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CRIMINOLOGY

NATURE OR CRIME-HISTORY-CAUSES-STATISTICS

The International Crime Drop: New Directions In Research

Edited by Jan van Dijk, Andromachi Tseloni and Graham Farrell

Drawing on studies from major European countries and Australia, this exciting new collection from a group of internationally-renowned scholars extends the ongoing debate on falling crime rates from the perspective of criminal opportunity or routine activity theory. Considering the trends and discourse of the international crime fall, this book analyses the effect of Post World War II crime booms which triggered a universal improvement in security across the Western world, such as the introduction of mandatory security in motor vehicles in Europe and the US. Preliminary evidence is also presented on the impact of collective improvements in home security, analyzing levels of household burglaries and their distribution amongst the population in The Netherlands, England and Wales.

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 333p.

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Re-examining The Crime Drop

By Stephen Farrell

The crime drop is one of the most important puzzles in contemporary criminology: since the early-1990s many countries appear to exhibit a pronounced decline in crime rates. While there have been many studies on the topic, this book argues that the current crime drop literature relies too heavily on a single methodological approach, and in turn, provides a new method for examining the falling rates of crime, based on ideas from political science and comparative historical social science. Farrall’s original new research forwards an understanding of trends in crime and responses to them by questioning the received theoretical assumptions. The book therefore encourages a ‘deepening’ in the nature of the sorts of studies which have been undertaken so far.

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 116p.

The Crime Drop in America. Rev. ed.

By Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman

Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980s and continued to climb until 1991, after which something unprecedented occurred. The crime level declined to a level not seen since the 1960s. This revised edition of The Crime Drop in America focuses first on the dramatic drop in crime rates in America in the 1990s, and then, in a new epilogue, on the patterns since 2000. The separate chapters written by distinguished experts cover the many factors affecting crime rates: policing, incarceration, drug markets, gun control, economics, and demographics. Detailed analyses emphasize the mutual effects of changes in crack markets, a major focus of youth violence, and the drop in rates of violence following decline in demand for crack. The contrasts between the crime-drop period of the 1990s and the period since 2000 are explored in the new epilogue, which also reviews major new developments in thinking about the causes and control of crime.

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 375p.

Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System

By Hikmet Karčić

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims. Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb “living space.” Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 277p.

Climate Change and Crime in Cities

By Robert Muggah

Climate change is already disrupting cities around the world. Continued greenhouse gas emissions and warming are intensifying heat islands, contributing to water shortages, rising seas, increasing flood-related risks and worsening pollution. With over two thirds of the population expected to live in cities by 2030, the effects are consequential. Large and fast-growing cities in Asia, Africa and the Americas are likely to be hit hardest by more frequent and intense disasters. Coastal cities across North America and Western Europe are likewise on the front-line.

Climate change is influencing all aspects of city life, from labor markets and food security to migration patterns and economic productivity. One critical, if under-examined, way climate change is affecting cities is in relation to crime and victimization. To be sure, the debate about the relationships between climate and security – and in particular the influence of global warming on conflict onset, duration and intensity – has heated-up over the past decade, there is less attention devoted to how climate change stands to influence criminal violence in cities around the world.

Evidence suggests that dramatic climate change will generate a substantial increase in crime in many cities – and especially more vulnerable neighborhoods. In this paper, Robert Muggah, Igarapé Institute co-founder and Research and Innovation Director analyses studies and theories about the link climate-crime and present strategies and preventive measures to avoid violence while protecting the most vulnerable.

Rio de Janeiro - RJ - Brasil, Igarapé Institute, 2021. 13p.

Violence Against Women and Ethnicity: Commonalities and Differences Across Europe

Edited by Ravi K. Thiara, Stephanie A. Condon, and Monika Schröttle

This book draws together both: theory and practice on minority/migrant women and gendered violence. The interplay of gender, ethnicity, religion, class, generation and sexuality in shaping the lives, experiences and choices of minority/migrant women affected by violence has not always been adequately theorised within much of the existing writing on violence against women. Feminist theory, especially the insights provided by the concept of intersectionality, are central to the editors’ conceptual frameworks.

Leverkusen-Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich , 2011. 426p.

Violence: Situation, Speciality, Politics, and Storytelling

By David Wästerfors

This book considers how the concept of violence has been interpreted, used, defined, and explored by social researchers and thinkers. It does not provide a final answer to the question of what violence is or how it should be explained (or prevented), and instead offers a variety of useful ways of thinking about and theorising the phenomenon, mainly from a sociological standpoint. It outlines four ways of understanding violence: • Violence as situation: the tension that exists between category-driven and situational explanations. • Violence as speciality: the study of particularly violent actors, and how they may be understood by reference to childhood histories, technologies, institutions, culture, class, and gender. • Violence as politics: political violence and violent politics. • Violence as storytelling: representations of violence from a narrative perspective. Concluding with reflections on possible convergences between the four approaches and new directions for research, this book offers a unique and experimental approach to discussing and reconstructing the concept of violence.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 138p.

The Ecology of Football-related Crime and Disorder

By Justin Kurland

Numerous studies have been conducted on football ‘hooliganism’ with the majority of this work ignoring the immediate, environmental conditions that facilitate opportunities for crime in the football match day context. Consequently, the existing theoretical framework for explaining why crime emerges during football matches remains incomplete. This thesis aims to fill this gap for understanding modern football-related crime and disorder. The thesis uses a predominantly environmental criminology framework to explore whether crime opportunity theories can make sense of crime patterns observed around previously unexplored English domestic football stadia. It is crime event-oriented, focussing on how variation in the ecology of the area around stadia on match days and a set of counterfactual days when the stadium is not used facilitates different criminal opportunities. This is achieved primarily through the analysis of police-recorded crime data for three kilometre areas surrounding a sample of five stadia for the period 2005- 2010. The thesis focuses on three components of crime events - where they occur, when they occur, and why a disproportionate amount of it clusters in some neighbourhoods and not others. Despite the contrasting physical environment around the five stadia, the findings suggest very similar spatial and temporal crime patterns in the area surrounding stadia when they are used relative to when they are not and thus lend support to environmental theories of crime in the football context. The findings also help draw attention to where and when crime is elevated on football match days. The implications of the research for reducing the unintended and unwanted side-effect of football that is desired for the positive utilities it brings, in particular the practicality of employing situational crime prevention in the context of English domestic football are discussed.

London: University College London, 2014.

The Perversion of Virtue: Understanding Murder-suicide

By Thomas Joiner

Of the approximately 38,500 deaths by suicide in the U.S. annually, about two percent--between 750 and 800--are murder-suicides. The horror of murder-suicides looms large in the public consciousness--they are reported in the media with more frequency and far more sensationalism than most suicides, and yet we have little understanding of this grave form of violence.

In The Perversion of Virtue, leading suicide researcher Thomas Joiner explores the nature of murder-suicide and offers a unique new theory to explain this nearly unexplainable act: that murder-suicides always involve the wrongheaded invocation of one of four interpersonal virtues: mercy, justice, duty, and glory. The parent who murders his child and then himself seeks to save his child from a fatherless life of hardship; the wife who murders her husband and then herself seeks to right the wrongs he committed against her, and so on. Murder-suicides involve the gross misperception of when and how these four virtues should be applied.

Drawing from extensive research as well as real examples from the media, Joiner meticulously examines, deconstructs, and finally rebuilds our understanding of murder-suicide in such a way that brings tragic reason to what may seem an unfathomable act of violence. Along the way, he dispels some of the most enduring myths of suicide--for instance, that suicide is usually an impulsive act (it is almost always pre-meditated), or that alcohol or drugs are involved in most suicides (usually they are not).

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. 264p.

Falling Kidnapping Rates and Expansion of Mobile Phones in Colombia

By Santiago Montenegro and Álvaro Pedraza

This paper tries to explain why kidnapping has fallen so dramatically in Colombia during the period 2000-2008. The widely held belief is that the falling kidnapping rates can basically be explained as a consequence of the success of President Alvaro Uribe's democratic security policy. Without providing conclusive alternative explanations, some academic papers have expressed doubts about Uribe' security policy being the main cause of this phenomenon. While we consider the democratic security policy as constituting a necessary condition behind Colombia's falling kidnapping rates, we argue in this paper that a complementary condition underlying this phenomenon has been the significant increase during this period in the speed and quality of communications between potential victims and public security forces. In this sense, the expansion of the mobile phone industry in Colombia implies that there has been a substantial reduction in information asymmetries between kidnappers and targeted citizens. This has led to a higher level of deterrence as well as to higher costs for perpetrating this type of crime. This has resulted in a virtuous circle: improved security allows higher investments in telecommunications around the country, which in turn lead to faster communications between citizens and security forces, which consequently leads to greater security. We introduce a Becker-Ehrlich type supply and demand model for kidnappings. Using regional and departmental data on kidnapping, the police and mobile phones, we show that mobile phone network expansion has expanded the effective coverage of public protection; this, in turn, has led to a spectacular reduction in kidnapping rates.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE, 2009. 30p

What Part of the Income Distribution Matters for Explain Property Crime? The Case of Colombia

By Fabio Sánchez, Jairo Nunez, and Francois Bourguignon

Inequality has always been taken as a major explanatory factor of the rate of crime. Yet, the evidence in favor of that hypothesis is weak. Pure cross-sectional analyses show significant positive effects but do not control for fixed effects. Time series and panel data point to a variety of results, but few turn out being significant. The hypothesis maintained in this paper is that it is a specific part of the distribution, rather than the overall distribution as summarized by conventional inequality measures, that is most likely to influence the rate of (property) crime in a given society. Using a simple theoretical model and panel data in 7 Colombian cities over a 20 year period, we design a method that permits identifying the precise segment of the population whose relative income best explains time changes in crime.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE, 2003. 23p.

Parenting, Scarcity and Violence: Theory and Evidence for Colombia

By Jorge Cuartas, Arturo Harker, and Andrés Moya

During early childhood, children develop cognitive and socioemotional skills that predict success in multiple socioeconomic dimensions. A large part of the development of these skills depends on the child’s context during the first years of life and, in particular, on the quality of parental care. Grounded on recent literature in psychology and behavioral economics, we discuss a theoretical framework for understanding why some children receive adequate care, while others do not. Within this framework, we identify a determinant of the quality of parenting that has not yet been explored in-depth: the availability of parents’ mental resources, which are depleted by the subjective feeling of scarcity and the stress generated by adversities. Using cross-sectional data from a household survey in Colombia and administrative data on crime and violence, we find that a greater subjective feeling of scarcity (β=0.45, IC95%:[0.082, 0.979]) and greater exposure to violence (β =0.09, IC90%:[0.004, 0.182]) are associated with a lower likelihood that parents engage in stimulating activities with their children. At the same time, the results show that receiving information on childrearing is correlated with better parental practices (β =-0.48, IC95%:[-0.822, -0.136]).

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE , 2016. 35p.

Neuroforensics: Exploring the Legal Implications of Emerging Neurotechnologies: Proceedings of a Workshop

By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Technological advances in noninvasive neuroimaging, neurophysiology, genome sequencing, and other methods together with rapid progress in computational and statistical methods and data storage have facilitated large-scale collection of human genomic, cognitive, behavioral, and brain-based data. The rapid development of neurotechnologies and associated databases has been mirrored by an increase in attempts to introduce neuroscience and behavioral genetic evidence into legal proceedings.

In March 2018, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine organized a workshop in order to explore the current uses of neuroscience and bring stakeholders from neuroscience and legal societies together in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Participants worked together to advance an understanding of neurotechnologies that could impact the legal system and the state of readiness to consider these technologies and where appropriate, to integrate them into the legal system. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2018. 80p.

Modernizing Crime Statistics: Report 2: New Systems for Measuring Crime.

By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

To derive statistics about crime – to estimate its levels and trends, assess its costs to and impacts on society, and inform law enforcement approaches to prevent it - a conceptual framework for defining and thinking about crime is virtually a prerequisite. Developing and maintaining such a framework is no easy task, because the mechanics of crime are ever evolving and shifting: tied to shifts and development in technology, society, and legislation.

Interest in understanding crime surged in the 1920s, which proved to be a pivotal decade for the collection of nationwide crime statistics. Now established as a permanent agency, the Census Bureau commissioned the drafting of a manual for preparing crime statistics—intended for use by the police, corrections departments, and courts alike. The new manual sought to solve a perennial problem by suggesting a standard taxonomy of crime. Shortly after the Census Bureau issued its manual, the International Association of Chiefs of Police in convention adopted a resolution to create a Committee on Uniform Crime Records —to begin the process of describing what a national system of data on crimes known to the police might look like.

Report 1 performed a comprehensive reassessment of what is meant by crime in U.S. crime statistics and recommends a new classification of crime to organize measurement efforts. This second report examines methodological and implementation issues and presents a conceptual blueprint for modernizing crime statistics.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2018. 280p.

Modernizing Crime Statistics: Report 1: Defining and Classifying Crime.

By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

To derive statistics about crime – to estimate its levels and trends, assess its costs to and impacts on society, and inform law enforcement approaches to prevent it – a conceptual framework for defining and thinking about crime is virtually a prerequisite. Developing and maintaining such a framework is no easy task, because the mechanics of crime are ever evolving and shifting: tied to shifts and development in technology, society, and legislation.

Interest in understanding crime surged in the 1920s, which proved to be a pivotal decade for the collection of nationwide crime statistics. Now established as a permanent agency, the Census Bureau commissioned the drafting of a manual for preparing crime statistics—intended for use by the police, corrections departments, and courts alike. The new manual sought to solve a perennial problem by suggesting a standard taxonomy of crime. Shortly after the Census Bureau issued its manual, the International Association of Chiefs of Police in convention adopted a resolution to create a Committee on Uniform Crime Records —to begin the process of describing what a national system of data on crimes known to the police might look like.

The key distinction between the rigorous classification proposed in this report and the “classifications” that have come before in U.S. crime statistics is that it is intended to partition the entirety of behaviors that could be considered criminal offenses into mutually exclusive categories. Modernizing Crime Statistics: Report 1: Defining and Classifying Crime assesses and makes recommendations for the development of a modern set of crime measures in the United States and the best means for obtaining them. This first report develops a new classification of crime by weighing various perspectives on how crime should be defined and organized with the needs and demands of the full array of crime data users and stakeholders.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2016. 286p.

Support for Forensic Science Research: Improving the Scientific Role of the National Institute of Justice

By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Reliable and valid forensic science analytic techniques are critical to a credible, fair, and evidence-based criminal justice system. There is widespread agreement that the scientific foundation of some currently available forensic science methods needs strengthening and that additional, more efficient techniques are urgently needed. These needs can only be met through sustained research programs explicitly designed to ensure and improve the reliability and validity of current methods and to foster the development and use of new and better techniques. This task is challenging due to the broad nature of the field.

Concerns have been raised repeatedly about the ability of the criminal justice system to collect and analyze evidence efficiently and to be fair in its verdicts. Although significant progress has been made in some forensic science disciplines, the forensic science community still faces many challenges. Federal leadership, particularly in regard to research and the scientific validation of forensic science methods, is needed to help meet the pressing issues facing state and local jurisdictions.

This report reviews the progress made by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to advance forensic science research since the 2009 report, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward and the 2010 report, Strengthening the National Institute of Justice. Support for Forensic Science Research examines the ways in which NIJ develops its forensic science research priorities and communicates those priorities as well as its findings to the scientific and forensic practitioner communities in order to determine the impact of NIJ forensic science research programs and how that impact can be enhanced.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2015. 116p.

Income Inequality and Violent Crime: Evidence from Mexico's Drug War

By Ted Enamorado, Luis-Felipe López-Calva, Carlos Rodríguez-Castelán, and Hernán Winkler

The relationship between income inequality and crime has attracted the interest of many researchers, but little convincing evidence exists on the causal effect of inequality on crime in developing countries. This paper estimates this effect in a unique context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis takes advantage of a unique data set containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities covering a period of 20 years. Using an instrumental variable for inequality that tackles problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias, this paper finds that an increment of one point in the Gini coefficient translates into an increase of more than 10 drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2010. There are no significant effects before 2005. The fact that the effect was found during Mexico's Drug War and not before is likely because the cost of crime decreased with the proliferation of gangs (facilitating access to knowledge and logistics, lowering the marginal cost of criminal behavior), which, combined with rising inequality, increased the expected net benefit from criminal acts after 2005.

Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2014. 31p.

Macro-Economic Instability and Crime

By Patrick Guillaumont and Frédéric Puech

Relying on samples taken from developing and developed countries, several recent papers, such as those by Fajnzylber et al. (2002), Soares (2004) and Neumayer (2003, 2005), have emphasized the influence of macro-economic variables on crime. Those studies highlight the impact of the average level of income and of its growth rate. But none of them consider the impact of its instability. This paper argues that the factors corresponding to economic shocks or macro-economic instability have a significant and robust influence on crime. It suggests that this influence comes from disappointed anticipations, formed during periods of rapid increase of income, which, to some extent, generates frustration and possibly crime. It also suggests that illegal activities are used by some agents to compensate their loss of income and, in this way, smooth their consumption. It mainly deals with the direct effect of instability on crime. Nevertheless, since macro instability reduces growth, as it has been largely substantiated in literature, and growth has been found to have a negative impact on crime, it can also be supposed to have an indirect effect on crime through the growth rate.

CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International, 2006. 26p.

Exploring the Causes and Consequences of the Australian Crime Decline: A comparative analysis of the criminal trajectories of two NSW birth cohorts

By Jason Payne, Rick Brown and Roderic Broadhurst

In this study the arrest records of the 1984 and 1994 NSW birth cohorts were obtained using a data matching process facilitated by the NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages and the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR). The aim of this research is to examine the possible causes and consequences of the Australian crime decline through a longitudinal and developmental criminological lens. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first such comparative analysis of longitudinal data aimed at exploring the crime decline, and builds on the recent, albeit it aggregated and cross-sectional, analysis both in Australia (Weatherburn et al. 2014) and overseas (Farrell et al. 2015). Overall, the age-graded longitudinal experiences of the more recent of the two cohorts (born in 1994) confirm the declines previously identified by Weatherburn and Holmes (2013). Specifically, the results presented in this study suggest that as a proportion of each birth cohort the number of young people having contact with the criminal justice system by their 21st birthday had almost halved; down from 9.5 percent for the 1984 birth cohort to 4.8 percent for the 1994 birth cohort. But for the very young ages of between 10 and 13 years, the annualised prevalence of criminal justice contact was markedly lower for those born in 1994, although the analysis shows that these disparities are greatest in the late teenage and early adulthood years. Importantly, the otherwise non-existent or modest differences in the younger years suggests that for both cohorts the emergence and prevalence of ‘early onset’ offending was not dissimilar. Instead, the so-called crime decline appears to have been the result of fewer young people having contact with the criminal justice system as teenagers and young adults.

Canberra: Australian National University, 2018. 68p.

Crime Rate and Socio-economic Factors

By Sin-ying Choi

This dissertation is a study on the relationship between crime rate and socio-economic factors (i.e. poverty, income inequality, age, education and unemployment) in Hong Kong. Although there are many such studies on crime in foreign countries, similar study in Hong Kong is rare. This dissertation examines if any functional relationship could be established by regression analysis and how this can be related to new town development.

Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, 2007. 123p.