Aggregate Crime Rates Research Articles

Sociohistorical context and post-prison life course

Life-course criminology has recently begun to focus on sociohistorical context, with the use of multi-cohort studies. However, those studies have mostly concentrated on aggregate crime rates. Desistance research, in turn, has largely overlooked the impact of the broader sociohistorical context. Based on recent work on the effect of sociohistorical context on crime rates, we propose that context may shape desistance and social reintegration in a nuanced way.We examined employment, housing, and marriages among Finnish first-time prisoners released between 1995 and 2014 (N = 23,350) until 2019. We quantified the link between selected macro-level indicators and these outcomes using age-period-cohort models.The results showed that the outcomes evolved in separate ways post-release. Employment and marriage became more common over time, but only employment showed distinct periodical changes. The probability of living in housing remained stable. A higher level of national unemployment was associated with all outcomes. The association between prisoner characteristics and the outcomes changed depending on release year.Post-prison societal integration should not be assessed by one measure alone. Desistance studies should address societal context when comparing different times or countries. Early studies may require replication if the associations between demographic factors and desistance outcomes are subject to change.

Synthetic Control Analysis of the Short-Term Impact of New York State’s Bail Elimination Act on Aggregate Crime

We conduct an empirical evaluation of the short-term impact of New York’s bail reform on crime. New York State’s Bail Elimination Act went into effect on January 1, 2020, eliminating money bail and pretrial detention for nearly all misdemeanor and nonviolent felony defendants. Our analysis of effects on aggregate crime rates after the reform informs the understanding of bail reform and general deterrence, rather than specific deterrence via re-arrest rates of the detained/released population. We conduct a synthetic control analysis for a comparative case study of the impact of bail reform. We focus on synthetic control analysis of post-intervention changes in crime for assault, theft, burglary, robbery, and drug crimes, constructing a dataset from publicly reported crime data of 27 large municipalities. Due to the short time frame before the onset of COVID-19 and its far-reaching effects, we restrict attention to a short post-intervention time period. Nonetheless, evaluation of short-term impacts may still inform hypotheses of general deterrence of bail reform policy. Our findings, including placebo checks and other robustness checks, show that for assault, theft, and drug crimes, there is no significant impact of bail reform on aggregate crime. For robbery, we find a statistically significant increase; for burglary, the synthetic control is more variable and our analysis is deemed less conclusive. Since our study assesses the short-term impacts, further work studying long-term impacts of bail reform and on specific deterrence remains necessary. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Crime variability, peer effects, and economic inequality in social networks

A large fraction of the variance in aggregate crime rates cannot be explained by observable socioeconomic conditions. Social determinants of crime may drive the unexplained variation, but economic models of social influence so far emphasize the intensity of criminal effort, not the decision of whether to participate in crime. This article develops a model of criminal participation as a supermodular game, based on the theory of differential association. Simulations relate the structural characteristics of social networks to supportable patterns of crime in equilibrium. Denser and more unevenly connected networks show wider variation in aggregate crimes, but wage inequality in the formal sector reduces the variance. Additionally, average crimes rates are a single-peaked function of wage inequality. This feature suggests future cross-sectional studies of crime rates and income inequality should treat inequality as a quadratic function within a regression model.

An Empirical Evaluation of the Impact of New York's Bail Reform on Crime Using Synthetic Controls

We conduct an empirical evaluation of the impact of New York's bail reform on crime. New York State's Bail Elimination Act went into effect on January 1, 2020, eliminating money bail and pretrial detention for nearly all misdemeanor and nonviolent felony defendants. Our analysis of effects on aggregate crime rates after the reform informs the understanding of bail reform and general deterrence. We conduct a synthetic control analysis for a comparative case study of impact of bail reform. We focus on synthetic control analysis of post-intervention changes in crime for assault, theft, burglary, robbery, and drug crimes, constructing a dataset from publicly reported crime data of 27 large municipalities. Our findings, including placebo checks and other robustness checks, show that for assault, theft, and drug crimes, there is no significant impact of bail reform on crime; for burglary and robbery, we similarly have null findings but the synthetic control is also more variable so these are deemed less conclusive.

News Media Trends in the Framing of Immigration and Crime, 1990–2013

AbstractFew social problems engender as much public and political debate as the alleged link between immigration and crime. Contrary to the findings of much empirical literature, the majority of the public believe that immigration increases crime and that the foreign born are especially prone to offending. Among many factors, the way prominent news media describe the immigration-crime link may help explain the disconnectedness of scholarship and public opinion over the past several decades. Using a unique database of over 2,200 news stories drawn from among the highest circulation national papers for 1990 through 2013, the current study employs time-series trend analyses to examine the prevalence of different media frames used to explain the immigration-crime link and whether those frames have changed systematically over time. Our results reveal that most immigration-crime news stories describe immigrants as especially crime-prone or as increasing aggregate crime rates. Moreover, this framing has increased in prevalence over time, as have narratives inaccurately describing undocumented immigration as a crime itself, while framing immigrants as victims of crime has declined significantly over the 1990–2013 period. These changes occurred systematically in only some newspapers. We discuss implications for research, policy, and the public engagement of scientific evidence.

Remittances, criminal violence and voter turnout

ABSTRACT How do financial remittances influence electoral participation in violent democracies? Previous work has focused on the ‘substitution effect’; if recipients depend on remittances for welfare rather than the state, they become disengaged from formal political processes and less likely to vote in elections. However, while remittances can be used to substitute for state provision of welfare goods, they cannot fully substitute for public security. In this paper, we posit that the ability of governments to contain crime and violence conditions the effect of remittances on electoral participation. Specifically, we argue that high levels of crime can negate the substitution effect and make remittance recipients more likely to vote. Using municipality-level data from Mexico and individual-level data from Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, we find that both the receipt of remittances and crime exposure significantly reduce individuals’ propensity to vote and that aggregate remittances and crime rates are correlated with lower turnout. Remittances can, however, negate the turnout-suppressing effects of crime, and crime can negate the turnout-suppressing effects of remittances. Our results suggest a need to account for government provision of both substitutable and non-substitutable goods when investigating the effects of remittances on political participation.

Crime and the minimum wage

How does the minimum wage affect crime rates? Empirical research suggests that increasing a worker's wage can deter him from committing crimes. On the other hand, if that worker becomes displaced as a result of the minimum wage, he may be more likely to commit a crime. In this paper, I describe a frictional world in which a worker's criminal actions are linked to his labor market outcomes. The model is calibrated to match labor market outcomes and crime decisions of workers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and shows that the relationship between the aggregate crime rate and the minimum wage is U-shaped. The results from the calibrated model, as well as empirical evidence from county level crime data and state level minimum wage changes from 1995 to 2014, suggest that the crime minimizing minimum to median wage ratio for 16 to 19 year olds is 0.91. However, the welfare maximizing minimum to median wage ratio is 0.87, not equal to the crime minimizing value. The median wage of 16 to 19 year olds in the United States in 2018 was $10, suggesting that any federal minimum wage increase up to $8.70 may be welfare improving.

The Short-Run Effects of the Great Recession on Crime

The Great Recession had the most severe impacts on the unemployment rates of the racial and ethnic minorities as well as less-educated young men. There were cross-sectional variations of these disproportionate adverse impacts. This study exploits the changes in regional variations of the unemployment rates of unskilled men before and after the Great Recession to explain the sharp fall in aggregate crime rates in the post-recession recovery period. Our 2SLS approach uses plausible exogenous sources of changes in the state employment growth of minimum wage workers induced by the national employment growth of minimum wage workers. We find that changes in regional variations of the unemployment rates of unskilled young men can explain approximately 25% of the fall in the aggregate crime rate in the post-recession expansionary period. Estimating the heterogeneous impacts of unskilled young men by race, we find that the fall in aggregate crime rate was mainly driven by the changes in the unemployment rates of young black men.

Exploiting the coverage of administrative data to understand changing criminal careers and the causes of the crime drop: changing conviction patterns in the Scottish Offenders Index, 1989-2011

BackgroundThe status of the Scottish Offenders Index (SOI) as a census (n=all) of conviction proceedings in Scotland allows the adoption of research designs that would be prohibitively costly and time consuming to implement with more traditional survey approaches. This paper argues that this flexibility, combined with the large time span covered by the SOI (1989-current), provides a way to bridge the typical individual (micro-) focus of developmental criminology and the (macro-) analysis of aggregate crime rates.
 ObjectivesBy examining conviction patterns for multiple cohorts across multiple years, we can infer whether recent falls in aggregate conviction rates are most plausibly explained by period or cohort effects. In turn, this distinction between period and cohort effects can both suggest which potential explanations for these recent falls in conviction rates in Scotland are most feasible - thus helping to refine explanations for the recent ’crime drop’ - and help us understand the factors leading to change in criminal careers over time.
 Methods and FindingsTo support these claims, this paper presents the results of an exploratory analysis of change in convictions patterns in the SOI between 1989 and 2011, drawing on demographic information to account for change in population structure. Results show a complex pattern of change over time, with differences in convictions trends for young and old, for men and women and in different periods. Explanations of the crime drop must be able to account for these complex trends.
 ConclusionsAdministrative data provide a unique window into the recent crime drop, and we encourage similar studies on comparable datasets where possible.

Daylight saving time and crime: Does tiredness also affect criminal behavior?

This paper explores the effect of Daylight Saving Time (DST) change on aggregate crime rates. In order to do so I run regressions with hourly data on crime and I implement a regression discontinuity design with a treatment variable centered on the beginning of DST in spring. After the DST change in spring, which implies the loss of an hour at 2 a.m., there is a significant decrease in crime. Further evidence suggests that the results are not driven by a temporal displacement of crime or changes in the level of darkness. The empirical evidence suggests that reduction in crime rates could be driven by the tiredness of potential offenders and interpreted under the lens of the Routine Activities Theory. However, the study is not able to identify the direct causal effect.

Bringing Crime Trends Back into Criminology: A Critical Assessment of the Literature and a Blueprint for Future Inquiry

Rates of street crime have dropped substantially over the past several decades, but important nuances of this decline are underappreciated and the reasons for it remain unclear. We suggest that the narrow conception of change adopted within criminology has hindered the field's capacity to develop a stronger scientific understanding of crime trends. Criminology has focused heavily on within-person changes in crime, devoting comparatively little attention to changes in aggregate crime rates. In this review, we make a case for integrating research on crime trends into the core of criminology. After describing the late twentieth century crime drop, we present a conceptual framework that situates the study of crime trends in the criminological theoretical literature and illuminates several unresolved questions central to criminological inquiry. We then highlight major shortcomings of current empirical approaches and outline several methodological improvements that would enhance our capacity to describe and explain crime trends.

The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem in Person–Context Research

Objectives: To examine whether the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) observed in studies of aggregate crime rates poses a threat to studies examining the moderating effect of neighborhood processes on the association between individual risk factors and self-reported violence. Methods: A series of negative binomial regression models were estimated on a sample of 11,288 youth participating in the Add Health study to assess the moderating influence of neighborhood disadvantage on the association between impulsivity and violence aggregated to the census block group and the census tract. Results: One-unit increases in neighborhood disadvantage and impulsivity were associated with 5.1 percent and 4.9 percent increases in the expected count of self-reported violent behaviors, respectively. Neighborhood disadvantage exacerbated the association between impulsivity and self-reported violence when measured at the tract level but had no moderating effect when measured at the block group. Conclusions: The findings reported here suggest that the MAUP poses a unique concern for person–context research. The geographic aggregation of neighborhood effects warrants careful consideration in theoretical and empirical models linking individual behavior with broader social ecologies.

Entertainment and Crime

SummaryIn this paper I explore the effects of entertainment on aggregate crime rates. I track hourly crime data to analyze the behavior of offenses in a time window around football games played by the national team, in a country were football is the most popular entertainment. I find that total offenses decrease 13 percent during highly relevant games, an effect that comes exclusively from property crime. The decrease in property crime during the game is partially compensated by an increase in non‐property crime in the aftermath of these games.

Testing Social Support Theory: A Multilevel Analysis of Recidivism

Purpose Tests of social support theory have relied on aggregate crime rates as the outcome of interest, but such a focus ignores the potentially important macro-level processes and effects on individual-level behavior We thus perform the first multi-level investigation of social support theory. Methods Multilevel modeling is used to explore whether the two varieties of county-level social support – the presence of charitable organizations and AFDC expenditures – are associated with recidivism in a sample of Florida prison releasees. Results Results show that while social support explains little variation in individual-level recidivism, a combination of private and public social support may reduce the likelihood of reconviction for drug offenses. Conclusion Findings provide mixed evidence for the prospect that social support—whether governmental or nongovernmental—is associated with recidivism among recently-released inmates.

Demographic change, macroeconomic conditions, and the murder rate: The case of the United States, 1934–2006

Fluctuations in aggregate crime rates contrary to recent shifts in the age distribution of the U.S. population have cast doubt on the predictive power of the age–crime hypothesis. By examining a longer time horizon, back to the early 1930s, we show that the percentage of the young population is a robust predictor of the observed large swings in the U.S. murder rate over time. However, changes in the misery index—the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates—significantly contribute to explaining changes in the murder rate. This applies, in particular, to those changes that are at odds with the long-run trend of the U.S. age distribution, such as the decline in the murder rate in the latter part of the 1970s or its increase starting around the middle of the 1980s.

THE BIG PICTURE: 2010 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY*

Microanalysis holds sway over macroanalysis in contemporary criminology. All of criminology would be better off if greater attention were devoted to the big picture—the relationship between crime and the interplay of institutions in the social systems of whole societies. Microlevel researchers often assume that the reduction of individual criminal propensities leads ipso facto to reductions in aggregate crime rates, but the implied connection is illusive, has not been demonstrated, and is belied by the macroanalysis of crime. The perspectives, methods, and data of macrocriminology also need to be developed, however, if they are to advance our understanding of crime at the level of social systems. Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Karl Polanyi, and C. Wright Mills have contributed essential building blocks for the study of the big picture of crime. Improvements in the quality and timeliness of aggregate crime data, finally, are necessary to bolster the policy relevance of macrocriminology.

Home Foreclosures and Community Crime: Causal or Spurious Association?

More than 6.4 million U.S. properties entered foreclosure between 2007 and 2009. Among the dire consequences of foreclosure is a possible increase in crime. Foreclosures and the subsequent property vacancies and residential turnover may affect community crime rates by increasing opportunities for property crime and by undermining informal social control among community residents. Yet aggregate crime rates continue to decline despite the foreclosure crisis. This study examines the implications of rising foreclosure rates on community crime using crime and foreclosure data from the city of Chicago between 2002 and 2009. Dynamic panel-data models of crime reveal that the association between foreclosure and both property and violent crime is spurious. After accounting for simultaneity and time-variant and time-invariant community characteristics, the rise of recent home foreclosures has no independent effect on community crime rates. Rather, crime and foreclosures are explained by a common set of factors.

Legislative Waiver Reconsidered: General Deterrent Effects of Statutory Exclusion Laws Enacted Post‐1979

In recent years, the juvenile justice system has undergone a “get tough” transformation. One component of the system which has experienced substantial alteration is the mechanism by which states allow for the waiver of juvenile offenders to adult criminal court. Most of the state systems now have some form of transfer procedure in place and many allow for the automatic transfer (or statutory exclusion) of juveniles who have been charged with certain offenses. Although the effects of waiver laws on individuals have received much empirical attention, their effects on the respective states’ aggregate level violent juvenile crime rates are less understood. In this study, we examine the relative effects of legislative waiver laws in 22 states that have added statutory exclusion provisions since 1979. In doing so, we assess whether legislative waiver should be reconsidered.

Crime and corruption in transitional economies: lessons for Cuba

Trends in aggregate crime rates across Europe reveal significant increases in crime in transitional countries. We identify causal mechanisms associated with the economic transition. Historical experience of corruption in the Soviet Union is reviewed, and connections between corruption and transition are analyzed. We apply the results to Cuba's current circumstances, examining the potential for growth in crime and corruption in Cuba and suggesting policies to ameliorate it.

SIZE MATTERS: Examining the Link between Small Manufacturing, Socioeconomic Deprivation, and Crime Rates in Nonmetropolitan Communities

Previous research explaining macrolevel crime patterns has generally been limited in focus to urban communities. Further, the bulk of this research has narrowly investigated links between socioeconomic deprivation, and to a lesser extent labor market characteristics, and crime rates. Taken together, these two foci reveal important limitations in extant research. First, few studies have examined whether levels of socioeconomic disadvantage impact crime rates in nonmetropolitan settings, despite the fact that some rural communities have high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and serious crime problems. Second, research on labor markets and crime has assumed that manufacturing industries are uniformly good for communities. Yet an emerging body of research suggests that the size of local manufacturing establishments may have important implications for community socioeconomic well-being, organization, and social control. Drawing from recent research documenting the positive impact small manufacturing firms have on communities, we expect a strong presence of small firms to be associated with low crime rates in nonmetropolitan areas. Moreover, our conceptual framework suggests that the presence of small manufacturing will temper the criminogenic effects socioeconomic disadvantage has on crime rates. Based on data from 1,731 nonmetropolitan counties, our findings lend strong support to these expectations. The implications of these findings for theory and research on aggregate crime rates are discussed.