Comparative perspectives in fighting organized crime

The fight against organized crime is a field where the application of comparative methodology finds, at least in appearance, its ideal terrain. This fact is, of course, reinforced by the circumstance that, regardless of the peculiarities of each type of crime or criminality and regulatory response, globalization on the one hand and digitization on the other and the universal spread of the web have made crime itself and the fight against it more than international even transnational. However, this very phenomenon forces us to revise our general approaches and even our idea of legal comparison. Since crime has also moved beyond the international dimension to the transnational one, it is not enough to combat it, to operate at the "international" level but it is necessary to act precisely through legal systems, through individual legal systems considering also all those aspects that although not explicit in each system actually operate concretely in all of them. To combat it requires not only synergies and international cooperation but also "alternative" solutions and that can actually and concretely operate everywhere, beyond the actual normative "recognition" by each system. Legal comparison takes into account not only the individual normative data (national, European Community, international) but studies the connections between legal rules and normative choices and the individual "society," also reconstructing the politico-social datum and thus the actual operation of the rules. In this chapter, it is observed that society moves and acts by obeying or disobeying rules not so much when certain behaviours are explicitly provided for and permitted and others instead prohibited; it moves and acts by obeying or disobeying rules when there is a "convenience" to do so: a convenience that is not only and exclusively economic (it is useless to think of a simple cost-benefit analysis) but of "pleasure," of enjoyment, of fulfilment, of satisfaction, of "improvement of the quality of life," even non-material and even not contingent and immediate. From this perspective, the comparatist rediscovers the "alternative" role of law in general and the law of private individuals in particular. Finding means and solutions, other than the simple criminal "punitive" system, that make it more "convenient" and "satisfying" to follow the rules rather than to violate them is, according to this study, the best means to effectively fight crime. The study goes on to focus on two aspects of the fight against organized crime where a transnational criminal phenomenon has been responded to at the international level or otherwise "invented" a model that was then exported and revisited in other jurisdictions precisely peer to highlight the difficulties, despite the best intentions, of the concrete application of rules imposed from above and without adequate connection with the social fabric of the individual systems involved: this is the case of "human trafficking" for the first hypothesis and the issue of "compliance" and adherence to its standards for the second hypothesis.