Friends and Enemies inside Home. ‘Organising’ the Judicial Response to Organised Crime in Italy and Mexico

State success in fighting organised crime is determined by several variables. Scholars usually suggest that lack of state-capacity and power vacuum explain the development of this phenomenon, and look either outside (the crime industry and its environment) or inside (corruption and principal-agent problems) state institutions. As a matter of fact, the prosecution of organised crime inherently poses organisational challenges to judicial systems, starting with its cross-territorial nature and its criminal diversification. While corruption and other institutional variables may play a crucial role, inertia and resilience within the justice system in the face of organisational transformations to cope with organised crime are even more pivotal in explaining the variation in the judicial response to organised crime. The paper aims at capturing this variation by looking at two dimensions: the specialisation of prosecutorial offices and the coordination within, outside and across the justice system. We then present different types of judicial models to deal with organised crime, shedding light on their variation across countries and over time. We provide a comparative analysis of the judicial response to organised crime in Italy and Mexico, by systematically characterising their path of organisational transformations to prosecute it.