Social Welfare Practices and “Administrative” Qualifications of Mafiosity

This article interrogates the role of legal classification in structuring welfare responses to the social consequences of organized crime, particularly where conceptual overlap arises between online organized crime and multi-actor digital offending. It argues that the threshold for subsuming conduct or conditions of vulnerability within the category of “mafiosity” functions as a decisive gateway to public entitlements. This classificatory determination is not neutral: anchored in criminal law assessments of material and organizational features, it effectively determines the scope and availability of intervention. Definitional boundaries thus operate as selective filters governing access to welfare. Inclusion within the mafia paradigm unlocks enhanced and targeted support, whereas exclusion produces forms of institutional under-recognition despite analogous harms. The resulting stratification of protection regimes calls for a critical reassessment of the distributive effects embedded in the very processes of institutional identification and qualification of mafia-type cybercrime.