Criminal Constitutions

Why do criminals use constitutions? This article argues that constitutions perform three functions in criminal organisations. First, criminal constitutions promote consensus by creating common knowledge among criminals about what the organisation expects of them and what they can expect of the organisation's other members. Second, criminal constitutions regulate behaviours that are privately beneficially to individual criminals but costly to their organisation as a whole. Third, criminal constitutions generate information about member misconduct and coordinate the enforcement of rules that prohibit such behaviour. By performing these functions, constitutions facilitate criminal cooperation and enhance criminals' profit. To examine our hypothesis we examine the constitutions of two criminal organisations: eighteenth-century Caribbean pirates and the contemporary Californian prison gang, La Nuestra Familia.