The Legal Embeddedness of Criminal Organizations: The Case of Barcelona’s Narcopisos
通过三年田野调查，研究巴塞罗那毒品公寓现象，发现犯罪组织利用毒品、住房和减害政策中的法律漏洞来发展活动，提出“法律嵌入性”概念分析其如何利用现有法律实现组织目标。
How can criminal organizations grow and thrive in legal environments purposively designed to eradicate them? We explore this question ethnographically by drawing on three years of fieldwork documenting the narcopisos phenomenon in Barcelona, Spain. “Narcopiso” refers to the occupation of vacant apartments by members of criminal organizations to sell and facilitate the consumption of cocaine, crack cocaine, and heroin. We discovered that the development of the narcopisos and the criminal organizations behind them were closely tied to the instrumentalization of laws and policies in the areas of drugs, housing, and harm reduction. We introduced the concept of legal embeddedness as a novel analytical tool to analyze how organizational members identify the affordance of existing laws and policies, purposively building on them to adapt and further develop their criminal activities to achieve organizational goals.