Imprisonment functions as a costly signal of market exit that saves lives

Evidence

Deliberately getting oneself arrested or placed in obligatory confinement (soggiorno obbligato), at times with the complicity of one’s rivals and even potential murderers, is a strategy known to have been employed by mafiosi to stay alive. Short of death itself, in fact, imprisonment is the clearest signal that one is out of the market. Giuseppe Calderone was offered such an opportunity after Stefano Bontade’s death. He did not accept, and was killed. By contrast, Antonino Salamone, the boss of San Giuseppe Jato, spent many years abroad, running his family from afar and counting on Bontade’s powerful support in Sicily to curb his lieutenant’s desire for power. Once Bontade was killed, however, Salamone returned in 1982 and went straight to the police in order to submit to the soggiorno obbligato to which he had been sentenced years before. Tommaso Buscetta could not explain why Salamone gave himself up, but Antonino Calderone later revealed that he did it to save his life (AC: I, 245). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 166

Categorization

• XREF: Accurate signaling theory: imprisonment is a costly, hard-to-fake signal that one is no longer competing, exactly paralleling Schelling’s commitment devices — the signal must be costly to be believable.
• CANDY: Mafiosi deliberately volunteering for prison to dodge murder is a compact, counterintuitive anecdote perfect for conversation.