Editing Bandit (section)

== History ==
In general for most of the history of civilization crime was bad. '''Really Bad.''' The worst areas of the modern first world pale in comparison to what was normal in the middle ages as far as crime goes. This was a time  where most people were dirt poor and for most civilizations there was no form of police that cared about anyone other than the nobility or do more than nab the odd fellow they deem suspicious and scare a few more for a bit. In the Middle Ages, towns would have guards who'd protect the gates and deal with riots, laws that required that random townsfolk or volunteers to patrol the streets at night with torches and chase away suspicious people, bounties were put out for thieves captured and rich people would have guys patrol their neighborhoods to catch anyone who looked suspicious. The countryside did not even have that and there were many nooks and crannies where ne'er-do-wells could lurk. And since most people lived in the countryside or sparsely populated villages, outlaws were an ever-present danger outside the boundaries of their homes. 

Empires such as Rome or China during the high points of the various dynasties and countries where things were stable like Edo Japan were somewhat better as they could have law enforcement forces, garrisons and patrols of rural areas, though they'd still be considered lawless by modern standards. The development of even somewhat modern policing (in terms of a dedicated full time professional law enforcement agency funded and run by the government, and who weren't just part of the army), which only really began to happen after the [[Renaissance]], led to a reduction; even then, the problem of banditry was a serious one well into the [[Industrial Revolution]], and in some places, the 20th century and/or the present day.

On the same note the worse off a country was, the more bandits it produced. In particular, armies, particularly mercenary armies, had a tendency when ill-disciplined or when badly losing to spin-off into banditry; until the 18th century, it was a common and frequently necessary tactic to pillage the countryside in order to support an army on foreign soil, and, well, people tend to do what they know. Even in modern times, if your country of residence has a lot of civil strife in the form of civil wars, economic collapse, or just has remote destitute outbacks with corruption being rife, you’re more likely to have desperate people turning to banditry to feed themselves.

For a further example of "war leads to bandits", if your cottage gets burned by a party of knights (possibly the ones who are supposed to be protecting ''you'') on a raid and the choice is letting your family starve or stealing some stuff from some passing merchant who never sold anything you could afford or a tax collector who's been bleeding people dry at the best of times, a fair number of people would steal from them. Robin Hood might have been a work of fiction, but men who steal from the rich and give to the poor when taxes were too high are not unprecedented. How much of this is altruism and how much of it was public relations would be something that varies from case to case. After all, if you provide a bit of treasure to people who have little enough to begin with, they're less likely to rat you out to the local knight (who they probably hate anyway for taxing them to hell and back, as mentioned above). 

The above took on a further twist in the context of regions that had recently been conquered by rival countries (e.g. Greece following its conquest by the Ottoman Empire). Deprived of direct military force and with no other options to retaliate against their occupiers, their inhabitants sometimes took to banditry as a form of guerrilla warfare. As above, this was frequently supported by the commoners, who had no love for their new masters. 

When did the age of banditry end? Well, that varies according to your definition of "banditry". The three most notable permutations of the concept for our purposes are:
* Highwaymen and Muggers, who target travelers.
* Robbers, who target individual buildings (banks, jewelery stores, etc).
* Raiders, who target entire towns and farms.

The era of Raiders ends with the birth of the modern army, who no longer needed to plunder in order to eat. The era of the Highwayman ends with either the train (train robbers are usually, well, more Robbers than Highwaymen; see below for more) or the invention of an effective Highway Patrol. Large scale robbery usually ends with the birth of the aforementioned dedicated police, with at least some people who follow up on things; nowadays the most important part of robbery planning is ''getting away with it'', which requires either a safe place to hide (a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty, forex) or good anonymity.

Some notable Real Life historical banditry, in approximate chronological order:

* The Qin Dynasty fell in part because the penalty for reporting late (death) was the same as that for rebellion (death again), thus neatly creating a bandit and rebellion problem, among other things. 
** Banditry was usually a part of the negative feedback loops which did Chinese dynasties in: corruption leads to a lack of funds for police and infrastructure projects in X province, infrastructure decays and the police spend more time shaking people down than fighting bandits, bandits operate unimpeded while the economy suffers (incidentally leading more people to get into banditry because there's no legitimate work to go around), which leads to budget cuts across the board which leads to more corruption. 
* Alexander "Sawney" Bean, a guy in 16th century Scotland who started a whole family of bandits who decided that they didn't need the gold so much as they just wanted to eat people. And most of the grandchildren were the products of incest. I mean, if you're going to break one law, why not break them all? It took a manhunt led by the king himself to track them down.  
*The end of the warring states period and rise of the shogunate created a brief golden age of banditry in Japan. With the feudal lords forced to disband most of their samurai armies, the country was flooded with suddenly unemployed sword-wielding ronin. Having no marketable skills other than fighting and "being a samurai," in a society that no longer had any need of them in such numbers, many became bandits if they were unable or unwilling to find a legitimate way to continue making a living.
* There were many outlaws during the period of the Wild West (in no small part due to the absence of an established police force) who get romanticized, like Billy The Kid, Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy. Many of them were portrayed as either Americanized Robin Hoods or free, unbound spirits that exemplified the Wild West, among other things. Although going past the romanticism, there was little evidence (if any at all) that proves they were anything more than proficient, opportunistic bandits that the simplefolk made stories about and eventually caught on as fact in the public mind. People tend to, incorrectly, take their existence and fame as evidence the west was swarming with criminals when it statistically had far lower crime rate than the east and most settlements went years without major crime.
** Side note: Many of the most notable figures had their origin in small scale "range wars", usually with both sides reaching for legal justification for their acts. [[Wikipedia:Category:Range_wars_and_feuds_of_the_American_Old_West | Wikipedia has articles on these conflicts]].
* Mexican history is positively littered with bandit revolutionaries; [[wikipedia:Pancho Villa|Pancho Villa]] is probably the most notable, and among other things, he actually starred in a few Hollywood films about his exploits (yes, seriously), and provoked [[Wikipedia:Pancho Villa Expedition|a full military response]] when he attacked the US town of Columbus, New Mexico. And seeing how Mexico has always had unrest to a certain degree in remote parts of the country, bandits ranging from migrant smugglers to drug runners still persist in the remote deserts to this day.
* There was also an outbreak of Bank Robbery during the 1930s that was later romanticized, with such names as "Pretty Boy" Floyd, John Dillinger, "Baby Face" Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and Willie "Falsely Attributed as Saying 'I Rob Banks Because That's Where the Money Is'" Sutton. Particularly with the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and the US armories not being staffed by a permanent garrison (the US didn’t really have a permanent standing army until the Cold War).
=== Urban gangs and organized crime ===
The same basic principles that lead people to become rural bandits in the middle ages also applied to people in an urban setting. If you get a lot of poor working class people together in a single place, some will seek a better life through less than legal means: from stealing apples off unwatched carts to selling odds and ends without a formal vendors' permit from the local lord/guild/town council/market authority to flogging smuggled or stolen goods or contraband, picking pockets, fishing for hats, breaking and entering, robbing people at knife-point in dark alleys, beating people up to steal their stuff and murdering people for coin-purses. Likewise, cities offer plenty of bolt-holes and the ability to blend in with a crowd. These petty criminals often gang up to carry out bigger jobs and reap bigger rewards.

Often gangs will rise up from people which have something in common. It can be that they all grew up on the same street from families which are mostly employed in the same job. In particular, people from marginalized groups will often form gangs. A wave of poor immigrants arrives in an area with nothing but the shirts on their back. They form enclaves in a city where they speak their own language and do business with people which don't look down on them. They often do the mucky jobs and are looked down on by large sections of society for doing these mucky jobs, "stealing jobs" and other more overtly racist bullshit. This ranges from dirty looks to acts of violence. In such a situation, some of the migrants and their kids will band together against aggression, among other illicit activities on the side (because if people are going to see you as a born criminal no matter what you do, you may as well become one in reality and get something out of it). It's a story which has unfolded numerous times, across many places and with groups.

Gangs often come and go. Many people who get into gangs (especially the lighter gangs which avoid the seriously nasty shit) as kids will eventually leave as they grow up, settling down into quiet normal lives. Eventually enough people leave that the remainder give up and either go their own way or join a new gang if they are so inclined and all that remains (if anything) is a circle of a few old guys who might reminisce about a rough and reckless youth now and again. But if conditions are right (ie, if there's a lot of money in it), the gang can persist and grow. People stay on and establish themselves and hone their skills as new members are inducted while other gangs either ally with the ascendant one, are absorbed or in extreme cases destroyed. If that happens eventually you can get into full fledged Organized Crime. These are far more ambitious in scope, and can grow into something akin to their own nation-state, complete with their own "laws" and customs. Even so, the model they follow most closely is a corporate one: there's a few wealthy guys on top who run everything, middle management, various departments that handle things from payroll, medical support, quality control, gun procurement and public relations, ground level leaders, the rank and file of workers and fighters, temporary muscle which is hired when needed and often a diversified portfolio of investments ranging from extortion and drugs to growing avocados. Of course, if someone breaks a Crime Syndicate's rules "getting fired" can be a lot more literal.