more severe sanctions and better-organised enforcement. We analysed the impact of these changes using interrupted time series regression models on series spanning a 40-year period. Our findings support the hypothesis that more robust law enforcement significantly affects intentional homicide rates by making the threat of punishment more realistic.