By Ben Grunwald and Jeffrey Fagan

In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow that a suspect’s presence in a “high-crime area” is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. Despite the importance of the decision, the Court provided no guidance about what that standard means, and over fifteen years later, we still have no idea how police officers understand and apply it in practice. This Article conducts the first empirical analysis of Wardlow by examining data on over two million investigative stops conducted by the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012. Our results suggest that Wardlow may have been wrongly decided. Specifically, we find evidence that officers often assess whether areas are high crime using a very broad geographic lens; that they call almost every block in the city high crime; that their assessments of whether an area is high crime are nearly uncorrelated with actual crime rates; that the suspect’s race predicts whether an officer calls an area high crime as well as the actual crime rate; that the racial composition of the area and the identity of the officer are stronger predictors of whether an officer calls an area high crime than the crime rate itself; and that stops are less or as likely to result in the detection of contraband when an officer invokes high-crime area as a basis of a stop. We conclude with several policy proposals for courts, police departments, and scholars to help address these problems in the doctrine.

California Law Review 345-404 (2019

By Damon L. Perry

In Britain, no one has the right not to be offended. Words or actions that are taken by some as offensive – whether they relate to religion, sexuality or race – are not criminal as long as they are not intentionally hostile and meant, or likely, to incite hatred. The statutory guidance on Non Crime Hate Incidents, revised in March 2023, is consistent with the law in this regard. It states: “Fundamentally, offending someone is not, in and of itself, a criminal offence. To constitute an offence under hate crime legislation, the speech or behaviour in question must be threatening, abusive or insulting and be intended to, or likely to, stir up hatred”. Yet, this does not seem to be fully acknowledged in Britain’s schools. As this revealing survey of over a thousand teachers from YouGov and Policy Exchange demonstrates, since the Batley Grammar School protests, a small but significant proportion of British teachers have self-censored to avoid offence on religious grounds – 16%. (That proportion is slightly higher for teachers of certain subjects, including almost a fifth of all English teachers and art teachers – 19%). In areas with the largest Muslim populations, around 10% fewer teachers do not self-censor than those in areas with the smallest Muslim populations. A worrying proportion believe that – regardless of a teacher’s intentions – images of the prophet Muhammad should never be used in classrooms, even in the teaching of Islamic art or ethics: In addition to the 55% of teachers that would not personally use an image of Muhammad independently from the Batley Grammar School protests, an additional 9% said they personally were less likely to use it as a result of the events in Batley. The case of the teacher at Batley Grammar who went into hiding after death threats thus appears to have had a significant impact on teachers’ confidence and willingness to use materials that fall within the scope of the law. Alarmingly, half of British teachers believe that if blasphemy-related protests led by activist and advocacy groups occur outside their schools, there would be a risk to their physical safety. Despite most teachers thinking that headteachers get the balance right – between supporting them to use materials that are on the right side of the law but which might offend, and ensuring no offence is caused – they are clearly in need of greater confidence in the support they can expect from their headteachers and, in the case of activist-led protests outside their school gates, the police. Recent events have given further impetus to concerns regarding the physical safety of teachers and the security at schools. On 13 October, 2023, in Arras, France, a literature teacher, Dominque Bernard, was killed in a knife attack; the suspect, an Islamist extremist, was looking for teachers  of history or geography. The case has been compared to that of Samuel Paty, the teacher who was killed three years ago by an Islamist extremist for showing cartoons of Muhammad to a class on freedom of expression. Both teachers have been described by President Macron as champions of the values of the French republic. Although this tragic incident took place across the Channel, France’s battle with Islamist extremism is one shared with the UK. Closer to home, in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on hundreds of civilians in Israel on 7 October, protests on the streets of the UK against Israeli reprisals in the name of the Palestinian “resistance” have demonstrated alarming levels of hateful extremism and antisemitism.5 Some Jewish schools were forced to close on 13 October, when Hamas called for a “Global Day of Jihad”, and several Jewish schools were vandalised with red paint. The atmosphere has been fraught. The Department for Education wrote to school leaders “to ensure that any political activity from pupils in response to the crisis does not create an ‘atmosphere of intimidation’”  etc.

London: Policy Exchange, 2024. 51p.

By Yuhyeong Jang1 ·Raanju R. Sundararajan1 ·Wagner Barreto-Souza2 · Elizabeth Wheaton-Paramo

The article presents a robust quantitative approach for determining significant economic factors for sex trafficking in the United States. The aim is to study monthly counts of sex trafficking-related convictions and use a wide range of economic variables as covariates to investigate their effect on conviction counts. A count time series model is considered along with a regression setup to include economic time series as covariates (economic factors) to explain the counts on sex trafficking-related convictions. The statistical significance of these economic factors is investigated, and the significant factors are ranked based on appropriate model selection methods. The inclusion of time-lagged versions of the economic factor time series in the regression model is also explored. The authors’ findings indicate that economic factors relating to immigration policy, consumer price index and labor market regulations are the most significant in explaining sex trafficking convictions

Empirical Economics. 2024, 18pg

By Robert D. Crutchfield 

Are the unemployed more likely to commit crimes? Does having a job make one less likely to commit a crime? Criminologists have found that individuals who are marginalized from the labor market are more likely to commit crimes, and communities with more members who are marginal to the labor market have higher rates of crime. Yet, as Robert Crutchfield explains, contrary to popular expectations, unemployment has been found to be an inconsistent predictor of either individual criminality or collective crime rates. In Get a Job, Crutchfield offers a carefully nuanced understanding of the links among work, unemployment, and crime.

Crutchfield explains how people’s positioning in the labor market affects their participation in all kinds of crimes, from violent acts to profit-motivated offenses such as theft and drug trafficking. Crutchfield also draws on his first-hand knowledge of growing up in a poor, black neighborhood in Pittsburgh and later working on the streets as a parole officer, enabling him to develop a more complete understanding of how work and crime are related and both contribute to, and are a result of, social inequalities and disadvantage. Well-researched and informative, Get a Job tells a powerful story of one of the most troubling side effects of economic disparities in America.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2014. 303p.

By Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney Lopez, and Jonathan Simon

Since the 1970s, Americans have witnessed a pyrrhic war on crime, with sobering numbers at once chilling and cautionary. Our imprisoned population has increased five-fold, with a commensurate spike in fiscal costs that many now see as unsupportable into the future. As American society confronts a multitude of new challenges ranging from terrorism to the disappearance of middle-class jobs to global warming, the war on crime may be up for reconsideration for the first time in a generation or more. Relatively low crime rates indicate that the public mood may be swinging toward declaring victory and moving on.
However, to declare that the war is over is dangerous and inaccurate, and After the War on Crime reveals that the impact of this war reaches far beyond statistics; simply moving on is impossible. The war has been most devastating to those affected by increased rates and longer terms of incarceration, but its reach has also reshaped a sweeping range of social institutions, including law enforcement, politics, schooling, healthcare, and social welfare. The war has also profoundly altered conceptions of race and community.
It is time to consider the tasks reconstruction must tackle. To do so requires first a critical assessment of how this war has remade our society, and then creative thinking about how government, foundations, communities, and activists should respond. After the War on Crime accelerates this reassessment with original essays by a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars as well as policy professionals and community activists. The volume's immediate goal is to spark a fresh conversation about the war on crime and its consequences; its long-term aspiration is to develop a clear understanding of how we got here and of where we should go.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2008.256p

by Osborne Jackson and Riley Sullivan

Criminal justice reform has been a high-priority policy area in New England and the nation in recent years. States are generally seeking legislation that would help reintegrate ex-offenders into society while still prioritizing the welfare of all members of the public and the achievement of fiscal goals. The research findings presented in this report indicate that raising felony larceny thresholds—that is, increasing the dollar value of stolen property at or above which a larceny offense may be charged in court as a felony rather than a misdemeanor, a policy adopted by three New England states over the last decade—seems to balance these objectives. Policymakers interested in criminal justice reform should consider incorporating felony larceny threshold increases into the suite of policy changes implementing such reform.

When assessing larceny incidents as a whole, this report concludes that enacting higher felony larceny thresholds does not lead to an escalation of crime in the short run. Even upon considering the subset of larceny incidents where escalation is most likely to occur and where analysis is potentially not affected by other concurrent changes in larceny penalties, this report finds only a small, 2 percent short-run increase in the intensity of larceny crime (value of stolen property) and still no increase in the amount of larceny crime (rate of occurrence).

New England Public Policy Center,  Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. 2020, 29pg

By Osborne Jackson and Thu Tran

The “hidden tax” resulting from larceny crime refers to the higher prices paid by consumers to producers who raise prices in order to pass on some of the associated cost of such theft. In the same vein, consumers who are victimized by larceny theft could pass along some of the associated cost that they bear by spending less. This study analyzes larceny crime as a hidden tax in order to examine its welfare implications. Using traditional tax theory, the authors first characterize how larceny crime might create distortions in a given product market. Employing a sample covering 17 US states during the 2000–2015 period, they then use the enactment of higher felony larceny thresholds to generate exogenous variation in larceny crime by product market. A felony larceny threshold is the dollar value of stolen property at or above which a larceny offense may be charged in court as a felony rather than a misdemeanor. Focusing on the subset of larceny crime that is likely most affected by raising the larceny threshold, the authors calculate baseline hidden tax rates and then examine how changes in larceny rates related to higher thresholds affect this tax. They use these estimated changes in the hidden tax rates to compare the associated welfare costs of larceny crime across product markets.''

Boston: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Research Department. 2020, 33

By The Pelican Institute

This year, disturbing reports of increased crime have dominated the news, both in Louisiana and nationally.

Crime is a serious issue that demands thoughtful solutions to deter criminal behavior and promote public safety. They should be guided by data and evidence, not anecdotes. That’s why Pelican set out to review and better understand the underlying data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report and Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Comparing Louisiana’s crime data with other states paints a complete picture of the scale of the problem and its potential causes.

New Orleans LA: Pelican Institute. 2022, 12pg

By Douglas Husak

The allegation that criminal justice systems (and that of the United States in particular) have become guilty of overcriminalization is widely accepted by academics and practitioners on nearly all points along the political spectrum (Dillon 2012). Many commentators respond by recommending that states decriminalize given kinds of conduct that supposedly exemplify the problem. I urge those who are theoretically minded to proceed cautiously and address several preliminary matters that must be resolved before genuine progress is possible. In the absence of a position on several controversial normative and conceptual issues, discussions of overcriminalization and decriminalization are bound to be oversimplified and superficial. My review is organized around six of these issues. I invite commentators to examine (a) what the criminal law is; (b) what overcriminalization means; (c) why overcriminalization is thought to be pernicious; (d) whether overcriminalization is a de jure or de facto phenomenon, i.e., whether it is a function of the law on the books or the law in action; (e) what normative criteria might be invoked to alleviate the predicament; and (f) whether and to what extent overcriminalization is a serious concern in our penal system. Even though these six issues are analytically distinct, positions about one invariably blur into commitments about the others. Although theorists rarely dissent from the claim that states are guilty of something called overcriminalization, uncertainties about the foregoing topics mar their treatments. I conclude that a deep understanding of the problem of overcriminalization depends on how these six issues are resolved.

Annual Review of Criminology, v. 6. 2023, 19pg

By Ralph B. Taylor

For close to a century, the field of community criminology has examined the causes and consequences of community crime and delinquency rates. Nevertheless, there is still a lot we do not know about the dynamics behind these connections. In this book, Ralph Taylor argues that obstacles to deepening our understanding of community/crime links arise in part because most scholars have overlooked four fundamental concerns: how conceptual frames depend on the geographic units and/or temporal units used; how to establish the meaning of theoretically central ecological empirical indicators; and how to think about the causes and consequences of non-random selection dynamics. The volume organizes these four conceptual challenges using a common meta-analytic framework. The framework pinpoints critical features of and gaps in current theories about communities and crime, connects these concerns to current debates in both criminology and the philosophy of social science, and sketches the types of theory testing needed in the future if we are to grow our understanding of the causes and consequences of community crime rates. Taylor explains that a common meta-theoretical frame provides a grammar for thinking critically about current theories and simultaneously allows presenting these four topics and their connections in a unified manner. The volume provides an orientation to current and past scholarship in this area by describing three distinct but related community crime sequences involving delinquents, adult offenders, and victims. These sequences highlight community justice dynamics thereby raising questions about frequently used crime indicators in this area of research. A groundbreaking work melding past scholarly practices in criminology with the field’s current needs, Community Criminology is an essential work for criminologists.

New York; London: New York University Press, 2015. 336p.

By David Garland

This review situates the recent, radical challenges to American criminal justice—calls to end mass incarceration, defund the police, and dismantle systemic racism—within the broader social and economic arrangements that make the US system so distinctive and so problematic. It describes the social structures, institutions, and processes that give rise to America's extraordinary penal state—as well as to its extraordinarily high rates of homicide and social disorder—and considers what these portend for the prospect of radical change. It does so by locating American crime and punishment in the structural context of America's (always-already racialized) political economy—a distinctive set of social structures and institutional legacies that render the United States more violent, more disorderly, and more reliant on penal control than any other developed nation. Drawing on a broad range of social science research findings, it argues that this peculiar political economy—a form of capitalism and democratic governance forged on the anvils of slavery and racial segregation and rendered increasingly insecure and exclusionary in the decades following deindustrialization—generates high levels of social disorganization and criminal violence and predisposes state authorities to adopt penal control as the preferred policy response.

Annual Review of Criminology v. 6. 2023, 20pg

By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin

This report examines the effects of a small set of factors on violent and property crime rates in Chicago. The authors find that a statistical model based on the Illinois imprisonment rate and a measure of the cost of living explained past variation in crime rates with minimal error.  The authors then used the model to forecast crime rates through 2025. Both violent and property crime are forecast to drop through 2025. In addition, the report finds that were Illinois to reduce its imprisonment rate by 25%, the effect on Chicago’s rate of violent crime would be negligible. No association was found between imprisonment rates and property crime. 

New York: Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. 2023, 20pg

By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin

Employing a small number of predictive variables, the authors of this report created statistical models to forecast violent and property crime rates in New York City. The models estimated yearly changes in New York City’s crime rates from the early 1960s through 2021, estimates that corresponded very closely to the actual rates. The authors then used these models to forecast annual changes in crime rates through 2026. The forecast for violent crime is a slight decrease each year through 2026, while the forecast for property crime shows slight yearly increases. Finally, the projected impact on New York City’s violent crime rate of reducing the state imprisonment rate by 25% would be minimal. No association was found between imprisonment rates and property crime.

New York: Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. 2023, 18pg

By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin

In this report, the authors devised statistical models to “predict” past yearly changes in Los Angeles’s rates of violent and property crime from the early 1960s through 2021, employing a very small set of predictive variables known to be associated with levels of crime. The yearly changes projected for those years corresponded quite closely to the actual changes. The authors then used the models to forecast crime trends through 2026. Violent crime is forecast to decline through 2026, while property crime is expected to rise modestly in the same period. The analysis also finds that if California imprisonment rates were reduced by 20%, the effect on crime in Los Angeles would be minimal.

New York: Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. 2023, 21pg

by Lindsey Price Jackson

This guide on Risk-Need-Responsivity: Response Recommendations for Community Courts provides best practices for court practitioners in alignment with evidence-based RNR findings, including advice on incentives and sanctions and a response matrix template.

Also included with this publication is the Center for Justice Innovation's free, non-proprietary RNR tool, the Criminal Court Assessment Tool (CCAT), available in both English and Spanish. Use of an RNR tool is often legislated for community justice programs or required by grant funding. The CCAT is available as an option for use in court-based programs in alignment with local requirements. Please contact the Center for a short, free training before using the CCAT. We also strongly recommend locally validating the tool on your jurisdiction’s population before implementing.

New York: Center for Justice Innovation. 2024, 16pg

By Louise Mansfield, Norma Daykin, Neil E. O'Connell, Daniel Bailey, Louise Forde, Robyn Smith, Jake Gifford, Garcia Ashdown-Franks

Background

Young people who enter the justice system experience complex health and social needs, and offending behaviour is increasingly recognised as a public health problem. Arts interventions can be used with the aim of preventing or reducing offending or reoffending.

Objectives

1. To evaluate evidence on the effectiveness and impact of arts interventions on keeping children and young people safe from involvement in violence and crime. 2. To explore factors impacting the implementation of arts interventions, and barriers and facilitators to participation and achievement of intended outcomes. 3. To develop a logic model of the processes by which arts interventions might work in preventing offending behaviours.

Search Methods

We searched AMED, Academic Search Complete; APA PsycInfo; CINAHL Plus; ERIC; SocIndex; SportDiscus, Medline, CENTRAL, Web of Science, Scopus, PTSDPubs and Performing Arts Periodicals Database, Sage, the US National Criminal Justice Reference Service, the Global Policing and British Library EThOS databases, and the National Police Library from inception to January 2023 without language restrictions.

Selection Criteria

We included randomised and non-randomised controlled trials and quasi-experimental study designs. We included qualitative studies conducted alongside intervention trials investigating experiences and perceptions of participants, and offering insight into the barriers and facilitators to delivering and receiving arts interventions. We included qualitative and mixed methods studies focused on delivery of arts interventions. We included studies from any global setting. We included studies with CYP (8–25 years) who were identified as at-risk of offending behaviour (secondary populations) or already in the criminal justice system (tertiary populations). We included studies of interventions involving arts participation as an intervention on its own or alongside other interventions. Primary outcomes were: (i) offending behaviour and (ii) anti-pro-social behaviours. Secondary outcomes were: participation/attendance at arts interventions, educational attainment, school attendance and engagement and exclusions, workplace engagement, wellbeing, costs and associated economic outcomes and adverse events.

Data Collection and Analysis

We included 43 studies (3 quantitative, 38 qualitative and 2 mixed methods). We used standard methodological procedures expected by The Campbell Collaboration. We used GRADE and GRADE CERQual to assess the certainty of and confidence in the evidence for quantitative and qualitative data respectively.

Main Results

We found insufficient evidence from quantitative studies to support or refute the effectiveness of arts interventions for CYP at-risk of or who have offended for any outcome. Qualitative evidence suggested that arts interventions may lead to positive emotions, the development of a sense of self, successful engagement in creative practices, and development of positive personal relationships. Arts interventions may need accessible and flexible delivery and are likely to be engaging if they have support from staff, family and community members, are delivered by professional artists, involve culturally relevant activity, a youth focus, regularity and a sustainable strategy. We found limited evidence that a lack of advocacy, low funding, insufficient wider support from key personnel in adjacent services could act as barriers to success. Methodological limitations resulted in a judgement of very low confidence in these findings.

Authors' Conclusions

We found insufficient evidence from quantitative studies to support or refute the effectiveness of arts interventions for CYP at-risk of offending or who have offended for any outcome. We report very low confidence about the evidence for understanding the processes influencing the successful design and delivery of arts interventions in this population of CYP and their impact on behavioural, psychosocial, cognitive and offending outcomes.

Campbell Systematic Reviews Volume20, Issue1 March 2024 e1377

By Maury Nation

The author reports on the motivation for developing and performing the Nashville Longitudinal Study of Youth Safety and Wellbeing (NLSYSW) as well as the project’s activities and outcomes, and resulting artifacts. The work of the NLSYSW was organized into working groups corresponding to the principal required tasks to develop the multi-sectoral dataset. The four data collection working groups focused on the following: Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) administrative data; MNPS survey data; contextual data; and youth mapping data. Two data management working groups focused on data anonymization and data archiving. The report describes the major tasks of each working group, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic disruptions, and NLSYSW outputs and artifacts. The major output of the study was a compilation of multiple data sources with over two million observations and 450 variables; the report provides a list of data sources with the years of data included and a short description of each data set, and directs readers to the user guide and codebook sections for complete details.

Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 2023. 167p.

By Peggy C. Giordano; Monica A. Longmore; Wendy D. Manning; Jennifer E. Copp

The research described in this report sought to address social and individual-level mechanisms that drive successful and sustained criminal desistance through a mixed-method project that included analyses based on the existing six waves of the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS) over an 18-year time span. The researchers’ goal was to more fully inform criminal justice policy priorities and help design more effective criminal recidivism intervention efforts. The researchers proposed conducting desistance narratives with a subset of male and female respondents who had evidenced a pattern of sustained criminal desistance, and contrasting those respondents with individuals who have persisted in criminal activity as well as others with patterns of intermittent criminal activity. The report details the researchers’ methodology, and notes that their goal was to incorporate insights from the narratives as well as contemporary theorizing to systematically distinguish individuals who persisted, desisted, and were intermittently involved in criminal activity. The three guiding research aims were: to identify individual-level factors linked to sustained desistance; to examine social network influences on desistance processes; and to determine gender similarities and differences in desistance processes. The report provides a discussion of outcomes and findings, and a listing of artifacts that resulted from the project.

Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, 2023. 27p.

By David Pérez Esparza, Eugenio Weigend Vargas, Tony Payan and Carlos Pérez Ricart

Gun shows are public gatherings where licensed gun dealers and private gun owners use formal and informal venues to exchange information or sell and buy firearms, accessories, and ammunition. A major challenge is that gun shows, unlike established business locations, can be considered gray zones where regulatory loopholes facilitate the movement of legal firearms to illegal domains both domestically and internationally. Given this, they tend to feed into gun trafficking schemes. Despite this, gun shows are poorly monitored. Moreover, these events are not tracked by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and what little is known comes from academic studies, press releases, or outdated ATF reports. To address this gap, update information, and generate a better understanding of how gun shows connect with gun trafficking, we generated a gun show dataset in the US from 2011 to 2019. We compiled information on promoted gun shows from three main sources, The National Rifle Association Magazine and the websites Gun Show Trader and Shooting Illustrator. We completed our dataset by looking at other minor sources that promoted gun shows. Our dataset encompasses information of 20,691 gun shows and suggests that 71% of them occurred in states where background checks were not required during gun sales between private individuals. We argue that scholars and practitioners will find in this dataset an original tool to analyze gun shows and their impact on public security and public health.

  Journal of Illicit Economies and Development. 2022, 11pg

By Jocelyn J. Bélanger, N. Pontus Leander, Maximilian Agostini, Jannis Kreienkamp, Wolfgang Stroebe

This research examines the notion of defensive gun ownership using the Dualistic Model of Passion. We hypothesized that an obsessive (vs. harmonious)passion for guns would be associated with a belief in a dangerous world (BDW).We expected this relationship to intensify in threatening contexts, leading to a more expansive view on defensive gun ownership. We tested this hypothesis across three threat contexts: a gun‐control message (Study 1,N= 342), a live shooting simulation (Study 2,N= 398), and the aftermath of the Christchurch mass shootings (Study 3,N= 314). In the experimental Study 1, exposure to a gun‐control message increased the intention to purchase guns among those with an obsessive passion (OP) for guns. Study 2 revealed that BDW mediated the relationship between OP and assertive modes of protection, the desire to purchase high‐stopping‐power guns, and anti‐Black racial bias in a shooting task. Study 3 showed that knowledge of the Christchurch attack intensified thelink between OP and BDW, leading to increased support for gun access, willingness to act as a citizen‐protector, and prejudice against Muslims.Comprehending these dynamics can assist policymakers incrafting messaging campaigns for firearm regulation and public safety measures that are more effective.

Aggressive Behavior, Volume 50, Issue 3. May 2024, 17pg