By Özlem Dündar

There are many reasons for crime, including biological, psychological, economic, and social. The reasons for the crime may vary by the types of crime. While some types of crimes are mostly committed for economic reasons, many factors other than economic factors can be predominantly influential in committing some types of crimes. It is essential to investigate the economic causes of crime types. Because, there may be economic reasons on the basis of crimes stemming from psychological and sociological reasons. In this study context, the economic reasons for theft crime which is mostly committed for economic reasons, were investigated by the System Generalized Moments Method (GMM) for selected countries (25 OECD countries) that are members of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation. While determining the OECD member countries, the data set of all the variables (unemployment, Gini coefficient as an indicator of income inequality, consumer price index as an indicator of inflation, social expenditures, and population) included in the analysis was examined, and a standard analysis period (2013-2018) was determined according to these data. Thus, the effect of these variables on theft crime was investigated for the period 2013-2018. In the literature, economic variables were mostly used in the studies on the subject, but there were not many studies investigating the effect of the social expenditure variable on theft crime. For this reason, it is considered that the study will contribute to the literature. According to the system GMM analysis results, while unemployment, inflation rate (consumer price index), and the Gini coefficient positively affect theft crime, social expenditures and population variables show no effect.

Unpublished paper, 2022. 23p.

By Kelly M. Babchishin, Leslie-Anne Keown, and Kimberly P. Mularczyk

Employment is a key factor that helps reduce reoffending rates among individuals with criminal records. The current study examined the economic outcomes of 11,158 federal offenders (Mage in 2014 = 47 years) admitted to Correctional Service of Canada institutions between January 4th, 1999 and December 31st 2001 (medianadmission year = 2000) who were released in the community for an average of 14 years. The purpose of the current study was to better understand the economic outcomes of Canadian federal offenders. More than half of the cohort of released offenders filed their taxes (5,835 of 11,158). The current study suggests that individuals with criminal records face considerable barriers when seeking employment in Canada, with only half of the individuals released from federal institutions finding employment after an average of 14 years. Individuals released from federal correctional institutions participated in the labour market less, made substantially less employment income, received more social assistance payments, and filed taxes less than the general Canadian population. After an average of 14 years post release, most individuals were underemployed with a median income of $0. Of those who reported employment, the average reported income was $14,000. This is less than half of what Canadians in the general population earn through employment. We also found that barriers to finding gainful employment following incarceration disproportionately impacted women, Indigenous, and older individuals, with these groups fairing even poorer than men, non-Indigenous, and younger individuals with criminal records. The current study suggests that more should be done to assist individuals with a criminal record secure gainful employment.

RESEARCH REPORT: 2021-R002 . Ottawa:; Public Safety Canada, 2021. 37p.

By Ireland Bellsmith, Olivia Goertzen, Kia Neilsen and Olivia Stinson

Poverty is both a source and a consequence of injustice. The following is a brief review of some of the many issues at the intersection between poverty and the justice system, and more generally, poverty and access to justice. It is based on a review of the literature as well as some of the prior work by the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy, an institute of the UN Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme Network based in Vancouver, BC. In their first report, the National Advisory Council on Poverty (NACP) defined poverty as the deprivation of resources and the lack of power required to attain basic living standards and to facilitate social integration and inclusion, thus clearly linking poverty to social exclusion or marginalization. Although the Council agreed with that broad definition of poverty, initially used in Opportunity for All – Canada’s First Poverty Reduction Strategy, it also acknowledged that a more comprehensive definition would further emphasize the feelings of social disconnect and disempowerment that commonly characterize poverty. Poverty limits people’s access to justice and their ability to resolve conflicts and deal with everyday legal problems. It is a very disempowering and alienating experience. The resulting inability to successfully resolve legal problems is itself contributing to people’s inability to attain or maintain basic living standards. The justice system instead of empowering poor people and allowing them to fight for their rights is too often a source for them of frustration, disillusionment, and disempowerment, as well as a direct reflection of prevailing social inequality and exclusion. The experience of the justice system for marginalized victims of crime and individuals struggling with poverty is also problematic and is also contributing to and dictated by poverty. Yet, poverty is linked to higher rates of victimization and the consequences of victimization are often direr for people experiencing poverty and marginalization. Finally, the experience of people facing criminal charges or being convicted of a crime is also affected by their social and economic status. The likelihood of a criminal conviction and the consequences of a criminal conviction are directly influenced by the means of the defendants and the means and social capital of those who are convicted. The lack of support for convicted offenders, compounding their ostracization, is a further source of inequality and contributes to further entrenching them and their family in poverty and exclusion. This report presents an overview of recent research and general information gathered from persuasive articles, publications, and research studies on the topic of poverty in Canada and its implications and influence on access to justice. By evaluating different areas of justice and legal proceedings, we seek to identify emerging themes in research and analyze effective practices and those that appear to fall short. Thus far, evident themes between poverty and access to justice include unsatisfactory victim experience, conditions leading to incarceration despite the availability of alternatives, lack of legal awareness within communities, and problematic disempowerment. While current practices and legislation have sought to address these obstacles inherent to the Canadian justice system, we suggest that the circumstances of poverty continue to impede equal access to justice in a number of ways and recommend that further research be conducted to evaluate best practices.

Vancouver, BC: International Centre for Criminal Law Reform , 2022. 38p

By Youngmin Yi

The prevalence, consequences, and unequal distribution of parental and own incarceration in the United States are well documented. However, much of our knowledge of the reach of the carceral state into family life is focused on incarceration of a parent, romantic partner, or child, to the exclusion of other important relationships. Using data from the Family History of Incarceration Study, a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (N=2,029), this study introduces novel descriptive measures that provide a more comprehensive picture of the demography and racially unequal distribution of family incarceration: degree, generational extension, and permeation. This analysis shows that Black adults in the United States are not only more likely to have experienced family incarceration but are also more likely to have had more family members incarcerated (5.3 members vs. ≤2.8 members for adults of other racial/ethnic groups) and to have had family members from more generations ever incarcerated (1.7 generations vs. ≤1.1 generations for those of other groups). Further, the stability of these estimates across model specifications underscores the importance of interrogating long-standing approaches to the analysis of linkages between race, the criminal legal system, and family life and the investigation of racialized systems and social inequality more broadly

Demography (2023) 60(1):15–40

By Benjamin Ferri and Lia Yin

Does inequality lead to more crime? We develop a new model that articulates how Poverty (the lower tail of the earnings distribution) and Earnings (the upper tail) enter into equilibrium crime rates. In our model, individuals in Poverty have less to lose in the context of criminal punishment, so are less averse to committing crimes in general. The presence of high Earnings (therefore things worth stealing) heightens the expected gain to offenders per crime - but specifically in terms of financial gain, not emotional gain. We estimate our model on a comprehensive panel of U.S. Commuting Zones (1980-2016), deploying novel Shift-Share instruments to correct for reverse causality (of crime on the earnings distribution). Corroborating our hypothesis, we find that high Earnings plays a much larger role in driving crimes that yield financial gain to the offender (various forms of theft) than it does for crimes of emotional gain; while Poverty is a driving force equally across both types of crime. In each case, not accounting for reverse causality would underestimate both effects, often by more than double.

Unpublished paper, 2022. 50p.

By Amanda J. Aubel, Angela Bruns, Xiaoya Zhang, Shani Buggs & Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz

Living near an incident of firearm violence can negatively impact youth, regardless of whether the violence is experienced firsthand. Inequities in household and neighborhood resources may affect the prevalence and consequences of exposure across racial/ethnic groups. Findings. Using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study and the Gun Violence Archive, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 adolescents in large US cities lived within 800 m (0.5 miles) of a past-year firearm homicide during 2014–17. Exposure risk decreased as household income and neighborhood collective efficacy increased, though stark racial/ethnic inequities remained. Across racial/ethnic groups, adolescents in poor households in moderate or high collective efficacy neighborhoods had a similar risk of past-year firearm homicide exposure as middle-to-high income adolescents in low collective efficacy neighborhoods. Conclusions. Empowering communities to build and leverage social ties may be as impactful for reducing firearm violence exposure as income supports. Comprehensive violence prevention efforts should include systems-level strategies that jointly strengthen family and community resources.

Injury Epidemiology volume 10, Article number: 24 (2023)

By John R. Hipp and Seth A. Williams

This review takes stock of recent advances, as well as enduring and emerging challenges, in the area of spatial criminology. Although the notions of place and space are fundamentally intertwined, spatial criminology is distinct in its attempt to measure and theorize explicitly spatial processes and relationships. This review highlights three key themes. First, the use of increasingly smaller geographic units in recent research creates an even greater need to account for spatial behavior of persons when studying the location of crime. Second, although the explosion of spatially precise data in recent years presents exciting possibilities, we argue that theory is falling behind in guiding us in analyzing these new forms of data, and explicitly inductive approaches should be considered to complement existing deductive strategies. Third, an important direction for spatial criminology in the next decade is considering the extent to which micro- and mesolevel processes operate invariantly across different macro contexts.

Annual Review of Criminology, 3(1), 2020.

By Marco De Nadai, Yanyan Xu, Emmanuel Letouzé, Marta C. González & Bruno Lepri

Nowadays, 23% of the world population lives in multi-million cities. In these metropolises, criminal activity is much higher and violent than in either small cities or rural areas. Thus, understanding what factors infuence urban crime in big cities is a pressing need. Seminal studies analyse crime records through historical panel data or analysis of historical patterns combined with ecological factor and exploratory mapping. More recently, machine learning methods have provided informed crime prediction over time. However, previous studies have focused on a single city at a time, considering only a limited number of factors (such as socio-economic characteristics) and often at large in a single city. Hence, our understanding of the factors influencing crime across cultures and cities is very limited. Here we propose a Bayesian model to explore how violent and property crimes are related not only to socio-economic factors but also to the built environment (e.g. land use) and mobility characteristics of neighbourhoods. To that end, we analyse crime at small areas and integrate multiple open data sources with mobile phone traces to compare how the different factors correlate with crime in diverse cities, namely Boston, Bogotá, Los Angeles and Chicago. We fnd that the combined use of socio-economic conditions, mobility information and physical characteristics of the neighbourhood effectively explain the emergence of crime, and improve the performance of the traditional approaches. However, we show that the socio-ecological factors of neighbourhoods relate to crime very differently from one city to another. Thus there is clearly no “one fits all” model.

Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 13871 (2020).

Police-reported crime data (hereafter “crime”) is routinely used as a psychosocial stressor in public health research, yet few studies have jointly examined (a) differences in crime exposure based on participant race and ethnicity, (b) differences in measures of crime exposure, and (c) considerations for how exposure to police is captured in police-recorded crime data. We estimate neighborhood exposure to crime and discuss the implications of structural differences in exposure to crime and police based on race and ethnicity. Methods. Using GPS coordinates from 1188 participants in the Newborn Epigenetics Study, we estimated gestational exposure to crime provided by the Durham, North Carolina, Police Department within (a) 800 m and (b) the Census block group of residence. We controlled for non-overlapping spatial boundaries in crime, Census, residential, and police data to report crime spatial (crime per km2) and population (crime per 1000 people per km2) density. Results. We demonstrate dramatic disparities in exposure to crime based on participant race and ethnicity and highlight variability in these disparities based on the type of crime and crime measurement method chosen. Conclusions Public health researchers should give thoughtful consideration when using police-reported crime data to measure and model exposure to crime in the United States, as police-reported data encompasses joint exposure to police and crime in the neighborhood setting.

BMC Public Health (2021) 21:1078

By Benjamin D. Scher , Scott D. Neufeld , Amanda Butler , Matthew Bonn , Naomi Zakimi , Jack Farrell , and Alissa Greer

In light of North America’s persisting drug toxicity crisis, alternative drug policy approaches such as decriminalization, legalization, regulation, and safer supply have increasingly come to the forefront of drug policy discourse. The views of people who use drugs toward drug policy and drug law reform in the Canadian context are essential, yet largely missing from the conversation. The aim of this study was to capture the opinions, ideas, and attitudes of people who use drugs toward Canadian drug laws and potential future alternatives. Methods: This paper was developed as part of the Canadian Drug Laws Project, a cross-jurisdictional qualitative study conducted in British Columbia, Canada between July and September 2020. The qualitative data are from 24 semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of people who use illegal drugs. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed thematically by the research team. Results: Two main themes and corresponding sub-themes are presented: (1) The experience of stigma as a consequence of criminalization; (2) The perceived benefits of drug law reform. Participants spoke in-depth about their experiences living within a criminalized drug policy context and offered suggestions for new pathways forward. Their perspectives illuminate how Canada’s drug laws may shape public attitudes toward people who use drugs and the consequent manifestations of structural, social, and self-stigma experienced by people who use drugs. Conclusion: Participants openly and profoundly believed that current drug laws produced and propagated the public attitudes and structural inequities experienced by people who use drugs in Canada. This matters, not only because our findings highlight the fact that people who use drugs experience stigma in tangible and clearly impactful ways, but it also suggests that the criminalization of drugs shapes the experience of structural, social, and self stigma. Finally, participants believed that efforts to destigmatize people who use drugs would be ineffectual without the enactment of more robust forms of drug law reform such as the decriminalization of illegal drugs.

Contemporary Drug Problems 1-24 © The Author(s) 2023

By Lila Abed

o contribute to a reduction and, ultimately, the eradication of femicide in Mexico, the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute launched its “Engendering Safety: Addressing Femicide in Mexico” Initiative in 2022 to bring together key stakeholders to raise awareness, explore the driving factors and enabling environment, and outline action items for both government and civil society. Since the launch of the initiative, the Mexico Institute has organized a series of events and consultations to help inform a report to the Mexican Senate on the policy options available to Mexico’s legislature to effect positive change for women’s safety.

In October 2022, the Mexico Institute, in partnership with the Mexican Senate’s Special Commission to Investigate Cases of Femicide of Girls and Adolescents, organized a National Forum titled Femicide: Visions and Solutions. During the one-day session, more than two dozen federal and state-level public officials, lawmakers, civil society organizations, activists, experts, and academics discussed preventive measures, best practices, and legislative actions that can reduce and eradicate femicide in Mexico. The data and research shared has informed the drafting and introduction by Mexican lawmakers of several legislative proposals.

This report is a compilation of the data, best practices, preventive measures, and public policy recommendations presented during the National Forum. The objective of this report is to summarize the findings of the conference in an effort to raise awareness and so that Mexican lawmakers can utilize this information when drafting and approving bills to prevent, reduce, and eliminate femicide and gender-based violence in Mexico.

Washington, DC: Wilson Center, Mexico Institute, 2023. 64p.

By Grahame Allen, Zoe Mansfield

This briefing paper looks at homicide statistics for England and Wales. It also covers equivalent statistics for Scotland and Northern Ireland, and other international comparisons. The paper examines statistics on the characteristics of victims and offenders, the methods used to kill and the outcomes for offenders.

London: House of Commons Library, 2023. 40p.

By Alexandru Cernat, David Buil-Gil, Ian Brunton-Smith, Jose Pina-Sánchez and Marta Murrià-Sangenís

We assess if asking victims about the places where crimes happen leads to estimates of “crime in place” with better measurement properties. We analyze data from the Barcelona Victimization Survey (2015–2020) aggregated in 73 neighborhoods using longitudinal quasi-simplex models and criterion validity to estimate the quality of four types of survey-based measures of crime. The distribution of survey-based offense location estimates, as opposed to victim residence estimates, is highly similar to police-recorded crime statistics, and there is little trade off in terms of the reliability and validity of offense location and victim residence measures. Estimates of crimes reported to the police show a better validity, but their reliability is lower and capture fewer crimes.

Crime & DelinquencyVolume 68, Issue 11 Oct 2022 Pages 1923-2171

By Timothy Brezina & MariTere Molinet

The unique scholarship of Carlo Morselli fuelled interest in criminal networks, entrepreneurship, and achievement. In this paper, we summarise Morselli’s contributions to the scholarship on criminal achievement, with special attention to the subjective aspects of such achievement. We show how Morselli’s work ignited interest in the novel concept of criminal self-efficacy and we offer a number of suggestions for continuing and extending this important line of work. In particular, we (1) discuss reasons why the subjective aspects of criminal achievement have been largely neglected by others, but why they are important to explore; (2) review the possible sources of criminal self-efficacy; (3) discuss gender differ-ences in this area; and (4) highlight the overall balance between criminal and conventional self-efficacy as an important considera-tion. Further research in this area may help us better understand the attraction to crime, the limited effectiveness of punishment, and reasons for the persistence of criminal careers.

GLOBAL CRIME                                               2022, VOL. 23, NO. 1, 81–100 

By Becca Cadoff, Erica Bond, Preeti Chauhan, & Allie Meizlish

In this report, the Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ) presents analyses on criminal convictions in New York City from 1980 through 2019, using data provided by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. DCJ presents the number of criminal convictions that have accumulated over the course of these four decades, broken down by charge severity (i.e., misdemeanor vs. felony), charge type (e.g., drug charges or property-related charges) and demographics (i.e., race/ethnicity, sex, and age). DCJ also documents the number of individuals who have criminal convictions on their records, including the race/ethnicity, sex, and age of people with conviction records. Finally, DCJ analyzes individuals’ conviction records to assess how long ago these convictions occurred and the number and type of charges that make up conviction records.

New York: Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ) 2021. 69p.

By Becca Cadoff, Olive Lu, Sarah Monaghan & Michael Rempel

Key Findings:

Total Convictions

• Changes in Annual Conviction Totals From 1980 to 2021: In 1980, there were just over 71,000 statewide convictions. After rising sharply in the 1980s, and fluctuating from about 170,000 to 200,000 per year from 1990 to 2010, annual convictions dropped to 109,000 in 2019, and continued to decline significantly in 2020 and 2021.

• Geography: New York City accounted for 53% of the State’s convictions in 1980, declining to 33% in 2019, while 18% involved the suburban counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland, and 49% involved the upstate region.

• Demographics: From 1980 to 2021, 82% of convictions involved men. From 1985 to 2021, 42% of convictions involved Black people (though they made up 15% of the State’s population in 2019), 20% involved Hispanic people, and 36% involved white people.

People with Convictions

• Overall: The 6.6 million total statewide convictions represented just under 2.2 million people. A misdemeanor conviction was the most serious on the record for three quarters of the cases.

• Racial Disparities: From 1980 to 2021, about 1.1 million white, 640,000 Black, 380,000 Hispanic, and 41,000 Asian New Yorkers accumulated a conviction. In 2019, the conviction rate per 100,000 people was 3.1 times higher for Black than white people statewide. New York City saw the starkest racial disparities of any region, with a conviction rate 5.7 times higher for Black than white people.

• Recency of Convictions: The most recent conviction was more than 20 years ago for 47% of people, 11 to 20 years ago for 26%, and within the past ten years for 27%.

• People Newly Accumulating a Conviction Record: In the 2019 pre-pandemic year, 107,481 people were convicted of a crime, of which 30,458 (28%) experienced their first conviction (and, hence, were newly exposed to resulting lifetime repercussions).

New York: Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, 2023. 24p.

By Robert VargasFollow, Chris WilliamsFollow, Phillip O’SullivanFollow and Christina Cano

This Essay investigates Chicago city-government policy responses to the four largest homicide waves in its history: 1920–1925, 1966–1970, 1987–1992, and 2016. Through spatial and historical methods, we discover that Chicago police and the mayor’s office misused data to advance agendas conceived prior to the start of the homicide waves. Specifically, in collaboration with mayors, the Chicago Police Department leveraged its monopoly over crime data to influence public narratives over homicide in ways that repeatedly (1) delegitimized Black social movements, (2) expanded policing, (3) framed homicide as an individual rather than systemic problem, and (4) exclusively credited police for homicide rate decreases. These findings suggest that efforts to improve violence-prevention policy in Chicago require not only a science of prevention and community flourishing but also efforts to democratize how the city uses data to define and explain homicide.

University of Chicago Law Review: Vol. 89: Iss. 2, Article 5.

By Timon de Groot

Over the course of its history, the German Empire increasingly withheld basic rights—such as joining the army, holding public office, and even voting—as a form of legal punishment. Dishonored offenders were often stigmatized in both formal and informal ways, as their convictions shaped how they were treated in prisons, their position in the labour market, and their access to rehabilitative resources.  With a focus on Imperial Germany’s criminal policies and their afterlives in the Weimar era, Citizens into Dishonored Felons demonstrates how criminal punishment was never solely a disciplinary measure, but that it reflected a national moral compass that authorities used to dictate the rights to citizenship, honour and trust.

New York; Oxford UK: Berghahn Books, 2023. 250p.

By Courtney McKnight , Chenziheng Allen Weng, Marley Reynoso, Sarah Kimball, Lily M. Thompson, Don Des Jarlais

Background: As the proportion of drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl continues to increase in the US, monitoring exposure to and possible changes in intention to use fentanyl among people who use drugs (PWUD) is of great public health importance. This mixed methods study examines intentionality of fentanyl use among persons who inject drugs (PWID) in New York City during a period of unprecedently high rates of drug overdose mortality. Methods: Between October 2021 and December 2022, N = 313 PWID were enrolled in a cross-sectional study that included a survey and urine toxicology screening. A subset of N = 162 PWID also participated in an in-depth interview (IDI) examining drug use patterns, including fentanyl use and experiences with drug overdose. Results: 83% of PWID were urine-toxicology positive for fentanyl, though only 18% reported recent intentional fentanyl use. Intentionality of fentanyl use was associated with being younger, white, increased drug use frequency, recent overdose (OD), recent stimulant use, among other characteristics. Qualitative findings suggest PWID tolerance to fentanyl may be increasing, which could result in an increased preference for fentanyl. Concern about overdose was common with nearly all PWID using overdose prevention strategies to avoid it. Conclusion: The findings from this study demonstrate a high prevalence of fentanyl use among PWID in NYC, despite an expressed preference for heroin. …

International Journal of Drug Policy , Article in Press, May 2023

By Nicole Rafter

FROM THE PREFACE: “All early theories of crime were biological. Indeed, until the early 20th century, biological theories and criminology were virtually synonymous. But then biological theories were pushed aside by sociological explanations of criminal behavior. Although a few die hard eugenicists kept biological theories alive, by the end of World War II, when people realized what the Nazis had done in the name of biology, these explanations were firmly rejected and consigned to the dustbin of history--to stay there, many hoped, forever. Biological theorizing was not dead, however, but only dormant….”

NY. New York University Press. 2008. 326p. USED BOOK - CONTAINS MARK-UP