Organised crime and widespread illegality do great harm to Italy. The former destroys income, hope, and jobs, even though some still believe it generates wealth in poorer areas. The latter provides fertile ground for tax evasion, depriving the country of resources. The antidote exists and is called culture, perhaps with some help from artificial intelligence.
We are well aware of the effects of organised crime on civil coexistence and on the respect for laws and social norms we have established in order to live better alongside each other. Calculating human lives lost through the activities of organisations like the mafia, the Camorra, and the ‘Ndrangheta is a sad business. We can measure the blood tribute paid by law enforcement and the judiciary; we have counted the many innocent victims and the lives destroyed, even of those who managed to survive but live under constant threat from the new mafias. We have statistics on overdose deaths associated with the drug trafficking managed by these organisations. We know how pervasive the fear sown by assassins is among the communities under their control.
Organised Crime Destroys Income and Jobs
However, we have much more approximate knowledge of the economic costs of organised crime, and some even argue that these organisations have a positive effect on the economic growth of many depressed areas, if not the entire country that hosts them. They may create jobs, certainly illegal and criminal, but still jobs in areas where employment opportunities are very scarce. They may pour the proceeds of their activities into the territory, generating income and wealth even for those not part of the clans.
In this issue of Eco, we document that this is not the case at all. Organised crime destroys not only human lives but also income. It takes away not only hope but also jobs. It does not alleviate the discomfort of depressed areas. On the contrary, it condemns them to degradation and marginalisation. The poorest areas of our country are precisely those where the business world is most infiltrated by organised crime, meaning there is the highest incidence of businesses where at least one owner, manager, or auditor belongs to a criminal organisation or acts on its behalf. This presence influences business activities or even just builds relationships with the political world and local public powers. These relationships are dangerous for the local economy: they prevent new businesses from emerging and developing, inhibit competition and innovation, and corrupt institutions that should pursue the common good.
Money spent on repressing organised crime is therefore well spent even from a strictly economic point of view: it is an investment that pays off with the dividends that can be achieved by eliminating space for criminal organisations. Calculating the economic benefits of successes in combating the mafia, ‘Ndrangheta, and Camorra is not an easy task, but it is one of great utility. It helps to better direct police activities, judicial investigations, and document checks. It is useful to concentrate the scarce resources we have on policies that presumably have the strongest impact on the local economy. And this will also help increase popular support for the relentless fight against crime.
There are many indications that these benefits are substantial. When rigorous methods are used to establish what would have happened without the presence of the new mafias, it is estimated that defeating organised crime could lead to increases in the number of businesses around 10%, and increases in employment and income up to 20%. These are probably underestimates because it is very difficult to assess the indirect effects on economic activity of restoring legality.
The Help That Comes from Artificial Intelligence
We now have new tools to eradicate organised crime. Artificial intelligence, in particular, can be of great help because organised crime has its routines; criminals tend to repeat their strategies and behaviours, making them somewhat predictable. Generative artificial intelligence is ideally suited to identifying these recurrences and recidivisms, and predicting where, when, and how they might occur again. There are already encouraging experiences in this predictive use of artificial intelligence. In this issue of Eco, we discuss the experience of KeyCrime software used by the police in Milan to assist law enforcement in identifying individuals who might be repeat offenders in their criminal activities. KeyCrime, like all AI applications, requires large databases to be effective. The richer the databases, the lower the risk of errors.
Another reason to invest in artificial intelligence and the databases available to law enforcement is that the new mafias make extensive use of AI in money laundering, product marketing, and reinvesting clean money. The drug designers that many criminal organisations employ alter the composition of substances they work with to ensure they do not fall under the list of prohibited substances. If we are better than criminals at using artificial intelligence and new technologies, we can anticipate these moves by expanding the range of agents prohibited by law in time rather than one step behind them.
Widespread Illegality is Fought with Culture and Combating Extreme Poverty
In this issue of Eco, we address not only organised crime but also petty crime and widespread illegality. It is unclear how and to what extent these phenomena are intertwined. One might think that areas with little social capital, where institutions are weak and laws are applied in an approximate manner, and where there is widespread tax and regulatory evasion, create a favourable environment for criminal organisations to develop. There is a vast sociological literature that supports this thesis, which holds that once one falls outside the law, the step towards organised crime is a relatively short one. However, as we document in this issue of Eco, organised crime has now also taken root in areas with high social capital such as Emilia Romagna and Veneto.
Combating widespread illegality requires different tools from the merely repressive ones used in the battle against organised crime. It is necessary to prevent illegal behaviours from becoming the only source of income for the poorest families, for example, by helping them when they fall into indigence due to the birth of a child or the loss of a job, as the case of Brazil teaches us. It is also necessary to break the vicious circle whereby the non-compliance with laws by some becomes a reference model and induces similar or complicit behaviours by others. This mechanism explains why there are still total tax evaders, people with a lifestyle certainly incompatible with incapacity, who are highly visible within the communities they belong to but whom no one bothers to report to the financial police.
To combat this type of behaviour, the most effective tool is a cultural battle. This strategy takes a long time and that is why it can no longer be postponed. Schools play a fundamental role in encouraging behaviours consistent with respect for the rules of civil coexistence and the provision of public goods. Their ability to educate must be strengthened, especially in the most difficult contexts. As we document, empathy, understanding of others, distrust of others, and self-control are attitudes scarcely present in urban outskirts. School dropout is primarily affecting the most disadvantaged regions and fuels the phenomenon of NEETs, people who neither study nor work, in which our country holds a somewhat unenviable record.
It is towards these realities that we should prioritise education investments, starting with those contemplated by the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan). Unfortunately, schools are the area where we are most behind in implementing the plan’s investments. Moreover, to date, we do not know whether the money spent has been used to give iPads to children already overexposed to social media or to create gyms and social spaces for children and teenagers in our suburbs, distancing them from the allure of street gangs.
direttore@rivistaeco.com
