It has often been thought that one of the best ways of dealing with our troubles is to have family ‘around’ to support and take you through the challenges that one might be facing.  In fact locally we still value the family highly especially when the going gets tough and rough.  Actually we tend to huddle around family members if matters get unpleasant – and this is the way it should be! 

However, as Dr Janice Formosa Pace, an academic and researcher within the Department of Criminology (Faculty for Social Wellbeing) stated in her study, ‘Intergenerational Continuity in Offending’, the family also seems to serve as an establishment that resonates criminal behaviour. In her study she concludes that our prison population is flooded with criminal families that ply the trade of their parents and/or other members of the family - a nest and a platform that seems to replenish the criminal population.

This is indeed a serious situation that requires immediate interfering.

Maybe rightly so, in the past we have often lamented that in social policy empirical data is scarce and in short supply.  However, it is also true that in certain areas of welfare, and this is one of them, there exists a steady flow of statistics that is coming through the Department of Criminology and it should serve us well to start focusing our social policy efforts.    

In her research, Dr Formosa Pace examined the crime history of 622 families over a span of 60 years (1950-2010), practically two to five generations of family members who in this period were serving time.  This research is a clear factual indicator that the family was not being a crime preventer but more of a crime promoter!  It transpired that a large portion of those seeing through a sentence in prison had a history of criminality that had its roots in the family which was being transferred from one generation to another. In this study Formosa Pace demonstrates that these crime family members could range from two and up to ten members of the family being engaged in criminal behaviour.

The data gathered by Dr Formosa Pace shows that there is a continuation of crime from one generation to another.  The study concluded that we have a unique situation in Malta whereby co-offending between parents and children is quite common locally, unlike in other countries. Another phenomenon is that of spouses who embark on illicit behaviour jointly which is another common occurrence in Malta, a bit of a Bonnie and Clyde syndrome maybe.

In such situations the spread of crime is amongst more than one family thus strengthening the intergenerational element of felony. According to Formosa Pace, the biggest crime family we have in Malta is technically made up of five families, well known to the police.  The closeness of family ties and the cultural and geographical closeness are unique features for Malta that push forward criminal occurrences.

In her study Formosa Pace also mapped out the detail that the bigger the family gets the more crime prolific they become.  This leads to misdemeanour that becomes more serious and with a tendency to be more organised and complex. In other words, the more the individuals are exposed to crime in their family ‘the better they get at it’. To add insult to injury, these individuals live in neighbourhoods that are poverty and offender hotspots. Now the fact that children are exposed to people who have criminal records and long prison sentences make it increasingly difficult to get away from this cycle of lawbreaking and the succession starts again.

Another piece of evidence surfaced in this research that shows how crime families are breeding wrongdoing is that one out of every three Maltese inmates who are sentenced to prison comes from a crime family.  In other words there are clear indications that criminality is embedded in a family culture nourished by a neighbourhood context.  This is further compounded by the fact that inmates who come from crime families tend to be more recidivists than those who don’t.  Another astonishing fact in Formosa Pace’s study is that people coming from crime families are 57 times more likely to be unemployed.  Dr Formosa Pace states that this illustrates that these people are living well on criminality and the functional needs of the family are being met through crime. 

Dr Formosa Pace stated that it might be important at this point to dig deep and reflect whether we might also have another phenomenon burgeoning in our crime scene; that of people who assume the role of ‘padrino’ in a system of organised crime. 

So many other issues emanate from this complex study but amazingly there exist, to date, no organised and focused services for crime families.  It appears that there are serious lacunae in terms of solution finding. We have a lack of support services; there is a need to engage with crime families and a significant lack of provision of services within geographic and social crime hotspots.

Understandably, children of people with a criminal career are at a higher risk of slipping into this cycle of criminality.  Having one correctional facility makes the mix and match of criminality far easier to happen.  If we are not careful the age long cliché that prisons are schools of crime will carry on. 

Not all is lost. 

Formosa Pace indicated that we can build a criminal career research and with the data we have at hand this should lead us to address this phenomenon.  Appropriate services and strategic operations can do a great deal with these families.  It is now a question of matching good will with empirical data and policy decision making and taking..