Differences In Crime Rates Research Articles

Comparative Analysis of Crime: Estonia, the Other Baltic Republics, and the Soviet Union

Factors that influence crime are many and varied. This paper examines the differences in crime rates between the various regions of the Soviet Union with particular attention directed to the Baltic republics. Over the years, crime has increased considerably throughout the country. It is particularly high in the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, although it has declined in Transcaucasia. In the case of Estonia, for example, the crime rate during the postwar years (1946-1950) was high. This was a result of the introduction of socialist methods of production that were alien to Estonia and to the influx of people who had fled the Soviet Union to save themselves from starvation. During the years 1951-1955 the crime rate decreased in Estonia, but in later years, especially since the early 1980s, it has grown steadily.

THE NEGLECTED SITUATION: A CROSSNATIONAL STUDY OF THE SITUATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CRIME*

Although it is generally recognized in the social sciences that the “situation” is indispensable for understanding behavior, thus far criminologists have not devoted systematic attention to situational analysis. This paper contributes to the development of a situational perspective on crime by defining the concept of situation, developing four hypotheses about the situational characteristics of selected personal contact crimes, and then testing those hypotheses using victimization survey data from the United States and Venezuela. The research shows that coercive crimes are less situationally clustered than noncoercive crimes and that instrumental crimes are more situationally clustered than character crimes. Despite tremendous differences in crime rates for the two countries, substantial similarity is found in situational crime patterns. The implications of the research for criminological theory are discussed.

WHY ARE PRISON RATES IN ENGLAND AND WALES HIGHER THAN IN AUSTRALIA?

In 1986 the number of people in prisons per 100,000 of the population was much higher in England and Wales than Australia (93 compared to 70). This difference was not due to differences in crime rates nor the success of the police in apprehending offenders, but to the greater number of people (per capita) in England and Wales received into prison, both on remand and under sentence. Furthermore, in England and Wales, young adults were much more likely to be detained in custody—particularly those sentenced for non-sexual assault, burglary, and property damage.

Foreign Minorities and the Criminal Justice System in The Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract: The article addresses problems of ethnic and foreign minorities in the criminal justice system in the Federal Republic of Germany. Analysis of police and court data suggests at first glance that members of foreign minorities commit far more crimes than are committed by the population's majority. But controlling for differences in those variables which make considerable differences between foreign minorities and the population's majority, especially socio‐economic status, differences in crime rates fade away. It is argued that cultural conflict theory does not provide an adequate framework for explaining crime occurring within foreign minorities. Available evidence suggests that deprivation and control theories are more powerful in explaining criminal behaviour within ethnic and foreign minorities, they seem also to he more useful in guiding criminal policy dealing with foreign offenders. Although crime problems have been of paramount importance in criminological studies dealing with ethnic and foreign minorities, problems of criminal victimisation should be taken into account, too. Furthermore, problems of processing members of ethnic minorities through the criminal justice system are touched on in the article with special emphasis on those points in the process which are hypothesised to embody great potential for discriminatory decision‐making

Rare events, sample size, and statistical problems in the analysis of the NCS city surveys

The NCS city surveys are a unique and important data set and criminologists' only practical alternative to UCR based crime rate estimates for a large number of American cities. There are, however, some statistical problems involved in using this particular data set that are quite different from those usually faced by researchers investigating crime rates across cities. These result from the relative rareness of many of the crimes investigated and the small number of cities included in these surveys. These problems include the unreliability of rate estimates for cities and the potential for both lack of statistical power and the overfitting of equations designed to explain differences in crime rates among cities. Each of these problems is explicated, and strategies for analyzing these data are suggested.

The Etiology of Juvenile Delinquency: The United States and Switzerland Compared

Both Switzerland and the United States are highly affluent societies and rank consistently among the top five countries in the world in per capita income, both are Western democracies, both are highly urbanized, and both are highly industrialized. Thus, it is quite surprising to discover that Switzerland has much lower rates of crime and delinquency than is the case for the United States, a fact which is especially true for violent crimes. This paper attempts to explain the sources of the differences in crime rates between the two countries and gives special attention to a comparison of juvenile misconduct in the two countries. In the first section, difficulties are discussed concerning the measurement of crime and delinquency in Switzerland, a country which collects few data on social problems in general. Some general trends are shown to be clear, however, including marked increases in drug abuse and suicide cases among the young in Switzerland. In the subsequent section, previous explanations of crime i...

Urbanism, Race, and Crime

There is general agreement that urbanism is an important correlate of criminality. However, the interpretation of the relation is a matter of theoretical dispute. Some argue that differences in crime rates across the urban-rural dimension can be attributed to differences in the compositions of the populations residing in those areas. The most common argument is that there is a confounding effect between urbanism and race. This paper uses National Crime Survey data to test the compositional argument. The findings imply a reconsideration of the accepted relationship between urbanism and crime generally portrayed in the criminological literature. Data limitations are noted.

Community Safety and Criminal Activity in Black Suburbs

(1) Crime in the United States is still primarily a phenomenon of large cities, even though crime rates in suburbs are increasing at a much higher rate. (2) Crime is committed disproportionately by individuals at the lower end of the occupational scale-much of which stems from inner-city ghetto slums where many blacks live. (3) The differences in crime rates from one group to another are not racial, but a result of social pressures. (4) While the emphasis has been on high crime rates within black central-city ghettos, little research has focused on those individuals desiring to live in crime-free environments.'

Effect of Police Expenditures on Crime Rates: Some Evidence

The main concern of this paper is the relationship between public sector use of resources for law enforcement and the rate of criminal activity. In addition, this paper reports tests of the hypotheses that crime rates are influenced by economic and demographic factors that condition the individual's environment and alternatives. The results support several tentative conclusions: existing intercity differences in crime rates cannot be attributed to the existing and substantial intercity differences in resources devoted to public law enforcement. Nor can the major share of crime rate variation be attributed to environmental factors that are widely regarded as determinants of individual decisions to engage in unlawful activity, although some of these factors (income, race, age, city size) appear to have a significant and stable effect on crime rates.

Organization as a Key to Police Effectiveness

Citing evidence on intercity differences in crime rates, as well as differences in rates of increase for several kinds of crime, this paper argues that police departments differ in their effectiveness. The key to an understanding of effectiveness lies in the way police departments themselves are organized. How individual police men perform their occupational duties depends in part on how these duties are defined. In order to understand these definitions and the pressures which affect the way police perform their work, it is necessary to adopt a "systemic" view of legal and illegal forces in society. Determinants of police effectiveness are ex plored, through examples from the control of organized crimes, by relating the way departments interact with other legal and illegal organizations.