The natural history of extended co-offending

Most criminal acts are committed in very small groups or alone, and are repeated sporadically. But that is not always the case. Co-offending can include larger groups, cooperating sequentially or simultaneously, knowing each other or at least knowing about one another. We may use the term “extended co-offending” to subsume varieties of crime organization, crime networks, gangs, and criminal clusters. Extended co-offending also includes vaguely organized crime repetitions, and is a matter of degree. Criminal cooperation can be extended in time, space, numbers of persons involved, and types of criminal action. The extension process has a very wide span of possibilities. Drawing ideas from Max Weber and others, this paper suggests that the natural history of criminal cooperation progresses in four stages, with steeply decreasing prevalence: (1) primordial clusters of offenders, (2) small-scale charismatic leadership of offenders, (3) a medium-scale patrimonial system of offenders, and (4) and an extended patrimonial system of criminal cooperation. Primordial co-offending occurs on a very local level, with little or no hierarchy or systematic repetition. Extended criminal cooperation usually requires personal trust among offenders, favoring patrimony over formal organization.