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Breaking the Cycle of Crime and Corruption (while questioning existence of the cycle)
By Kaufmann | April 14, 2010 1 Comment »
The World Policy Journal asked for the views of a few of us on “How Can Nations Break the Cycle of Crime and Corruption?” I answered, in a just-published short piece, though I disagreed with the main premise behind such question: Crime and Corruption need not be inextricably linked, or party to a vicious cycle…
In fact, crime and corruption do not always co-exist, share the same determinants, or respond to the same strategies and measures. A corrupt and authoritarian police state can control common crime, as in North Korea. Conversely, common crime can be a challenge to countries with satisfactory anti-corruption track records, like Chile.
Crime rates tend to be higher where there is high unemployment, high socio-economic inequality, and lax gun laws.
Corruption thrives where civil liberties, free press, transparency, and contestable politics are absent.
A functioning rule-of-law matters for controlling both crime and corruption, but again differences emerge: an independent judiciary is crucial for combating political corruption; an effective police is important for fighting petty corruption as well as common crime.
There are also differences between the determinants of common crime and organized crime, since the latter does relate to corruption more closely—for instance, drug traffickers and underground arms dealers thrive in collusion with corrupt authorities in weak states.
Unfortunately, most of the research on corruption focuses on developing countries. When corruption indices measure cruder forms of corruption, such as bribery, they mask one of the most serious governance challenges facing countries like the United States today—so-called legal corruption and state capture by powerful corporations.
For evidence of this, one need only look at the the undue influence exerted by Wall Street and mortgage giants over regulations leading up to the financial crisisu exerted by Wall Street and mortgage giants over regulations leading up to the financial crisis, or by giant carmakers over automobile safety regulators. Indeed, research suggests that the extent of legal corruption and state capture in the United States is very high when compared with most countries in the world, and higher than any other industrialized OECD country.
Thus, contrary to popular notions, both developing and rich countries face corruption challenges, although their form may differ. The strategies to combat different manifestations of crime and corruption will differ from each other, and must be tailored to country context.
To combat common crime, it is important to focus on shared socio-economic progress and reduced unemployment among the youth, police effectiveness, and effectively banning guns in civilian hands. To address legal corruption and state capture, reforms in transparency, as well as restrictions on corporate political finance and lobbying is needed.
Yet crime and corruption do share one important aspect in common. To address them, and to be prepared to take on powerful vested interests, and address the challenges of money in politics, political will, leadership, and integrity are required at the top.
Topics: capture, Corruption, financial crisis, Measurement Frontiers, Public-Private Linkages, Regulation & Security, Rule of Law, Transparency | | 1 Comment
April 16th, 2010 at 3:05 am
The abject failure to find a means of controlling political campaign financing has resulted in democracy being replaced by dollarcracy across the planet. This has caused the expansion of legal corruption and state capture in the United States and other industrialized nations and discredited democracy in the eyes of others. Where imitated in the newly attempted “democracies” of developing countries the failure of democracy is assured.
The 5-4 US Supreme Court decision handed down on January 21 in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf ) has broadened the road to state capture through buyout of the “democratic” process on the part of those financially able to make the investment all justified in the name of freedon of speech. It portends disaster for the entire concept of democracy while opening a Pandora’s Box of opportunities for legal corruption and state capture by powerful corporations and/or powerful criminal organizations.