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*Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate*
That's the new book by Diego Gambetta and it is the best applied book on signaling theory to date. Gambetta's task is well summarized by a single sentence:
Given these propensities, one wonders how criminals ever manage to do anything together.
The signaling problems faced by criminals are unusual in the following regard. On one hand they wish to signal a certain untrustworthiness, namely that they are criminals in the first place. This is useful for both meeting other criminals and also for intimidating potential victims. On the other hand, the criminals wish to signal that they are potentially cooperative, for the purpose of working with other criminals. Sending these dual signals isn't easy and Gambetta well understands the complexity of the task at hand. As Henry points out, facial tattoos are one particular effective method of signaling that one is a criminal for life.
Here is a passage which I found striking:
...Women are significantly less violent than men in the outside world and less lethal when they are violent. This holds in all times and places for which relevant data exist. And yet in prison this universal fact is overturned: women become at least as violent and often more prone to violence than men are. Although women in prison rarely commit homicide, a large study of Texas prisons by Tischler and Marquart showed that there was no difference between women and men in the incidence of violent episodes. Table 4.2, based on comprehensive statistics for England and Wales, shows that the gender pattern is even reversed; women assault each other twice as much as men do, and they fight one and half times as much as men do, a result that disconfirms the testosterone hypothesis.
Generally, women are convicted of proportionally fewer violent offenses than men are and have shorter criminal histories, two circumstances that rule out some of the possible selection effects that could explain away the high rates of female prison violence...
Gambetta wonders whether women in prison resort to violence so frequently because they have fewer alternative credible means of signaling toughness.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 23, 2009 at 07:01 AM in Books, Economics | Permalink
Comments
Interesting. How much time does Gambetta devote to legislation?
Posted by: smitty at Aug 23, 2009 8:51:15 AM
Michael Mann, director of Heat, and thus a serious research on criminal organizations said that there may be one to none of the kind of crews he makes movies about operating in the country at any given time.
As for women and the manifestation of their violence it could be a physical feature. Perhaps women are more often violent because they are less likely to kill. I read somewhere that women start as many domestic fights as men. Men finish them. These get reported. It may be the absolute most violent women that end up in prison because marginally violent ones do little damage.
Women have less incentive to start a fight they are likely to lose with strangers. One reason is women don't need to be tough on the outside if they have tough boyfriends. Somewhere I heard women fight to protect what is theirs while men tend to use violence to take what is not theirs. But, house women alone together where the law no longer protects property and familiarity breeds contempt and now the tough ones move from (roughly) the 49th percentile of toughness to the 99th, and when they get tough they probably won't kill or pass some other line of no return. They get a couple days in the hole, which may be a net plus if it signals toughness and deters future infringements on their territories. I wonder if a few of the women in prison are responsible for a majority of the violence.
Posted by: Andrew at Aug 23, 2009 9:30:50 AM
I always thought the disproportionate violence of women in prison was due to the fact that women didn't get sent to prison unless they were the worst of the worst.
Posted by: Blackadder at Aug 23, 2009 9:36:47 AM
I'm with Blackadder here.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Aug 23, 2009 10:44:57 AM
In prison a lot of men turn into women. Perhaps similar doesn't hold for women in prison--and thus they are more unhappy?
Posted by: Rob at Aug 23, 2009 11:53:26 AM
Actually, I'm with Andrew. Women are as psychologically violent as men at all times. Prison doesn't allow them to use men as proxies or--to attack their boyfriends, something that usually doesn't get reported as an assault.
Posted by: Rob at Aug 23, 2009 12:01:39 PM
Isn't a more plausible explanation for the higher observed level of violence among female prisoners simply that male prison violence is under reported?
We see the pattern one would expect to see if this were the case: lower incidence of homicide for women (which would always be reported) but a higher incidence of minor crimes (which wouldn't be reported for men).
Posted by: Jack at Aug 23, 2009 12:21:09 PM
I'm sure the level of violence for men is much higher. Unless you don't consider ass-rape violent.
Posted by: Rob at Aug 23, 2009 12:29:30 PM
Thanks Rob
Posted by: David Riffer at Aug 23, 2009 12:40:29 PM
Surely the fact that there are something like ten times as many men incarcerated as women creates a form of selection bias? Even if women were an order of magnitude less violent in the overall population, those behind bars could easily be disproportionately composed of the violent.
Posted by: David Hecht at Aug 23, 2009 1:02:51 PM
I read somewhere that women start as many domestic fights as men. Men finish them.
Speaking from my own experience, I agree with that.
But the way I ended my ex-wife's verbal and physical assaults was separation and divorce, not more violence.
Posted by: anon at Aug 23, 2009 1:09:15 PM
Do you notice how the comments went straight to woman/violence....the paragraph started out with tattoos/customer service! I have repeatedly received better treatment from tattooed service providers then not...maybe it's because mine show in short sleaves but I doubt it...and yes, I'll tell you....an ocean bottom dwelling Angler fish in full color with a lit probossis!
Posted by: hubbabubba at Aug 23, 2009 1:48:12 PM
It's been a pet theory of mine that the reason women display less physical aggression has more to do with people being hard-wired to use violence when they're generally bigger and stronger than those around them and to avoid it when they're generally smaller and weaker than those around them than with either sex having hard-wiring for or against aggression (note how much less violent men get as they age past their physical prime). Perhaps, in line with that, the reason women are so violent in prison is because prisons are segregated by sex, so women in prison are surrounded by other women, and no longer in a situation where there's usually many bigger and stronger people about.
Posted by: Aaron Boyden at Aug 23, 2009 2:51:12 PM
Has anyone experimented with putting men in a women's prison, or vice versa?
Posted by: Andrew at Aug 23, 2009 3:34:30 PM
Why grasp at weird explanations involving signalling when simple conditional probability sufficies? Call the violence level that gets a person into prison V = 1.0. Clearly there are many more men than women in the general population with V > 1.0. But once we look at the prison population we have already selected for V > 1.0. There isn't a lot of range in the scale above that level (we only imprison a few percent of the population), so it should come as no surprise that the average V for men and women in that population is very close.
Posted by: David Wright at Aug 23, 2009 3:43:53 PM
Organized crime tends to be organized along family lines: i.e., "crime families." The multi-ethnic outfit of expert criminals so popular with Hollywood movie-makers is largely a Hollywood fantasy.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Aug 23, 2009 5:35:27 PM
At Steve Sailer, you're right in general, but wrong in particular. The Chicago Outfit is, famously, open to membership for or cooperation with several ethnicities and has been since it was led by Torrio. And the alliances between Jewish and Italian mobsters are longstanding from the 1920s as well. So, *sometimes* the Hollywood fantasy is real.
Posted by: Brian at Aug 24, 2009 9:53:42 AM
There's something oddly attractive, and at the same time absurdly short sighted, about the notion that women in prison are more violent than the social scientists expect them to be *because they can't avail themselves of whatever that social scientist's pet social theory is.* And I love the way the commenters here jump right to the Men's Rights Canard that women are more violent than men within domestic relationships but that this is somehow mysteriously underreported and known to just a few of the cognoscenti.
Look, women in prison, like men in prison, share one very important social fact--they are in prison. They don't get to dictate when the eat, sleep, or socialize. They also don't get to choose their social networks. They are forced into very close quarters, and they have to negotiate that small space with a lot of potentially scary strangers for long periods of time. The normal pattern for women in this or any other society is to *avoid conflict* and to withdraw from conflict. Women are trained from an early age to avoid public spaces (might be dangerous) and to retreat into a domestic sphere which they can, under some circumstances, defend and protect. In prison you simply don't have that ability. You can't *get away* from another person who is distasteful or aggressive to you.
Public spaces have all kinds of norms that keep people, generally speaking, from rubbing up against each other. There are hosts of unwritten social rules about how close you stand to other people, whether you say please and thank you for stepping in front of them, how you ask permission to enter a room, whether you treat your waiter well or indifferently, etc...etc...etc... Prison has its own rules too, but there are many novices brought in every day. Prison's routinely try to deal with this fact by putting new prisoners in isolation, or in special wards until they learn the new written and unwritten rules of their new institution. The more lax and open ended the unwritten rules, the more harsh and non negotiable the written rules, the more space for conflict.
Its not that "women don't have good ways of signaling" to each other. Its that women are using many different kinds of signals from their own race, class, ethnicity, previous experience and that they haven't yet managed to create a shared language. In order to test my hypothesis you'd have to do a longitudinal study that takes into account how long the participants in violent incidents have been in their new setting.
aimai
Posted by: aimai at Aug 24, 2009 11:16:35 AM
Call the violence level that gets a person into prison V = 1.0.
One big problem with that theory is that violence is not the only thing that gets you into prison. In fact, it isn't even the *primary* thing that gets you into prison. A majority of the prison population has not been convicted of any violent crime. This is what happens when you treat drug users the same way you treat armed robbers and murderers.
Now, it would hardly surprise me if the population of non-violent offender inmates were more violent than the population at large (in fact, I'd expect it), but they aren't actually *selected* for violence. They are selected for legal disobedience, and the probability with which they are selected *given* said disobedience has a lot to do with race, class, gender, mental illness, etc.
It's not simply about violence in the way you imply.
Posted by: Michael E Sullivan at Aug 24, 2009 12:02:06 PM
Steve - this is true only of some organisations. Many are formed along other lines of trust and respect. Also, as such organisations start to specialise and exchange services, larger vertical and horizontal networks of different groups cooperating with each other are emerging, further breaking down the emphasis on ethnicity as the major determinant of trust between criminal organisations.
Posted by: Mike at Sep 21, 2009 10:13:20 PM
