“What role do politicians play in organized crime?”
The above question would turn into a four-year quest for answers with my mentor, Dr. Chris Smith. The resulting paper would land in Criminology, and develop two new methods for analyzing networks in R (one of which didn’t even end up in the final manuscript).
Project Links:
nattswap, the network package written for this paper for attribute swapping simulations
Below you can find information about the paper, interactive visualizations of the network, and some fun cut content.
Please cite as:
Joseph, J., & Smith, C. (2021). The ties that bribe: Corruption's embeddedness in Chicago organized crime. Criminology, 59(4), 671–703. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12287
Abstract
The crime of corruption ranges from politicians involved in high-profile scandals to low-level bureaucrats granting contracts and police officers demanding bribes. Corruption occurs when state actors criminally leverage their positions of power for financial gain. Our study examines how corruption varies by political power position and within criminal contexts by measuring the embeddedness of corruption within Chicago historical organized crime. We analyze Chicago’s organized crime network before and during Prohibition (1900-1919 and 1920-1933) to compare differences across embedded network positions between political, law enforcement, and non-state actors. Our findings show that more police were in organized crime than politicians before Prohibition, but the small group of politicians had higher embeddedness in organized crime. During Prohibition, when organized crime grew and centralized, law enforcement decreased in proportion and became less embedded in organized crime. Politicians, however, maintained their proportion and high level of embeddedness. We argue that everyday corruption is more frequent but less embedded when criminal contexts are moderately profitable. However, as criminal contexts increase in profitability, corruption moves up the political ladder to include fewer people who are more highly embedded. This work has theoretical implications for the symbiotic relationship between corruption and criminal organizations.
Visualizations
Pre-Prohibition Organized Crime Network
(The interactive plot may take a moment to render in your browser.)
Prohibition Organized Crime Network
(The interactive plot may take a moment to render in your browser.)
Neighborhood Plot
My favorite static image of this project comes from a one-step neighborhood analysis that was eventually cut from the final paper. This looked at the “reach” of state actors in the network, or how easily the state actors could make contact with other nodes in the network (closeness in network terms). State actors are the bright nodes, with those directly connected to them a middle orange, then more distant nodes cooling to a dull orange.
