CRIMINAL OPPORTUNITY THEORY AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POVERTY AND PROPERTY CRIME

Criminal opportunity theory suggests that community economic deprivation has two countervailing effects on property crime: it causes strain and disorganization which may encourage some individuals to offend, but it also simultaneously lessens opportunities to engage in property crime by reducing the supply of worthwhile targets in an area. The present study examines the relationship between economic deprivation and rates of burglary and motor vehicle theft for census tracts in two large American cities (Austin and Seattle). Regression analyses support the opportunity saturation hypothesis derived from criminal opportunity theory. This hypothesis suggests that the relationship between levels of deprivation and property crime is curvilinear where the positive effect of deprivation on property crime is stronger at low levels of neighborhood poverty than it is at high levels. Research and policy implications are discussed.     

Economic structure and crime: The case of Japan

Despite a high rate of industrialization, crime rates in Japan have declined overall since World War II. This is inconsistent with the “Durkheimian-Modernization” respective which argues that rapid socioeconomic changes increase crime rates. Although a number of qualitative studies investigate possible reasons for Japan's low and declining crime rates, few employ quantitative analyses with aggregate data. This paper systematically examines the impact of poverty, economic inequality and unemployment, on homicide, robbery and larceny rates among the 47 prefectures in Japan. The multiple regression analysis reveals a significant positive relationship between unemployment rates and homicide and robbery and between the degree of economic inequality and larceny. The poverty level is significantly and positively correlated only with homicide, but this relationship vanishes when controls for unemployment rate, the percent of young males and the level of industrialization are introduced. The implications of these findings for Japanese economic policy are discussed.     

Social Disorganization Theory and the Contextual Nature of Crime in Nonmetropolitan Counties*

Abstract This research explores violent and property crime rates in nonmetropolitan counties. It is argued that crime rates are lower in these counties because of higher levels of social integration. We test the hypothesis that predictors of crime from social disorganization theory exert different effects on violent and property crimes at different levels of population change in nonmetropolitan counties. We use a spatial lag regression model to predict the 1989–1991 average violent and property crime rates for these counties, taken from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The results show that a factor‐analyzed index of resource disadvantage (poverty rate, income inequality, unemployment, percent female‐headed households) has different effects on both violent and property crime at different levels of population change in nonmetropolitan counties. Contrary to expectations, we find that resource disadvantage exerts a greater positive effect on both violent and property crimes in nonmetropolitan counties that lost population between 1980 and 1990. Implications for theory and research are discussed.     

Inequality,Unemployment and Crime: A Cross-National Analysis*

In order to contribute to the development of an international perspective on crime and to examine a central tenet similar to many theoretical perspectives on the etiology of crime, cross-national data on inequality, unemployment, and crime rates were analyzed. It was hypothesized that nations having a high rate of unemployment and an inequitable distribution of income would have a high crime rate. The results of the correlational analyses indicate a moderate positive relationship between the rate of unemployment and homicide rates, whereas there are small negative relationships between unemployment rates and (1) the rates of property crime, and (2) the total crime rates. The variable of inequality is strongly related to the three indices of crime and the directions of the relationships are consistent with those involving unemployment rates. The results were further investigated to examine the possibility that the observed relationships were due to the effects of industrialization. The direction of the zero-order correlations involving property crime rates and total crime rates are not changed in the partial correlations and the strength of the relationships are not consistently reduced. These results are discussed in reference to their implications for criminological theory and the development of a comparative criminology.     

The crime drop in comparative perspective: the impact of the economy and imprisonment on American and European burglary rates

Influential statements on recent American crime reductions maintain that the crime drop was confined to the USA. Yet other research has revealed comparable crime decreases in Europe. We suggest that the USA and European crime declines occurred in tandem because they were both brought about by upturns in the economy. In light of US research showing crime reductions resulting from growth in imprisonment, we also examine the possibility that rising imprisonment rates reduced European crime rates. We test these hypotheses in a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of burglary rates in the USA and nine European nations between 1993 and 2006. The results indicate that burglary declines in the US and Europe were associated with rising consumer confidence. By contrast, imprisonment appears to be significantly related to burglary rates only after unusual policy interventions, such as Italy's 2006 clemency measure that dramatically reduced the size of its prison population. We interpret these findings as reflecting the structural similarity and economic integration of the world's developed nations and the uneven convergence in US and European punishment policies.     

Anomic suicide: A Durkheimian analysis of European normlessness

ABSTRACT

According to Durkheim (1897), periods of economic, social, or political change result in a state of anomie or normlessness. Anomic periods lead to deregulation of desires and suffering. Durkheim hypothesized that, as an expression of suffering, societies and groups experience an increase in suicide rates. This paper provides two formal tests of Durkheim’s (1897) theory of anomie - a behavioral aggregate analysis and an attitudinal individual-level analysis - on the backdrop of the 2008 economic crash. The first analysis assesses the relationship between unemployment and suicide in the European Union between 2000 and 2010. Results provide conditional support for Durkheim's theory: suicide rates increased following the crash and decreased once economic stability resumed in 2010 for males only. A second attitudinal analysis identified factors contributing to the gendered relationship between anomie and suicide. Results indicated that traditional Durkheimian regulatory mechanisms, such as marriage and divorce, contributed to the gender-specific results.     

The Influence of Gaming Expenditure on Crime Rates in South Australia: A Local Area Empirical Investigation

Although there has been much speculation about the possible links between gambling and crime rates, relevant quantitative evidence has been practically non-existent in Australia to date. This paper reports the results of research that utilised a model designed to investigate the potential relationship between electronic gaming machine expenditures and property (income-generating) crime rates reported to police in local areas in South Australia in 2002–2003. The research found that the higher the expenditures on gaming machines in a particular local area per adult, the higher the income-generating crime rate in that area. No such relationship was found between gaming machine expenditure and non-income-generating crime rates. However, further research is required before any policy-relevant conclusions can be drawn.     

The Impact of Religious Homogeneity on the Rate of Divorce in the United States

This study extends the understanding of the relationship between religious homogeneity, that is, the extent to which formal religious groups are concentrated at the county level, and the rate of persons currently divorced in those counties. Linking the research question to Durkheimian precepts of religion as an integrative force in social life, the essential question is, “At the county level, does the rate of currently divorced vary inversely with more concentrated affiliation with formal religious organizations?” We investigate this relationship using data from the 1990 U.S. Census and from the Glenmary Research Center that encompasses 621 counties in the U.S., that is, a 20 percent random sample of counties from each state. As hypothesized, the divorced rate is inversely related to religious homogeneity, even after controlling for a series of factors that have been shown to be correlated with divorce in other studies.     

COMPETING PERSPECTIVES ON CROSS-NATIONAL CRIME: AN EVALUATION OF THEORY AND EVIDENCE

Cross-national studies of crime are dominated by a Durkheimian-Modernization theoretical perspective. We evaluate this perspective and present two alternatives, the Marxian-World System and Ecological-Opportunity perspectives. Each is for its theory of social change, causal explanation of criminal behavior, conceptualization of law and crime rates, and view of the relation between collective political behavior and crime. The empirical evidence is assessed and weak support is found for the dominant perspective. The article concludes by reconsidering the concepts of economic development and crime rates.     

Immigration,internal migration and crime in South Africa: A multi‐level model analysis

A review of South African literature on crime confirms the lack of a study that considers the impact of migration on the crime rate in the country. The high levels of crime in South Africa aside, additional motivation behind the study has been the increasing rhetoric in media and by politicians insinuating the prominent role of foreign immigrants in the high crime levels of the country. While this is the first attempt to study this relationship in the South African context, it also stands apart from existing studies undertaken in the developed countries by accounting for both internal migrants as well as foreign immigrants. Further, the study claims the use of multi‐level regression estimations as an improvement from the existing studies on the issue by accounting for variance clustering across different spatial levels. In all the estimated models, internal migrant ratio came out as being positively and significantly related to crime rates across five different crime categories, with the sole exception of sexual crime rate. There was no evidence of foreign immigrant ratio impacting on crime rate in any of the crimes analysed except crime relating to property. Further, income inequality and sex ratio figure as determining factors across most types of crime in South Africa.     

Halbwachs and Durkheim: a test of two theories of suicide

The social integration hypothesis forms the basis of this study. It was first asserted by Durkheim in late nineteenth-century France and many of his assumptions are based on a social disorganizational model. This model tended to equate social change with the breakdown of social control and many of Durkheim's notions about anomie are derived from this view of industrial society. Halbwachs, on the other hand, proposed a social psychological theory of suicide. His model specifies more clearly the conditions under which lack of social integration may induce suicide. This study shows that among a population in transition, the Alaska Natives, the suicide rate was explained by the Halbwachsian model at least as well as the Durkheimian one and sometimes better. The Durkheimian model is shown to reflect a Cartesian dualism, which accounts only for that which is observable, thus making for biased studies of suicide. Moreover, psychopathological research confirms the Halbwachsian model. These findings restore the social isolation theory, once long neglected, to its rightful place among theories of suicide and opens up an important field for researchers seeking to understand high rates of suicide.     

WHOSE CIVIC COMMUNITY? TESTING ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESES OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CIVIC COMMUNITY AND RACIAL INEQUALITY IN ARREST RATES

This analysis extends prior research on racial inequality in arrest rates by testing opposing hypotheses derived from the civic community tradition in sociology. One interpretation of this perspective suggests that communities with a locally-oriented economic infrastructure, an abundance of civic institutions, and civically engaged citizens should exhibit lower racial disparity in arrest rates. On the other hand, recent writings exposing a potential “dark side” of social capital suggest that civic community may exacerbate such racial disparties. Using spatial regression models to analyze data from nearly 1,800 U.S. counties, the current analysis examines these competing hypotheses regarding the effects of civic community. Results suggest mixed support for both the traditional and “dark side” predictions. Implications for theory and empirical research are discussed.     

Persistence of Suburban Violent Crime Rates: An Ecological Analysis

Abstract

A lagged endogenous variable structural model of 1970 suburban violent crime rates is constructed and evaluated using a sample of 252 large suburbs for which 1960 and 1970 official crime data were available. It was found that suburban crime rates are persistent, that employment specialization and percent low income affect change in violent crime rates, and that suburban age, density, employment specialization, percent low income, percent Black, and region have substantial indirect effects on 1970 crime rates through earlier areal crime rates. Despite theoretical expectations, population growth and age composition exerted no significant direct or indirect effects on violent crime or changes in violent crime rates.     

Language Use and Violence: Assessing the Relationship Between Linguistic Context and Macrolevel Violence

Scholars have produced a sizable body of research assessing the macrolevel links between immigration and crime. However, researchers have given far less attention to related questions about the effects of language use on aggregate levels of violence. The current study addresses this gap in research by exploring the ways that patterns of language use—specifically, language heterogeneity and Spanish‐language concentration—are related to year 2010 serious violent crime rates for nearly 2,900 census places across the United States. Results of our analysis reveal that linguistic heterogeneity is associated with increased violence and that this relationship is stronger in disadvantaged contexts. In contrast, Spanish‐language concentration appears to be protective against violence and mitigates the violence‐generating effects of structural disadvantage, net of immigration and other macrostructural characteristics. Implications of these findings for research on immigration, communities and crime, and related theoretical perspectives on immigrant revitalization and macrostructural theories of crime are discussed.     

WHY DO INCREASED ARREST RATES APPEAR TO REDUCE CRIME: DETERRENCE,INCAPACITATION, OR MEASUREMENT ERROR?

This paper attempts to discriminate between deterrence, incapacitation, and measurement error as explanations for the negative empirical relationship between arrest rates and crime. Measurement error cannot explain the observed patterns in the data. Incapacitation suggests that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will reduces all crime rates; deterrence predicts that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will lead to a rise in other crimes as criminals substitute away from the first crime. Empirically, deterrence appears to be the more important factor, particularly for property crimes. ( JEL K42)     

Opportunity Theory and Agricultural Crime Victimization*

Abstract A growing body of research lends support to opportunity theory and its variants, but has yet to focus systematically on a number of specific offenses and contexts. Typically, the more crimes and contexts to which a theory applies, the broader its scope and range, respectively, and thus generalizability. In this paper, we focus on agricultural crime victimization— including theft of farm equipment, crops, livestock, and chemicals—an offense that opportunity theory appears well‐situated to explain. Specifically, we examine whether key dimensions of the theory are empirically associated with the likelihood of victimization and also examine factors associated with farmers' use of guardianship measures. In contrast to much previous research, we combine multiple individual‐level measures of these dimensions. We conclude that the theory partially accounts for variation in agricultural crime victimization, depending on the type of crime, and that greater work is needed investigating how key dimensions of opportunity theory should be conceptualized and operationalized in rural contexts. The study's implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

The Elementary Forms of Place and Their Transformations: A Durkheimian Model

Due to the fragmentary nature of research findings and conceptual models, the Durkheimian legacy remains undervalued in contemporary spatial theory. The paper addresses this neglect by proposing a unified Durkheimian model of place which can be applied to case history and comparative analyses. It draws together the fragmented insights of Durkheimian theory to characterize four elementary forms of place: sacred, profane, liminal and mundane. These place/space identities are maintained and transformed through rituals and narratives which depend upon contingent human actions for their sustenance. The paper concludes with an extended case study which deploys the model to explain the changing meanings of the site of the Bastille (Paris, France) over the past two centuries.     

SIZE MATTERS:

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.     

Reconsidering the Unusual Suspect: Immigration and the 1990s Crime Decline

The United States experienced a dramatic decline in crime during the 1990s. A number of explanations for this decline have been put forth, including demographic shifts, economic trends, stricter gun control laws, and changes in drug markets. A widely reported explanation is that the surge of immigration during the 1990s was the main cause for that decade's crime decline. Although the claim has received considerable attention, it has yet to be tested empirically using national‐level data. In order to fully test the immigration‐1990s crime decline relationship, we use national‐level homicide and Census data from 1990 to 2000. Our results reveal four key findings: (1) crime declined for nearly all groups during the 1990s; (2) non‐Latino blacks contributed the most to the crime decline, by a wide margin; (3) both overall and black homicide declined the least in areas with the highest levels of immigration; and (4) we find no evidence that immigration indirectly lowered non‐immigrant crime rates by revitalizing communities. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings.     

The constancy of crime hypothesis: Historical evidence from Plymouth Colony

In extending Durkheimian thought on the relationship between deviance and social order, Erikson (1966) advanced the constancy of crime hypothesis, maintaining that the volume of deviant behavior remains stable over time. Erikson's data for Essex County do show remarkable stability for the years 1651–1680 in the reported offender rate. However, Essex County represents a very limited test of the hypothesis. We present comparative historical data for the entirety of Plymouth Colony, 1633–1679, finding that change—not constancy—best characterizes the evidence. The lack of unequivocal support for the hypothesis suggests a need for its rethinking. Several such possibilities are briefly discussed.We wish to thank our colleagues David L. Smith, Charles J. Dudley, Michael Hughes, Richard Schuster, Alan C. Acock (Sociology), A. Roger Ekirch (Department of History) and the anonymous reviewers ofQualitative Sociology for their helpful suggestions on a prior version of this paper. The research was made possible by a small project grant from VPI & SU, and we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Catherine L. Hammond in completing the investigation.