Sicilians distrusted state justice and law enforcement since at least the sixteenth century

Evidence

The first is eminently political and has to do with the absence of credible or effective systems of justice and law enforcement. From at least the time of the sixteenth century (Cancila 1984), Sicilians were able to trust neither the fairness nor the protection of the law. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2141

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports Gambetta’s thesis that institutional distrust precedes and enables mafia emergence — connects to the Hardin trust-without-observable-constraints framework the reader is integrating. — connects to: Sicilian peasant leagues won land reform then were brutally repressed
• ADDENDUM: This is the empirical foundation of trust requiring observable constraints — pairs with the Luhmann familiarity argument about sight as the substrate of monitoring.