Abstract: What happens when state repression strengthens the very criminal groups it aims to constrain? Under mass incarceration, sophisticated prison gangs have learned not only to organize inmate populations, but to project power onto the street, challenging state authority in both direct and oblique ways. From Brazil to El Salvador, prison gangs have transformed the state’s disciplinary institutions into headquarters for building drug empires, organizing street crime, and orchestrating terrorist attacks capable of bringing the state to heel. At the same time, they govern—providing order and physical safety for millions of low-income residents across vast informal peripheries neglected by governments. The fruit of decades of resorting to repressive strategies to address underlying social problems, these criminal shadow-governments simultaneously defy and undergird the neoliberal state, in the process creating a stubborn specter of non-state authority and destabilizing the foundations of democratic politics.
Drawing on ethnographic observations and quantitative data from case studies in Brazil, El Salvador, and the U.S., Criminal Leviathans lays bare the dynamics that fuel the rise of prison gangs, the misguided state policies that facilitate their growth, and the possibilities for reform. In tracing the ways that criminals govern—both their own illicit organizations and civilian populations in which they are embedded—Benjamin Lessing also raises fundamental questions about the inherent vulnerabilities of state authority and the future of mass incarceration at a moment when the deterrent capacities of the carceral state have been exhausted.
"Statebuilding in the City: An Experiment in Civilian Alternatives to Policing” (With Chris Blattman, Gustavo Duncan, and Santiago Tobon). Conditional Acceptance at American Political Science Review, March 2025.
Abstract: We helped design and evaluated a statebuilding intervention by Medellín, Colombia’s municipal government that dramatically intensified non-police state presence in 40 neighborhoods over 20 months. On average, perceptions of security and legitimacy changed negligibly, suggesting that returns to statebuilding investments are generally low, at least within electoral cycles. Prespecified heterogeneity analysis, however, reveals significant increases in security and legitimacy where state governance began relatively higher, and null or possibly negative effects where it began lower. This suggests increasing rather than diminishing returns to statebuilding. The divergence apparently resulted from city officials under-delivering in initially lower-governance sectors. One reason might be “start-up costs” in statebuilding. Alternatively, both initial state penetration and incentives to implement new programs might depend on neighborhoods’ ability to hold agencies accountable. Whatever their source, increasing returns could drive persistent “neglect traps”—channeling political attention and investment to areas where state penetration is already robust, reinforcing existing disparities.
"Explaining Persistent Duopolies of Violence: How the State Gets Drug Gangs to Govern for It" Paper Presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, August 7, 2024. .
Abstract: Armed criminal governance over civilians is pervasive, resilient, and concentrated in urban zones within easy reach of the state. If states strive to establish Weberian monopolies, why do duopolies of violence persist? Perhaps the premise is wrong. "Market for protection" models offer limited traction: theoretically, they assume competing providers prefer monopoly; empirically, drug-retailing gangs often govern without charging taxes. Instead, I develop a public-goods model where state and criminal governance overlap and benefit both actors. I compare McGuire and Olson's (1996) model of (monopolistic) stationary banditry with a modified version that includes a second bandit-the gang-in terms of the state's utility, social welfare, and total governance. All three can be higher under criminal duopoly iff gangs' costs of governance-provision are lower. If lower costs flow (in part) from gangs' recourse to illegal violence, states cannot simply hire or copy them (unless states suspend civil rights, as occurred in El Salvador). Adding a retail drug market in which gang governance (and taxation) affect drug profits by winning (or losing) residents' loyalty, the state may prefer duopoly even under equal costs of governance. Policing of drug retailing incentivizes gangs to cut taxes and channel illicit profits into governance, making duopoly preferable even though more drugs are trafficked. This requires the "pain" of drug trafficking to the state be neither too high (so that it monopolizes), nor too low (so that it decriminalizes and gangs lose the incentive to govern). If the state moves first, however, it might fight a drug war it cares nothing about merely to get gangs to govern for it.
“Endogenous State Weakness: Paramilitaries and Electoral Politics” (with F. Daniel Hidalgo). Under Review as of April 23, 2019.
Abstract: State weakness can be self-reinforcing, encouraging rebel or criminal groups to directly challenge state power, generating frontal conflicts that can further weaken the state. With paramilitaries—non-revolutionary, pro-government groups, often with informal ties to state forces---state-weakening occurs less through outright conflict than more oblique channels, including electoral politics. We show this through an analysis of Rio de Janeiro's police-linked milícia groups. Once unique to a handful of favelas (slums), where they kept out the city's powerful drug syndicates, milícias rapidly proliferated between 2003 and 2007 to control some 170 communities. The election of milícia leaders and sympathetic police-related candidates in 2006 led to speculation that milícia had transformed dominated communities into electoral bailiwicks. We test this hypothesis through a difference-in-difference analysis of election results from 1998, 2002, and 2006, exploiting the timing of milícia expansion to estimate the impact of domination on voting behavior. Controlling for potential confounders with a neighborhood-level panel data set, we find that milícia rule causes the vote shares of police-affiliated candidates to increase dramatically. We then provide evidence of how milícias used political power to weaken state efforts to curtail their activities.
"Does Criminal Governance Increase Electoral Competition in Slums? (And is That a Good Thing?)" (with Douglas Block). Under Review as of June 15, 2019.
Abstract: A central problem for democratic consolidation in developing countries has been rapid urbanization, leaving huge populations living in informal slums and peripheral zones with low state presence and weak rule of law. In many slum zones, local governance is provided as much or more by criminal gangs than by the state. There is ample anecdotal and ethnographic evidence that these gangs engage in forms of armed electioneering, often most directly by selling physical access to specific candidates. We probe these dynamics by exploiting the sharp reduction of criminal governance in a subset of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas induced by the Pacification Policing program between 2008 and 2016. Contrary to what conventional wisdom would predict, we find that “Pacified” favelas had systematically less political competition than gang-governed favelas, and that political competition falls the longer a community has been pacified. This suggests that criminal governance is not effective in forcing residents to vote for favored candidates, but rather may induce skepticism, apathy, and generally erratic voting behavior.
"The Scramble for Brazil: How Prison Gangs Colonized a Continent’s Criminal Markets" In progress.
Abstract: Throughout the Americas, prison gangs have learned to establish governance over street-level actors. The leading example is Brazil’s Primerio Comando da Capital (PCC), which since 2001 imposes social order and alternative justice throughout the São Paulo urban periphery. Its recent expansion into every state in Brazil is reshaping criminal markets across the country. The PCC's superior organization and bureaucratic structure give it technological advantages over local rivals and Rio's older and cruder Comando Vermelho, making it the largest criminal group in the country. However, It has also faced strong resistance from these gangs, seriously impeding its imperial ambition. I argue that the Comando Vermelho's more charismatic style of rule has proven resilient despite its inefficiency, because is ultimately better suited to the criminal enterprise.