[lbo-talk] Criminal stats question

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Apr 2 08:32:28 PST 2004


I did a short search in Westlaw on the question of whether the poor are poor likely to commit crimes. The conventional wisdom among both liberals and conservatives appears to be that there is a generally strong correlation between class and crime, with the poor being more likely to commit crimes than those whow re better off. Some studies that are based on self-reporting find that criminal behavior is equally distributed among classes.

It is hard to know what to make of this inconsistency. Some of it may just be that the studies tend to focus on violent crime. Insofar as it's more than that, perhaps disaggregating kinds of crimes and people help explain it. For instance, there seems to be support for the idea that which crimes are committed varies with class: the poor are more likely to commit violent crimes, the better off, white-collar type crimes of fraud, embezzlement, etc. So maybe crime rates are fairly equal, but not rates of kinds of crimes. Moreover, drug crimes seem to be an exception to the class disparity: although rich and poor don't commit these crimes, necessarily, in the same way, they seem to commit them at about the same rate. Also notable is that the group most likely to commit crimes -- adolescent males seems to commit crimes (mostly nonviolent) at a rate that is fairly unconnected with both race and class. So maybe the self-reporting results has to do with drug use and such like among young men.

Obviously our prisons are disproportionately full of poor people and minorities, and for politicala nd racial reasons as wella s class bias, poor minorities a re more likely to be prosecuted and convicted of crimes. But we were talking about crime rates and social class, not prosecution and conviction rates.

Below are some quotes from a few law journal articles.

jks

Messner and Rosenfeld (1994), in Crime and the American Dream, seek to explain American patterns of crime through the cultural and structural organization of American society. They acknowledge their intellectual indebtedness to Robert K. Merton whose strain model had supported the war on poverty. Further, in Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America, LaFree (1998) links rising crime rates to changing institutional conditions of American society. Sampson and Raudenbush (1999), in the most expansive study of Chicago neighborhoods, find that public disorder, including crime, is caused by structural constraints and deprivation and by collective efficacy, that is 'cohesion among residents combined with shared expectations for the social control of public space' (1999, 603). Uggen (2000) finds that work programs for criminal offenders contribute significantly to their chances of abandoning criminal careers. Hagan and McCarthy (1997), in Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness, challenge school criminologists who, through self-report studies, found criminal behavior to be equally distributed across social classes. Their book shows how extreme deprivation of the street produces serious crime in which middle-class youngsters rarely get involved. They also show, through an inter-city comparison of Toronto and Vancouver, how social support programs are suited to reduce the risk of life in the street and of involvement in serious crime. (For a discussion see Theoretical *703 Criminology, vol. 4, no. 2.) Other studies that reaffirm the relationship between social inequality and crime (by authors such as R. J. Sampson and W. J. Wilson, K. Land, D. Steffensmeier, K. Heimer, and J. Braithwaite) appear in Hagan and Peterson (1995).

CULTURES OF CONTROL IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES

Joachim J. Savelsberg [FNa1]

27 Law & Soc. Inquiry 685, *685

27 Law & Soc. Inquiry 685, *702

The relationship between inequality and crime has also been the subject of sociological theories on crime. Broadly speaking, these have developed as interpretations of the observation that "with a degree of consistency which is unusual in social sciences, lower-class people, and people living in lower- class areas, have higher official crime rates than other groups." [FN7]

*1 INEQUALITY AND VIOLENT CRIME [FNa1]

Pablo Fajnzylber University of Minas Gerais

Daniel Lederman World Bank

Norman Loayza World Bank

45 J.L. & Econ. 1, *2

The main conclusion of this paper is that income inequality, measured by the Gini index, has a significant and positive effect on the incidence of crime. This result is robust to changes in the crime rate when it is used as the dependent variable (whether homicide or robbery), the sample of countries and periods, alternative measures of income inequality, the set of additional variables explaining crime rates (control variables), and the method of econometric estimation. In particular, this result persists when using instrumental variable methods that take advantage of the dynamic properties of our cross-country and time-series data to control for both measurement error in crime data and the joint endogeneity of the explanatory variables. In the process of arriving at this conclusion, we found some interesting results; the following are among them: First, the incidence of violent crime has a high degree of inertia, which justifies early intervention to prevent *26 crime waves. Second, violent crime rates decrease when economic growth improves. Since violent crime is jointly determined by the pattern of income distribution and by the rate of change of national income, we can conclude that faster poverty reduction leads to a decline in national crime rates. And third, the mean level of income, the average educational attainment of the adult population, and the degree of urbanization in a country are not related to crime rates in a significant, robust, or consistent way.

45 J.L. & Econ. 1, *25 -26

Indeed, the rates of criminal behavior, ranging from petty theft to homicide, are very high for all adolescent males, regardless of race, ethnicity, or social class. [FN106] Relatively little of this adolescent crime, however, involves violence to persons. [FN107] Moreover, most of this adolescent crime is self-limiting; it does not reflect a life-long drift toward crime, but will spontaneously stop as the individual matures

JUVENILE JUSTICE CAUGHT BETWEEN THE EXORCIST AND A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Jane Rutherford

51 DePaul L. Rev. 715, *737

This is always true of vice crimes. Gambling and prostitution, alcohol in the 1920s and drugs today, all cut across social class and ethnic affiliation. This too distinguishes drugs, and vice generally, from other sorts of criminal behavior. A lot of crime is class-bound: there are very few white-collar robbers, and equally few blue-collar embezzlers. Not so with drugs. Though illegal drug use is much more common in some communities than others, it nevertheless is fairly common in communities of all sorts. Poor urban neighborhoods and wealthy suburbs alike have drug markets. Not that drug markets look the same everywhere. In poor city neighborhoods, crack is typically sold on the street. [FN60] In the suburbs, dealers sell cocaine powder through individual deliveries, arranged meetings, and telephone transactions. [FN61

THE DISTRIBUTION OF FOURTH AMENDMENT PRIVACY

William J. Stuntz

67 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1265, *1281

--- dks <dkslbo at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Luke writes:
> "People of low socio-economic status are vastly
> overrepresented in our
> prisons primarily due to the following two factors:
> (1) they commit more
> crimes,

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