'The paradox of expected punishment: Legal and economic factors determining success and failure in the fight against organized crime'

Edgardo Buscaglia has authored this study based on 14 years of research spanning 107 nations that ratified the Palermo Convention. The study looks at asset forfeiture and effective results legal enforcement. (Buscaglia is a professor at ITAM School of Law in Mexico and Columbia University, New York)

'The study is appears in Review of Law and Economics 4(1), Article 14, October 2008.

In his conclusion Buscaglia states,

... in the absence of an active financial intelligence-based criminal asset forfeiture program, high-level corruption grows rapidly while, paradoxically, public sectors continue to devote more criminal justice system resources to incarcerating/convicting increasing numbers of organized crime members. At the same time, empirical analysis shows that higher probabilities of sanctions aimed at physical persons combined with stiffer sentencing guidelines in the books against organized crime members do not play their dissuasive role in the absence of preventive programs to reduce the flow of youth to criminal groups. This constitutes the paradox of criminal sanctions where more frequent and stiffer punishments applied to physical persons lead to higher levels of organized crime and higher level corruption.

Evidence-based results show that the inter-institutional coordination and the field specialization of judicial and intelligence systems are a necessary condition for successfully addressing organized crime. Moreover, the effectiveness of combining deterrence and preventive measures to counteract organized crime, as shown above, are both necessary to expect reductions in organized crime

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