Economic model for prevention of crimes

The cumbersome judicial system, wastage of time and feeling of insecurity prevent people from going to court and appear as witnesses. Resulting lack of witness allows the accused to evade justice and carry on with illegal acts. We come across in stories and novels written mostly during the British period that all members of a family are arrested for fault of one member only.
The global criminal and terrorism experts are concerned with the methods of crimes and financial support behind them. The network is now global due to open market and access to information technology. The focuses are on global partners of crime and terrorism.
The anti-terrorism and Anti-money laundering law is the result of the anti-terrorism movements. According to anti-terrorism law, family and groups of individual suspects are the focal points and there is hardly any distinction between tolerance and support. Historically, groups and clans were liable for the wrongs committed by group members and this ensured effective internal monitoring of the troublemakers within the group. In ancient societies, rules of communal responsibility permitted the imposition of sanctions - both physical and pecuniary on a wrongdoer's clan.
The rule of communal liability was an effective instrument for restoring law and order, in an environment characterized by limited access to information outside the group. These societies were characterised by a substantial lack of privacy which facilitated the opportunities for cross-monitoring members within the group. The characteristics of strict and communal liability for injuries, and collective guilt, are fundamentally derived from the high information costs of ancient society.
Acts of terrorism are not committed by individuals acting in isolation without help from other sources. An act of terrorism, its nature, goal and magnitude make terrorism more like corporate crime, although an individual may independently commit such acts. Families of terrorist members may directly or indirectly support terrorist activities by either concealing the whereabouts of the members or providing practical or financial assistance. In the context of terrorist organizations, the crime results from the concerted or interdependent actions of various actors committing it.
Economic analysis of terrorist behaviour is relatively underdeveloped. However, given the recent focus of policymakers on measures to fight terrorism, it may be useful to examine what insights the field of economics has to offer in framing counter-terrorism policy. Economic model of crime and law enforcement relies on the balance between the benefits derived by the offenders and the costs in terms of probability and severity of punishment. All terrorist activities resemble criminal activities, and so it might be useful to apply the economic models of crime in this area.
There are many methods of preventing terrorism. The criminal incapacitation is better than deterrence. Efficient incapacitation is achieved by eliminating opportunities for terrorism at minimum cost. One possibility is simply to eliminate the physical ability to commit offences by imprisonment or by imposing the death penalty. Another possibility is to reduce assets made available to terrorism by cutting terrorists off from their funds.
Prevention of terrorist activities requires deterring those individuals who would otherwise commit the acts. Anti-terrorism policy must focus on incentives for anti-terrorist forces and punishment for the terrorist groups as well as the individual terrorists.
Honour, pride and family status at times limit the power to award punishment to a potential terrorist. Financial penalties are unlikely to play a substantive role with respect to individual terrorists, but may play a larger role in respect of funding organisations. Heavy financial penalty for groups and families that provide support, or could have prevented the commission of a terrorist crime, will serve purpose.
There are two different rationales behind group liability. The first is based on the idea that terrorism has a "constituency" that benefits from terrorist acts. The group liability would target the constituency who benefits from the terrorist acts. This is similar to the foundation of vicarious liability of the principal for the acts of the agent. This form of "communal liability" might prove more effective than individual criminal liability of those who are directly involved in the terrorist activities.
Within this framework of group-wide liability, family or group members of a terrorist become quasi-enforcers, since groups and families are held strictly liable for their members' actions.
This is a rationale that focuses on the wrongdoers' external benefits. The second rationale instead focuses on the identification of superior enforcers. Liability is imposed on the wrongdoer's group not because the group benefits from the terrorist acts, but because the group can monitor and prevent the terrorist acts more effectively. This theory based on famous legal economist Gary Becker's analysis, assumes that spreading liability across the members of the group or family structure will provide some level of internal monitoring, and eventually impose sanctions on members of the group that allow the imposition of financial liability on the group as a whole.
The most obvious case of liabilities should be spread across active supporters of terrorism, and also the less obvious case of liability for those who benefit indirectly from terrorism or are passive supporters of terrorism. The observations of the International War Crimes Tribunal in judgments against the war crime convicts expressed similar views on the political party of offenders.  
Group responsibility is delegation of responsibility of monitoring and controlling potential offender to the family. It lowers the cost of enforcement of the government, but it increases the monitoring costs of such local groups. In doing so, the government must make sure, the group has the appropriate incentives to monitor and eventually penalise its members for engaging in criminal activities that lead to liability for the group.
It will deter those harmful activities that can be easily observed but will induce active terrorists to engage relatively more in those harmful activities that are hardly observable and controllable by their families and group members.
The government may consider to adopt the economic model of group liability for individual, family and groups for certain offences of terrorism in the
context of internal and global
scenario.
The writer, Legal Economist, is pursuing PhD in Open University, Malaysia.
shah@banglachemical.com