Martin Bouchard
Biographic Data
| ID | 3630786 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin Bouchard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin |
| FAMILY NAME | Bouchard |
| SIGNATURE | BOUCHARD M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2911-5544 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 232 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Snakes, Ladders, and Brokers
Contrary to unstructured criminal groups, outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs) utilize a three-tiered promotional process. Through these stages, members have shown to vary in their ability to advance. The current study uses social network analysis (SNA) to investigate the influence of network capital on the timing of promotion. We pay particular attention as to whether bikers show a capacity to connect and work with others, and/or whether the involvem…
Criminal Investigative Failures
The police investigative function is a key component of the criminal justice system. Wrongful convictions and investigative failures can cause significant and long-lasting damage at all levels of society. These failures are typically the product of multiple interconnected factors, which can be generally grouped into structural, organizational, and personal categories. Using network analysis, we explore the relationships between the causal factors…
Untangling SNA
While research has long demonstrated the potential of social network analysis (SNA) for criminal intelligence, empirical studies have revealed a growing gap between theory and practice. This study examines the role, prospects, and challenges of using SNA in criminal intelligence, addressing two primary questions: (1) How is SNA being used in criminal intelligence units in law enforcement agencies? and (2) What do analysts perceive as the challeng…
The impact of new chapters on the social structure of an outlaw motorcycle club in British Columbia
Still Standing
Recent work on resilience in illicit organizations emphasizes the need to examine how groups anticipate and prepare for disturbances. This study investigates how proactive resilience mechanisms enabled MS-13 in El Salvador to survive the collapse of a secret deal with state actors. Using wiretap logs, we map the gang’s telecommunications and apply network metrics and models to analyse shifts in interaction patterns. Our findings show that overlap…
How and why consensus fractured at the 2024 session of the UN Commission on narcotic drugs
Background Consensus in international drug policy has fractured. It would be useful to explain how and why this occurred.Aim This exploratory study develops and tests theory and methods for describing and explaining constellations of policy actors and positions in international drug policy.Methods This article applies the policy constellations approach. It uses social network analysis (SNA) of the statements made by countries at the 2024 Commissi…
Structuring adaptations
Inspired by Giommoni's assessment of the Cunningham precursor control scholarship, we propose two concepts to help drug policy scholars think through the mechanisms that operate when market participants are faced with a change in precursor availability. The first is the concept of restrictive deterrence, that emphasizes risks mitigation strategies such as looking into changes in the frequency, methods, markets that may occur after different types…
The tangled history of social network analysis and gang research—A long way from Street Corner Society
Cannabis Legalization and its Effects on Organized Crime
In October 2018, Canada legalized and regulated its entire recreational cannabis supply chain via the Cannabis Act. One of the objectives of this new policy was to take revenue away from organized crime groups. Five years after the Cannabis Act went into effect, we address the following question: what do we know about the impacts of cannabis regulation on organized crime? A review of the gray and academic literature revealed that there is little …
What Gangs Aren’t
This chapter aims to compare gangs with delinquent peer groups, organized crime groups, and other collectives to tease out what, precisely, makes a gang a gang. It proposes several dimensions to consider when aiming to determine whether a collective looks more like a gang or another form—some focus on how collectives approach crime and others focus on the organizational aspects of collectives. In the end, these dimensions combine in unique ways t…
A Robust Measure to Uncover Community Brokerage in Illicit Networks
The intangible benefits of criminal mentorship
Individuals who report having had a mentor also tend to report higher levels of criminal achievement. However, prior studies focused on indirect yet tangible outcomes of mentorship, telling us little about the direct – though potentially intangible – benefits of these relationships to the mentee. In this study, we analyse the content of 28 life story narratives of offenders to examine the effects of mentor-mentee relationships. Half of the partic…
A Network-Based Examination of the Longitudinal Association Between Psychopathy and Offending Versatility
Network integration within a prison-based therapeutic community
Social networks and gangs
Purpose As useful as police data have been in furthering our knowledge of gangs and gang violence networks, not everything about gang networks can be learned from examining police data alone. There are numerous alternative sources of data that already exist on gang networks and some that can be developed further. This study aims to introduce existing research on social networks and gangs with a specific focus on prisons and schools. Design/method…
In the eye of the beholder
Applying an abductive mixed‐methods approach, we investigate the informal status systems in three women's prison units (across two prisons) and one men's prison unit. Qualitative analyses suggest “old head” narratives—where age, time in prison, sociability, and prison wisdom confer unit status—are prevalent across all four contexts. Perceptions of maternal “caregivers” and manipulative “bullies,” however, are found only in the three women's units…
Conflict Management in High-Stakes Illegal Drug Transactions
We draw from aspects of Black’s theory of conflict management to (1) provide a description of the types of disputes occurring at the highest levels of the drug trade and (2) examine whether conflicts that end in violence differed from those that found a peaceful resolution. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse 33 incidents of smuggling transaction failures at the highest levels of the cocaine trade in the Netherlands. The results show tha…
Collaboration and Boundaries in Organized Crime
A network approach helps us better specify and model collaboration among people involved in organized crime. The focus on collaboration raises the boundary specification problem: Where do criminal organizations start, where do they end, and who is involved? Traditional approaches sometimes assume the existence of simple, rigid structures when complexity and fluidity are the norms. A network approach embraces this complexity conceptually and provi…
Are Psychopathic Traits Associated with Core Social Networks? An Exploratory Study in University Students
In a sample of 480 university students, we examined associations between self-ratings of psychopathic traits, made using the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP), the Psychopathic Personality Inventory: Short Form (PPI: SF), and self-ratings of the structure of their core social networks (i.e., best friends, intimates). Results indicated that higher self-ratings of domains (CAPP) and subscales (PPI: SF) related to interpers…
The Social Network Consequences of a Gang Murder Blowout
An unexpected crisis in a criminal organization offers a rare opportunity to analyze whether and how the configuration of business and trust relationships changes in response to external shocks. The current study recreates the social network of the Red Scorpion gang members involved in the Surrey Six Murder, one of the deadliest gang-related homicides to occur in Canada. The event, which involved two bystanders and six victims in total, was the r…
Nymphet or Lolita? A Gender Analysis of Online Child Pornography Websites
Previous research on child pornography has primarily focused on the consumption and distribution of the material – the consumer side. In this study, we turn the focus on the content of child pornography websites. While some research assessed the content, there was little consideration of gender. This paper assesses whether gender is important in correlating the presence of images of child exploitation in websites. The 300 websites examined were e…
Leveraging the value of online data and methods
One gang dies, another gains? The network dynamics of criminal group persistence
What leads a minority of criminal groups to persist over time? Although most criminal groups are characterized by short life spans, a subset manages to survive extended periods. Contemporary research on criminal groups has been primarily descriptive and static, leaving important questions on the correlates of group persistence unanswered. By drawing from competing perspectives on the relationship between cohesion and group persistence, we apply a…
Back to the core
Building New Approaches to Risk Reduction With Social Networks and People Who Smoke Illegal Drugs From Participatory Community-Based Research
Background: Global cases of overdose-related deaths attributed to synthetic opioids are reaching epidemic proportion in many jurisdictions. While the main focus of health agencies and the different levels of government has been to combat the cases linked to injection drug use, the deaths attributed to smoking illegal drugs have not gained the same attention. Moreover, little attention has been given to the role of people with past or current expe…
Where "Old Heads" Prevail
Research on inmate social order, a once-vibrant area, receded just as U.S. incarceration rates climbed and the country's carceral contexts dramatically changed. This study returns to inmate society with an abductive mixed-methods investigation of informal status within a contemporary men's prison unit. We collected narrative and social network data from 133 male inmates housed in a unit of a Pennsylvania medium-security prison. Analyses of inmate…
On the Resilience of Illegal Drug Markets
This paper argues that the concept of resilience is a fruitful way of understanding the impact of repressive policies on illegal drug markets. For the purpose of this article, resilience is defined as the ability of market participants to preserve the existing levels of exchanges between buyers and sellers, despite external pressure aimed at disrupting the trade. The first part of the paper highlights how some of the core features of illegal drug…
One gang dies, another gains? The network dynamics of criminal group persistence
What leads a minority of criminal groups to persist over time? Although most criminal groups are characterized by short life spans, a subset manages to survive extended periods. Contemporary research on criminal groups has been primarily descriptive and static, leaving important questions on the correlates of group persistence unanswered. By drawing from competing perspectives on the relationship between cohesion and group persistence, we apply a…
Cleaning up your act
Is small beautiful? The link between risks and size in illegal drug markets
A well-known finding of research on illegal markets is that drug-dealing organisations operate in risky and uncertain market and intra-organisational conditions that considerably limit their size and their survival time. Yet, little is known about the organisations or individual dealers who are more successful than others at avoiding arrest and incarceration, especially in regard to dealers operating in groups of various sizes. This article propo…
Groups, gangs, and delinquency
Patterns of criminal achievement in sexual offending
Collaboration and Boundaries in Organized Crime
A network approach helps us better specify and model collaboration among people involved in organized crime. The focus on collaboration raises the boundary specification problem: Where do criminal organizations start, where do they end, and who is involved? Traditional approaches sometimes assume the existence of simple, rigid structures when complexity and fluidity are the norms. A network approach embraces this complexity conceptually and provi…
The size and influence of a criminal organization
It is difficult to measure the size, influence and growth patterns of criminal organizations embedded in illegal markets. In this paper, we argue that measuring the influence of a criminal organization by its size (in number of employees, or ‘members’) may under- or overestimate its sphere of influence in illegal markets. Self-report survey and size of population methodologies are combined to assess the regional economic influence of a criminal o…
In the eye of the beholder
Applying an abductive mixed‐methods approach, we investigate the informal status systems in three women's prison units (across two prisons) and one men's prison unit. Qualitative analyses suggest “old head” narratives—where age, time in prison, sociability, and prison wisdom confer unit status—are prevalent across all four contexts. Perceptions of maternal “caregivers” and manipulative “bullies,” however, are found only in the three women's units…
No change is a good change? Restrictive deterrence in illegal drug markets
The Social Network Consequences of a Gang Murder Blowout
An unexpected crisis in a criminal organization offers a rare opportunity to analyze whether and how the configuration of business and trust relationships changes in response to external shocks. The current study recreates the social network of the Red Scorpion gang members involved in the Surrey Six Murder, one of the deadliest gang-related homicides to occur in Canada. The event, which involved two bystanders and six victims in total, was the r…
The 40 Members of the Toronto 18
Increases in studies on the network dynamics of crime groups and co-offending has led many scholars to reflect on potential measurement biases arising from a reliance on official data sources. A problem of official data is that it forces boundaries on criminal groups that are much more fluid and dynamic than they seem. Drawing from interviews with an individual embedded in a terrorist organization and court documents records, we apply longitudina…
The Balco scandal
The current study revisits the notorious Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) scandal involving the production and distribution of an undetectable anabolic-androgenic steroid to professional athletes from late 1990s until 2003. Multiple sources are reviewed to re-create the social structure of BALCO and examine whether it formed a close-knit community or instead multiple communities defined around a specific sport or discipline. Results from a…
How Obvious Is It? The Content of Child Sexual Exploitation Websites
Those who distribute child sexual exploitation (CE) material in the public Internet potentially face greater risks of detection. While public distribution is prevalent, little is known about the structure of these websites. We investigate whether websites take steps to hide their purpose, and, if so, what steps are taken? We analyze 634 websites directly or indirectly, via hyperlinks, connected to websites hosting known CE material, and compare o…
A method to detect criminal organizations from police data
Definitional problems in the area of organized crime have traditionally led to measurement problems that trickle down the criminal justice system. This study quantifies the broad conception of organized crime in the Canadian legal context and examines the types of crimes in which criminal organizations (and organized criminals) are involved. To estimate incidents potentially related to organized crime, we combine police-reported data from Montrea…
Advances in research on illicit networks
This paper introduces the contributions included in the special issue of ‘Advances in Research on Illicit Networks’. It situates the collection of papers in the growing trend of studies applying network methods to illicit networks
Adolescent parties and substance use
Towards a Realistic Method to Estimate Cannabis Production in Industrialized Countries
Among the many difficulties with estimating the size of the cannabis industry is that suitable methodologies for estimating large-scale outdoor illegal drug production in developing countries cannot be used to estimate indoor production in industrialized countries. This article proposes a new approach that overcomes some of these difficulties. The case study is a mature cannabis cultivation industry, located in the province Quebec, Canada. Starti…
Cannabis Legalization and its Effects on Organized Crime
In October 2018, Canada legalized and regulated its entire recreational cannabis supply chain via the Cannabis Act. One of the objectives of this new policy was to take revenue away from organized crime groups. Five years after the Cannabis Act went into effect, we address the following question: what do we know about the impacts of cannabis regulation on organized crime? A review of the gray and academic literature revealed that there is little …
Conflict Management in High-Stakes Illegal Drug Transactions
We draw from aspects of Black’s theory of conflict management to (1) provide a description of the types of disputes occurring at the highest levels of the drug trade and (2) examine whether conflicts that end in violence differed from those that found a peaceful resolution. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse 33 incidents of smuggling transaction failures at the highest levels of the cocaine trade in the Netherlands. The results show tha…
Promises kept? A meta-analysis of gang membership prevention programs
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the effects of gang prevention programs on gang membership. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a systematic literature review across 19 bibliographic databases and a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of these strategies. Findings – The database search resulted in 3,850 hits. Of the 162 studies that were screened in full, six involved a prevention program with outcomes commensu…
The influence of positional and experienced social benefits on the relationship between peers and alcohol use
An assumption of peer influence research is that being connected to an alcohol-using peer group is associated with personal alcohol use. However, most research assesses peer influence through simply counting the number of peers involved in a particular behavior or the amount of that behavior within a person's peer group. Rarely considered is the fact that behavioral pressures may only arise when the peer group actually provides substantial benefi…
La courbe de gravité des crimes
RESUME. - Cet article propose une relecture d'une enquête sur les jugements de gravité des délits réalisée aux États-Unis par Wolfgang et ses collègues en 1984. L'article fait état d'une propriété remarquable et insoupçonnée de ces jugements de gravité - leur évaluation implicite des coûts des préjudices matériels et moraux décrits dans les situations délictuelles qui sont soumises à l'attention des personnes interrogées. En outre, on constate un…
The intangible benefits of criminal mentorship
Individuals who report having had a mentor also tend to report higher levels of criminal achievement. However, prior studies focused on indirect yet tangible outcomes of mentorship, telling us little about the direct – though potentially intangible – benefits of these relationships to the mentee. In this study, we analyse the content of 28 life story narratives of offenders to examine the effects of mentor-mentee relationships. Half of the partic…
La courbe de gravité des crimes
RESUME. - Cet article propose une relecture d'une enquête sur les jugements de gravité des délits réalisée aux États-Unis par Wolfgang et ses collègues en 1984. L'article fait état d'une propriété remarquable et insoupçonnée de ces jugements de gravité - leur évaluation implicite des coûts des préjudices matériels et moraux décrits dans les situations délictuelles qui sont soumises à l'attention des personnes interrogées. En outre, on constate un…
On the Resilience of Illegal Drug Markets
This paper argues that the concept of resilience is a fruitful way of understanding the impact of repressive policies on illegal drug markets. For the purpose of this article, resilience is defined as the ability of market participants to preserve the existing levels of exchanges between buyers and sellers, despite external pressure aimed at disrupting the trade. The first part of the paper highlights how some of the core features of illegal drug…
Trevor Bennett and Katy Holloway, Drug-Crime Connections
Towards a Realistic Method to Estimate Cannabis Production in Industrialized Countries
Among the many difficulties with estimating the size of the cannabis industry is that suitable methodologies for estimating large-scale outdoor illegal drug production in developing countries cannot be used to estimate indoor production in industrialized countries. This article proposes a new approach that overcomes some of these difficulties. The case study is a mature cannabis cultivation industry, located in the province Quebec, Canada. Starti…
Convenient labour
The size and influence of a criminal organization
It is difficult to measure the size, influence and growth patterns of criminal organizations embedded in illegal markets. In this paper, we argue that measuring the influence of a criminal organization by its size (in number of employees, or ‘members’) may under- or overestimate its sphere of influence in illegal markets. Self-report survey and size of population methodologies are combined to assess the regional economic influence of a criminal o…
Cleaning up your act
Groups, gangs, and delinquency
Using police seizure data and hyperspectral imagery to estimate the size of an outdoor cannabis industry
In this paper, we take advantage of aerial police detection data and compare them to an analysis of airborne hyperspectral imagery to estimate the size of outdoor cannabis production in a high density cultivation area located in British Columbia, Canada. The results suggest that law enforcement missed at least 75% of the existing cultivation sites during the operation. Based on this ratio, the total number of cultivation sites in the island/coast…
Is small beautiful? The link between risks and size in illegal drug markets
A well-known finding of research on illegal markets is that drug-dealing organisations operate in risky and uncertain market and intra-organisational conditions that considerably limit their size and their survival time. Yet, little is known about the organisations or individual dealers who are more successful than others at avoiding arrest and incarceration, especially in regard to dealers operating in groups of various sizes. This article propo…
Patterns of criminal achievement in sexual offending
No change is a good change? Restrictive deterrence in illegal drug markets
Opportunistic Structures of Organized Crime
Illegal Markets and the Economics of Organized Crime
1. Introduction: Illegal markets and the economics of organized crime Martin Bouchard and Chris Wilkins 2. What is a criminal organization and why does the law care? Philip A. Curry and Steeve Mongrain 3. The size and influence of a criminal organization: a criminal achievement perspective Pierre Tremblay, Martin Bouchard and Sevrine Petit 4. Understanding optimal criminal networks Stephen T. Easton and Alexander K. Karaivanov 5. How illegal drug…
Investing in people
Keeping promises
The Balco scandal
The current study revisits the notorious Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) scandal involving the production and distribution of an undetectable anabolic-androgenic steroid to professional athletes from late 1990s until 2003. Multiple sources are reviewed to re-create the social structure of BALCO and examine whether it formed a close-knit community or instead multiple communities defined around a specific sport or discipline. Results from a…
Advances in research on illicit networks
This paper introduces the contributions included in the special issue of ‘Advances in Research on Illicit Networks’. It situates the collection of papers in the growing trend of studies applying network methods to illicit networks
Adolescent parties and substance use
Social Networks, Terrorism and Counter-terrorism
"This book examines two key themes in terrorism studies, the radicalization process and counter-terrorism policies, through the lens of social networks. Despite multiple calls to arms to approach terrorism through the lens of network methods, social networks are still under-researched in terrorism studies. This book aims to show that networks should be at the forefront when analysing terrorists, but also when assessing the responses to their acti…
Lessons from conducting trans-national Internet-mediated participatory research with hidden populations of cannabis cultivators
Production, perceptions, and punishment
Global patterns of domestic cannabis cultivation
A group-based recidivist sentencing premium? The role of context and cohort effects in the sentencing of terrorist offenders
The influence of positional and experienced social benefits on the relationship between peers and alcohol use
An assumption of peer influence research is that being connected to an alcohol-using peer group is associated with personal alcohol use. However, most research assesses peer influence through simply counting the number of peers involved in a particular behavior or the amount of that behavior within a person's peer group. Rarely considered is the fact that behavioral pressures may only arise when the peer group actually provides substantial benefi…
Psychology (42 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (33 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (32 works) · Criminology (28 works) · Political science (27 works) · Computer Science (25 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Law (18 works) · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk (16 works)