A Quantitative Network-Based Study in the Visualisation and Suppression of Illicit Drug Networks in the UK

The purpose of my proposed PhD thesis is to contribute to the existing literature studying the supply side of the illicit drug networks, and to provide policy setting suggestions in suppressing the drug-supply network operations within the UK
using the novel "Data First" from the UK Ministry of Justice. The thesis is split into three sections. The first section is composed of two articles carrying out exploratory studies, whereby the first visualises the regions covered by
heterogenous drug-supplying groups through the matching of case-IDs between arrested individuals to identify cooffenders across both time and geographical regions. The visualisation will then be further disaggregated by internal
hierarchy within each group (identified using a combination of data from the case report denoting the severity of crime and the number of registered co-offenders), and across heterogenous drug-types to investigate the differences in the
supply network structure. The second section assesses the causal mechanisms between co-offending and recidivism from a normative influence perspective. The purpose is to evaluate the plausibility of alternative policy setting in
suppressing drug-supply networks by targeting negative normative influences in early criminal careers in order to reduce recidivism, and thus the supply of drug-suppliers. The third section concludes by assessing the relative efficacy of
heterogenous criminal punishments on recidivism among different drug-supplying offenders