Martin Bouchard

On the Resilience of Illegal Drug Markets

This paper argues that the concept of resilience is a fruitful way of understanding the impact of repressive policies on illegal drug markets. For the purpose of this article, resilience is defined as the ability of market participants to preserve the existing levels of exchanges between buyers and sellers, despite external pressure aimed at disrupting the trade. The first part of the paper highlights how some of the core features of illegal drug markets, a decentralized structure and high prices, contribute to increasing their resilience to attacks. The second part develops a framework that can be used to compare markets on the basis of their resilient properties. Some of the empirical and policy implications of the framework are discussed in the conclusion.

Is It Who You Know, or How Many That Counts? Criminal Networks and Cost Avoidance in a Sample of Young Offenders

The aim of the current study is to assess whether criminal networks can help young offenders avoid contacts with the criminal justice system. We examine the association between criminal network and cost avoidance specifically for the crime of cannabis cultivation in a rural region in Quebec, Canada. A self‐report delinquency survey, administered to the regions quasi‐population of high‐school students (N = 1,166), revealed that a total of 175 adolescents had participated in the cannabis cultivation industry (a 15% lifetime prevalence rate). Forty‐seven respondents (27%), including 29 who were arrested, reported having participated in a cultivation site that was detected by the police. Results indicate that “who you know” matters in the cultivation industry, and is an important independent predictor of arrest: very few young growers who were embedded in adult networks were apprehended. Conversely, embeddedness in a youth network emerged as an independent risk factor, especially embeddedness in larger networks.

Risks of Arrest across Drug Markets: A Capture-Recapture Analysis of “Hidden” Dealer and User Populations

Capture-recapture methodologies have been used to estimate the size of the hidden population of active offenders on the basis of the observed properties of the truncated distribution of arrested offenders. We use this approach to estimate the odds of arrest of marijuana, cocaine, crack, and heroin dealers and users in one Canadian province (Quebec). Findings indicate that risks of being arrested are much higher for sellers than for consumers and that this gap widens for the more harmful drugs. Findings also show, however, that vulnerability to arrest was significantly higher for marijuana users than for others users and that dealers in the smaller but more harmful drug markets (crack and heroin) manage to experience lower aggregate risks of arrest than cocaine or marijuana dealers.

Need, Connections, or Competence? Criminal Achievement among Adolescent Offenders

Variations in criminal performance have been much less explored than other parameters of criminal careers. We explore the factors associated with differential criminal achievement in a sample of 154 adolescent offenders involved in cannabis cultivation. Drawing from theories of earnings attainment, we examine the role of drug use, criminal social capital and criminal human capital in providing either (a) monetary, or (b) in kind (cannabis) rewards from crime. Results reveal that criminal social capital and criminal human capital are related to performance while drug use explains little of the variation. Their effects, however, differ between outcomes: young offenders who are mainly connected to adult growers tend to be paid in kind, whereas respondents connected to a majority of other young growers tend to receive money. Criminal human capital is crucial to earning money but insignificant to obtaining larger payments in cannabis. Implications for criminal career and desistance research are discussed.

Finding the Key Players in Online Child Exploitation Networks

The growth of the Internet has been paralleled with a similar growth in online child exploitation. Since completely shutting down child exploitation websites is difficult (or arguably impossible), the goal must be to find the most efficient way of identifying the key targets and then to apprehend them. Traditionally, online investigations have been manual and centered on images. However, we argue that target prioritization needs to take more than just images into consideration, and that the investigating process needs to become more systematic. Drawing from a web crawler we specifically designed for extracting child exploitation website networks, this study 1) examines the structure of ten child exploitation networks and compares it to a control group of sports-related websites, and 2) provides a measure (network capital) that allows for identifying the most important targets for law enforcement purposes among our sample of websites. Results show that network capital — a combination between severity of content (images, videos, and text) and connectivity (links to other websites) — is a more reliable measure of target prioritization than more traditional measures of network centrality taken alone. Policy implications are discussed.

Toward a Criminology of Inmate Networks

The mid-twentieth century witnessed a surge of American prison ethnographies focused on inmate society and the social structures that guide inmate life. Ironically, this literature virtually froze in the 1980s just as the country entered a period of unprecedented prison expansion, and has only recently begun to thaw. In this manuscript, we develop a rationale for returning inmate society to the forefront of criminological inquiry, and suggest that network science provides an ideal framework for achieving this end. In so doing, we show that a network perspective extends prison ethnographies by allowing quantitative assessment of prison culture and illuminating basic characteristics of prison social structure that are essential for improving inmate safety, health, and community reentry outcomes. We conclude by demonstrating the feasibility and promise of inmate network research with findings from a recent small-scale study of a maximum-security prison work unit.

Investing in people: The role of social networks in the diffusion of a large-scale fraud

Abstract This paper draws from social network analysis and diffusion theory to study the case of a mortgage fraud that spread undetected for five years in British Columbia, Canada. The fraud is studied from the point of view of 559 victims who unknowingly invested in the Ponzi scheme which defrauded 2285 investors for a total of

The size and influence of a criminal organization: a criminal achievement perspective

240 million dollars. Results show diffusion played a role in the success of the Eron fraud even though the fraud ended before it reached the final stages of a classic diffusion process. A closer look at the social structure of the Eron network revealed the elements that made the fraud successful: (1) change agents, particularly Eron principals and Eron employees invested their personal time and effort recruiting investors; (2) independent brokers actively spread the fraud to their clients; and (3) opinion leaders, investors themselves, unknowingly spread the fraud through their social networks by recruiting their friends and family to invest in Eron.

Preliminary Analytical Considerations in Designing a Terrorism and Extremism Online Network Extractor

It is difficult to measure the size, influence and growth patterns of criminal organizations embedded in illegal markets. In this paper, we argue that measuring the influence of a criminal organization by its size (in number of employees, or ‘members’) may under- or overestimate its sphere of influence in illegal markets. Self-report survey and size of population methodologies are combined to assess the regional economic influence of a criminal organization (Hells Angels) in three illegal drug markets (the cocaine trade, the cannabis trade and the cannabis cultivation industry) in the province of Québec. Findings suggest that a relatively small organization by conventional standards can nonetheless achieve a large influence on criminal markets. We then analyse how factors other than violence play a role in explaining differences in achieving economic influence across criminal organizations. Finally, we suggest that turning our attention to measuring economic influence provides some insights into the duration and intensity of the violent conflicts occurring in these markets.

Patterns of Youth Participation in Cannabis Cultivation

It is now widely understood that extremists use the Internet in attempts to accomplish many of their objectives. In this chapter we present a web-crawler called the Terrorism and Extremism Network Extractor (TENE), designed to gather information about extremist activities on the Internet. In particular, this chapter will focus on how TENE may help differentiate terrorist websites from anti-terrorist websites by analyzing the context around the use of predetermined keywords found within the text of the webpage. We illustrate our strategy through a content analysis of four types of web-sites. One is a popular white supremacist website, another is a jihadist website, the third one is a terrorism-related news website, and the last one is an official counterterrorist website. To explore differences between these websites, the presence of, and context around 33 keywords was examined on both websites. It was found that certain words appear more often on one type of website than the other, and this may potentially serve as a good method for differentiating between terrorist websites and ones that simply refer to terrorist activities. For example, words such as “terrorist,” “security,” “mission,” “intelligence,” and “report,” all appeared with much greater frequency on the counterterrorist website than the white supremacist or the jihadist websites. In addition, the white supremacist and the jihadist websites used words such as “destroy,” “kill,” and “attack” in a specific context: not to describe their activities or their members, but to portray themselves as victims. The future developments of TENE are discussed.