Vol. 11 No. 6 (June 2001) pp. 272-274.

CRIME AND MARKETS: ESSAYS IN ANTI-CRIMINOLOGY by Vincenzo Ruggiero. New York:Oxford University Press, 2000. 208 pp. Cloth $70.00 ISBN 0-19-826838-6.

Reviewed by Jonathan Simon, School of Law, Univeristy of Miami.

The title of Vincenzo Ruggiero's latest book, CRIME AND MARKETS, will strike many North American readers as a part of the rising tied of micro- economic analyses of crime and crime policy that have been of growing influence since the late 1960s, but the subtitle, "essays in anti- criminology," seems dissonant. In fact, these essays plumb the terrain between crime and markets and between sociologically oriented criminology and economic public policy analysis in several different ways that have been under appreciated in North America.

Most of the chapters are drawn from empirical studies Ruggiero has conducted during the 1980s and 1990s on two major forms of market oriented crime, i.e., drug dealing and political corruption. The strongest essays are based on substantial field work in London and a number of other Western European cities within the population of drug users who circulate between dealing, other illegal retailing operations, and all manner of legal and quasi legal labor in the burgeoning "informal" economies found in most advanced capitalist countries since the 1980s. These examples combine with others to highlight the way criminal labor markets operated and particularly the way changes in their legal and political structure, especially the political unification of the European community, are altering such markets. The flow of goods and workers across borders has opened new channels of criminal opportunity and made available a population of largely minority nationality workers to take on the high-risk roles necessary in exploiting these opportunities while at the same time blurring the lines between criminal and non-criminal labor markets.

Ruggiero is interested in whether the structural changes in the capitalist economies described by economists and sociologists since the 1970s can help provide purchase on the changing qualities of crime those societies. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci first used the term "Fordism" to describe the style of capitalism exemplified by Henry Ford's assembly line and American mass production/mass consumption economy in the middle 20th century. Fordism highlighted the shift from smaller more competitive firms and high mobility between skilled labor and capitalist and towards large hierarchical corporations controlling a largely unskilled mass of permanent laborers. It also represented an essentially "nationalist" regime in which domestic firms and workers were actively protected by a highly regulatory state. Some theorists have argued that advanced capitalist societies began to move in the 1960s toward a post-Fordist regime of "flexible accumulation" in which the corporatist hierarchies of Fordism are successfully challenged by firms with more flexibility, mobility, and competitive mentality.

Page 273 begins here

Ruggerio suggests that this model of change in the structure of markets is applicable to crimes like drugs and stolen property but in a non-linear way. Thus during the 1970s and 1980s a mass market for drugs boomed in Western Europe leading to a move of organized crime into a decidedly Fordist direction. Formerly organized crime had involved mainly professional criminals even at the bottom of its labor hierarchy. With the drug market to exploit organized crime intensified its organization at the top and recruited a large unskilled labor pool from among the drug users themselves. State policy probably contributed to this process by imprisoning larger numbers of drug users who found themselves "disciplined" to the demands of professional criminal organizations inside the prisons. The creation of a large supply of minority workers in Western Europe also contributed. Ruggiero's work on drug dealing in London and other cities suggests that as in the non-crime economy, minorities are trapped by both the ease of identification and mistrust by both customers and employers. In the drug markets, minorities are most likely to be employed in those functions that are least skilled and most likely to lead to arrest like physically transporting quantities of drugs.

By the 1990s, however, Ruggiero suggests that drug consumption markets of Europe were demanding more flexible modes of delivery. While moving the narcotics from producer to consumer countries continues to involve lots of minority workers, retail distribution is often controlled by professionalized but small scale dealers who may offer a variety of products to their clients including drugs, stolen merchandise, but also legal or less illegal goods. In this phase the illegal drug economy has come more into line with the post- Fordist trends of the non-crime economy.

The very nature of post-Fordism makes it harder and harder to distinguish crime and non-crime markets. Deregulation and the valorization of flexibility produce a growing array of "hidden, parallel, and semi-legal economies." The cities of Western Europe and most of the advanced capitalist world have large number of young workers involved in apprenticing, unlicensed provision of services like plumbing and electrical installation, and low key retailing. Sometimes these workers are found in actual urban bazaars (flea- markets they might be called in the United States) or they may meet their customers' popular neighborhood restaurants or bars where a person might inquire about a good carpenter or plumber. For people in such contexts crime and non-crime are not part of a "definitive employment choice". The social networks, skills, and cultural sophistication developed in criminal and non- criminal markets increasingly complement and reproduce each other. This is true not only for drugs, but also criminal markets in human labor and arms smuggling.

The sub-title of Ruggiero's book describes another organizing axis of these essays, namely criminology as a discipline and research tradition with its convoluted history as both a central form of "official" knowledge and of radical critiques of liberal capitalist societies. In identifying these works as ones of "anti-criminology," Ruggiero strikes a theme that will be welcome to many socio-legal scholars of crime and to political scientists in particular. Anti-criminology is not so much a theory (like labeling theory) or an ideology (like the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s) as it is a rejection of the premise that "crime" can be the subject of a distinct

Page 274 begins here

scientific theory with the aim of producing covering laws or even generalizations of an ultimately predictive nature.

This is not a rejection of the social science tradition in favor of pure politics or literary analysis. Indeed these essays are at their best when throwing up explanatory hypotheses to account for the variety of interesting developments in crime and markets he observes. Yet Ruggiero's analyses are grounded in specific contexts and openly contemplate that the same variables in different contexts might generate not only different but opposite effects. Ruggiero's critique targets the strand in our social science tradition that has sought a general theory of criminal deviance, one that could functionally mark society's healthy core from its pathological periphery. The growth of the drug economy and a whole array of semi-legal and semi-illegal markets that Ruggiero describes challenges the very sustainability of the premise of criminology (official and critical) that there is a criminal subject to be interpreted at all. The young worker moving between selling drugs in clubs, fake designer tee-shirts at flea- markets, and at other times using skills as a carpenter to do urban loft improvements without proper permits, does not need to be explained as such (although their specific choices may).

However, if Ruggiero abandons the sociological tradition of seeking a general theory of deviance, it is not for a priori economic reasoning or moralistic sermons on the character of the poor, he remains committed to empirically exploring the way particular crime choices get made. A good example is the subject of political corruption that Ruggiero addresses in the second half of the book. The business executives offering bribes and the local officials taking them to arrange contracts do not suffer from a deficit of resources or opportunities that criminology has presumed must underlie the deviance of the poor. Indeed Ruggiero suggests that corruption reflects a surplus of both resources and opportunities, a criminality of the affluent.

The depth of the empirical work behind these studies varies somewhat. For perhaps not surprising reasons the criminality of the elite seems harder to study other than through the lens of political scandals once they emerge in the media. What makes the whole of high interest is the effort to see criminal activity in the context of intense competition for advantage in highly dynamic fields rather than as an expression of a stultifying marginality. In this regard particularly Ruggiero's anti-criminology offers a potentially influential model of its own for how to retool the study of crime by reintegrating it with the study of law and politics.


Copyright 2001 by the author, Jonathan Simon.