GANG HOMICIDE,DELINQUENCY, AND COMMUNITY*

Analysis of community-level data on community areas in Chicago substantiates two conceptual differences: the first. between gang crime and delinquency as community-level phenomena; and the second, between theoretical associations of each of the former to community-area patterns of social disorganization and poverty. One pattern is more common in Chicago's Hispanic communities; the other, in Chicago's black communities. Five measures of the quality of community life used are gang homicide rate, delinquency rate, unemployment rate, percentage living below the poverty level, and mortgage investment per dwelling. Identifying communities as white, black, Hispanic, or mixed and applying discriminant analysis reveal the racial-ethnic communities as distinct social worlds. Regression analyses of gang homicide and delinquency rates show that the two measures display very different patterns of association with other community characteristics. An analysis of the residual change score for gang homicide rate over two time periods indicates the relative stability of community patterns with poverty measures explaining much of the change in patterns. It is concluded that gang homicide rates and delinquency rates are ecologically distinct community problems. The distribution of gang homicide rates conforms to classic theories of social disorganization and poverty, and the distribution of delinquency rates is more generally associated with poverty.     

SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION OUTSIDE THE METROPOLIS: AN ANALYSIS OF RURAL YOUTH VIOLENCE*

In order to extend the study of community social disorganization and crime beyond its exclusive focus on large urban centers, we present an analysis of structural correlates of arrest rates for juvenile violence in 264 nonmetropolitan counties of four states. Findings support the generality of social disorganization theory: Juvenile violence was associated with rates of residential instability, family disruption, and ethnic heterogeneity. Though rates of poverty were not related to juvenile violence, this is also in accord with social disorganization theory because, unlike urban settings, poverty was negatively related to residential instability. Rates of juvenile violence varied markedly with population size through a curvilinear relationship in which counties with the smallest juvenile populations had exceptionally low arrest rates. Analyses used negative binomial regression (a variation of Poisson regression) because the small number of arrests in many counties meant that arrest rates would be ill suited to least‐squares regression.     

Social Ties, Collective Efficacy and Perceived Neighborhood Property Crime in Guangzhou, China

This study aims to (1) explore perceptions of property crime at the neighborhood level and their correlates based on a random sample from Guangzhou, China and (2) assess the applicability of collective efficacy theory in contemporary urban China. Since the data used in this study are multilevel and the dependent variable is dichotomous, a generalized hierarchical linear model was used for analysis of the data. This study reveals that both community structural variables (residential stability and poverty) and community process variables (social ties, collective efficacy and semi-formal control) were found to affect individuals’ perceptions of neighborhood property crime in Guangzhou. However, communities in Guangzhou are different from those in big cities in the US. This is evidenced by several findings in this study: (1) poorer communities in Guangzhou were not associated with lower levels of formal and informal control; (2) communities with higher levels of residential mobility were neither linked to higher levels of poverty nor disorganization; and (3) the correlation between residential stability and perceived neighborhood property crime was not mediated by community processes.     

The impact of local alcohol ordinances on official crime rates: The case of Tennessee

Past research has shown a strong link between alcohol and crime. In this study we examine the relationship between local alcohol ordinances and UCR crime rates for cities within the state of Tennessee. To assess adequately the actual relationship between crime and our alcohol availability measures, we included in the analysis a number of socioeconomic and demographic variables commonly associated with high crime rates. The results of this study suggest strongly that race, poverty, population size, and age composition provide the “best explanation” for variations in the level of criminal activity. Our findings support the hypothesis that social disorganization caused by numerous factors (especially racial and economic inequality) contribute strongly to a community's crime rate. The alcohol-related variables contribute to our understanding of the crime problem, but their impact is secondary and probably ancillary, once we have accounted for the influence of our demographic and socioeconomic variables.     

Space matters: An analysis of poverty,poverty clustering,and violent crime

While numerous criminological theories emphasize the theoretical importance of the spatial distribution of poverty, few studies specifically examine the empirical relationship between the spatial clustering of high poverty areas and violent crime rates. In this analysis we examine the association between poverty clustering and violent crime rates across 236 cities. For each city we compute a poverty cluster score that measures the proportion of contiguous high poverty census tracts. We find little support for a direct relationship between the spatial clustering of high poverty tracts and murder, rape, robbery, and assault. However, variables that measure city disadvantage (e.g., poverty) interact with poverty clustering scores in the case of homicide rates. Specifically, disadvantage has a much stronger relationship to homicide in cities with high levels of poverty clustering. Such an interaction effect is strongly supported by the literature.     

REEXAMINING SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORY USING CALLS TO THE POLICE AS A MEASURE OF CRIME*

This study examines social disorganization theory using calls to the police during 1980 in 60 Boston neighborhoods. These data, based on complainant reports of crime rather than official police reports, allow further investigation of differences in findings based on victimization data and official crime data. The rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are regressed on poverty, mobility, racial heterogeneity, family disruption, and structural density. Interaction terms for poverty and heterogeneity, poverty and mobility, and mobility and heterogeneity are also explored. Results from this study support findings from recent victimization studies and earlier ecological studies using official counts of crime. Poverty and heterogeneity, along with family disruption and structural density, are found to be important ecological variables for understanding the distribution of crime rates among neighborhoods.     

Crime and the transformation of capitalism

This study investigates factors that enhance criminal behavior. Typically, explanations for increasing crime rates discuss various familial and community attributes; i.e., single parent households and poverty rates. When crime has increased, these attributes are cited as being responsible. This we believe is an incorrect assumption. In particular, we argue the factors that are cited by these authors merely reflect transformations within the greater economic structure. As a result, the familial and community attributes suggested as causing crime are seen as intervening variables; which are either attentuated or amplified in their ability to control criminal behavior by the condition of the economy itself. Within this study, five urban cities (New York, Detroit, Newark, Boston, and Philadelphia) are observed over a twenty eight year period. Structural change is measured by industrial employment and crime is measured by three indices: burglary, robbery and murder. Our investigation reveals a strong relationship between declining industrial employment and increasing crime rates. In addition, we find that the magnitude of this relationship is subject to variation. This variation is dependent upon whether or not the industrial decline experienced was steady or vacilating between high and low levels. These findings support the contention that familial units and other communal organizations are merely intervening variables between large-scale structural changes and criminal behavior. Moreover, it suggests that unless anti-crime efforts (increasing the size of the police forces, increasing state expenditures for law enforcement, etc.) are accompanied by strategies of industrial reorganization, they will have no impact on reducing crime rates.     

POVERTY,INFANT MORTALITY,AND HOMICIDE RATES IN CROSS-NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: ASSESSMENTS OF CRITERION AND CONSTRUCT VALIDITY*

This article assesses the extent to which the infant mortality rate might be treated as a “proxy” for poverty in research on cross-national variation in homicide rates. We have assembled a pooled, cross-sectional time-series data set for 16 advanced nations from the 1993–2000 period that includes standard measures of infant mortality and homicide and contains information on the following commonly used “income-based” poverty measures: a measure intended to reflect “absolute” deprivation and a measure intended to reflect “relative” deprivation. With these data, we assess the criterion validity of the infant mortality rate with reference to the two income-based poverty measures. Also, we estimate the effects of the various indicators of disadvantage on homicide rates in regression models, thereby assessing construct validity. The results reveal that the infant mortality rate is correlated more strongly with “relative poverty” than with “absolute poverty,” although much unexplained variance remains. In the regression models shown here, the measure of infant mortality and the relative poverty measure yield significant positive effects on homicide rates, whereas the absolute poverty measure does not exhibit any significant effects. The results of our analyses suggest that it would be premature to dismiss relative deprivation in cross-national research on homicide, and that disadvantage is conceptualized and measured best as a multidimensional construct.     

IMMIGRATION AND THE RECENT VIOLENT CRIME DROP IN THE UNITED STATES: A POOLED,CROSS‐SECTIONAL TIME‐SERIES ANALYSIS OF METROPOLITAN AREAS*

A good deal of research in recent years has revisited the relationship between immigration and violent crime. Various scholars have suggested that, contrary to the claims of the classic Chicago School, large immigrant populations might be associated with lower rather than higher rates of criminal violence. A limitation of the research in this area is that it has been based largely on cross‐sectional analyses for a restricted range of geographic areas. Using time‐series techniques and annual data for metropolitan areas over the 1994–2004 period, we assess the impact of changes in immigration on changes in violent crime rates. The findings of multivariate analyses indicate that violent crime rates tended to decrease as metropolitan areas experienced gains in their concentration of immigrants. This inverse relationship is especially robust for the offense of robbery. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that the broad reductions in violent crime during recent years are partially attributable to increases in immigration.     

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND LEVELS OF HOMICIDE: AN ANALYSIS OF URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS*

This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between levels of economic inequality and homicide rates for a sample of 26 neighborhoods in Manhattan, New York. It argues that neighborhoods are more appropriate units of analysis for studying inequality and homicide than are larger political and statistical units because neighborhoods are more likely to constitute meaningful frames of reference for social comparisons. The principle hypothesis is that a high degree of economic inequality in a neighborhood will give rise to high levels of relative deprivation and high rates of homicide. The results of a series of multiple regression analyses fail to support this hypothesis. The measure of economic inequality is weakly associated with the observed homicide rates. Similarly, the racial composition of Manhattan neighborhoods exhibits no significant association with levels of homicide, given statistical controls for other sociodemographic variables. Two neighborhood characteristics do emerge as significant predictors of homicide rates: the relative size of the poverty population and the percent divorced or separated. Homicide rates tend to be highest in those neighborhoods characterized by extreme poverty and pervasive marital dissolution.     

Liberal versus conservative public policies on crime: What was the comparative track record during the 1990s?

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of social control and social support policies associated with conservative and liberal political ideologies with respect to violent crime in large U.S. cities during the 1990s. Eighty-five cities with populations of 150,000+ were included in the analysis; these cities accounted for fifty-two million urban area residents of the U.S. The use of the two-way, fixed-effect panel data method of statistical analysis enabled the authors to assess the relationship between change in local government expenditures for police and court services (social control) and expenditures on community development and park/recreation (support policy) and corresponding changes in crime rates documented within these cities. The findings indicated that expenditure on both police services and community development initiatives had significantly suppressive effects on crime in these cities during the period of the 1990s. It appeared that both conservative and liberal policies had their merits as effective countermeasures to crime.     

The police,crime, and economic theory: A replication and extension

Based on insights garnered from rational choice theory, Loftin and McDowall hypothesize that there is likely to be a reciprocal relationship, over time, within jurisdictions between police force strength and crime. Contrary to expectations, their ARIMA analyses of the association between total police force employment and the total crime rate for Detriot during the period of 1926 to 1977 produce null findings. As a result, they conclude that rational choice models are too simplistic to explain the relationship between the agency size and crime. It is our contention that this conclusion might be premature. We suggest that a failure to disaggregate total police force employment into its component sectors may be masking substantial reciprocal effects. The present investigation employs ARIMA techniques to model the reciprocal relationship between total, patrol, and detective police employment and total, property, and personal, robbery crimes in Milwaukee for the years 1930 to 1987. Consistent with previous research we report null findings between total police employment and total crime rates. However, the findings also reveal significant reciprocal relationships between the disaggregated measures of police size and crime. The implications of these results for rational choice theory are discussed.     

The effects of the second Intifada,terrorist acts,and economic changes on adolescent crime rates in Israel: A research note

Designed as a field quasi-experiment, this study analyzes the differences in Jewish adolescent crime rates before and after the inception of the second Intifada (September, 2000). Data covers the years between 1996 and 2003. The study focused on the relationship between the number of terrorist acts, the number of deaths in these acts, economic changes, and crime rates (murder, manslaughter, assault, mugging and robbery and property-related). The findings of the study were analyzed in terms of current theories on the impact of social and security-related stress on adolescents. The results show that the second Intifada has had significant effects on male adolescent crime rates. In particular, the number of terrorist acts was significantly associated with the following offences: assault, robbery, and manslaughter. No significant differences were found for adolescent female crime rates. Economic changes were significantly negatively related both to male adolescent crime for all the offences studied, as well as to property-related female offences.     

VIOLENT DELINQUENTS AND URBAN YOUTHS*

Violent juvenile crime is disproportionately concentrated in urban neighborhoods, and accordingly an understanding of the sources of serious delinquency is con founded by components of urbanism. These milieus usually have high rates of absolute poverty and relative economic deprivation, as well as weak social institutions. The persistent findings of delinquent peer contributions to delinquency have yet to be tested under conditions where social class and milieu effects are controlled. There is little empirical evidence to determine how adolescents in high-crime neighborhoods avoid delinquency despite frequent contact with delinquent peers. The differences between violent delinquents and other youths from comparable neighborhoods are little understood. This study contrasts a sample of chronically violent male juvenile offenders with the general male adolescent population (students and school dropouts) from inner-city neighborhoods in four cities. Violent delinquents differ from other male adolescents in inner cities in their attachments to school, their perceptions of school safety, their associations with officially delinquent peers, their perceptions of weak maternal authority, and the extent to which they have been victims of crime. Peer delinquency and drug“problems” predict the prevalence of three delinquency offense types for both violent offenders and neighborhood youths. Among violent delinquents, there appear to be different explanatory patterns, with one type better described by internal controls (locus of control), a developmental measure. Overall, there is strong support for integrated theory including control and learning components, and similar associations exist among inner-city youths as in the general adolescent male population. Despite the generally elevated rates of delinquency in inner cities, the explanations of serious and violent delinquency appear the same when subjects are sampled at the extremes of the distribution of behavior.     

Ethnic and immigrant residential concentration, and crime rates

One of the main arguments of social disorganization theory is that ethnic heterogeneity, influenced by immigrant residential concentration, is highly disruptive for community organization, and therefore, highly criminogenic. The effect of immigrant residential concentration on crime rates is, however, generally masked by the general effect of the broader category of ethnic heterogeneity. Some recent studies even suggested a negative relationship between immigrant residential concentration and crime. The present study, conducted in the city of Haifa, Israel, used neighborhood level data to test the specific relationship between immigrant residential concentration and crime rates among recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The results showed that the decomposition of ethnic heterogeneity into its two main components—immigrant residential concentration and ethnic residential concentration—served to qualify the predicted effects of social disorganization theory.     

POVERTY, URBANIZATION, AND CRIME

In an effort to evaluate the situational determinants of crime, principal components analysis was used to reduce 59 demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of 840 American cities to six independent factors: affluence, stage in life cycle, economic specialization, expenditures policy, poverty, and urbanization. When regressed upon crime rates two of these six factors, urbanization and poverty, were found to be the more important criminogenic forces. The exception to this generalization was the South, where stage in life cycle was more important than poverty in explaining crime. One reason for this exception may be that the South, though having a lower standard of living than other regions of the country, does not have the “culture of poverty” usually associated with lower income. Contrary to the assumption upon which most ecology of crime studies are based, larger cities (over 100,000 in population) are not representative of all cities. Greater association between socioeconomic variables and crime was found in larger than in smaller cities.     

INCOME INEQUALITY,RACE, AND PLACE: DOES THE DISTRIBUTION OF RACE AND CLASS WITHIN NEIGHBORHOODS AFFECT CRIME RATES?*

This study tests the effects of neighborhood inequality and heterogeneity on crime rates. The results of this study, which were obtained by using a large sample of census tracts in 19 cities in 2000, provide strong evidence of the importance of racial/ethnic heterogeneity for the amount of all types of crime generally committed by strangers, even controlling for the effects of income inequality. Consistent with predictions of several theories, greater overall inequality in the tract was associated with higher crime rates, particularly for violent types of crime. Strong evidence revealed that within racial/ethnic group inequality increases crime rates: Only the relative deprivation model predicted this association. An illuminating finding is that the effect of tract poverty on robbery and murder becomes nonsignificant when the level of income inequality is taken into account; this finding suggests that past studies that failed to take income inequality into account may have inappropriately attributed causal importance to poverty. This large sample also provides evidence that it is the presence of homeowners, rather than residential stability (as measured by the average length of residence), that significantly reduces the level of crime in neighborhoods.     

Criminal victimization in South Korea: A multilevel approach

A growing number of studies in criminal victimization had integrated the individual model and the context model to examine the dynamics of influences from the predictors at different levels. Only a few studies, however, had explored the impact of multilevel factors upon criminal victimization outside the U.S. context. Using the survey data gathered in Seoul, South Korea, the current study tested the applicability of the multilevel approach in criminal victimization to the Korean context. The results were mixed. At the macro level, poverty and community cohesion were positively associated with victimization by street crime and residential crime, respectively. Inconsistent with the findings in the U.S. studies, however, community cohesion increased the chance of residential crime victimization, and residential mobility was not significantly associated with criminal victimization. At the micro level, avoidance behaviors and target hardening efforts were associated with more criminal victimization, contrary to the proposition by opportunity theory. These unexpected findings could be explained by the unique social and cultural characteristics of Korean society. The unique contexts of modern Korean society as well as the limitation of the current study are discussed.     

A Cross-National Analysis of the Mediating Effect of Economic Deprivation on Crime

This study develops and tests a model of economic deprivation and crime using data from 52 nations for the years 1995–1999. The model, centering on the role of absolute and relative economic deprivation in mediating crime, predicts that social change causes variation in economic deprivation, which, in turn, leads to variation in crime rates. The results show that the relative deprivation variable, income inequality, mediates a large portion of the effects of two social change variables, population growth and urbanization, on homicide, while one of the absolute deprivation variables, GDP, transmits a great part of the effects of social change variables on theft. Both social change variables were found to have a weak direct connection to homicide and theft rates. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.     

U.S. SOCIAL STRUCTURE, CRIME, AND IMPRISONMENT

This research develops a structural model of crime and imprisonment in the United States from data on 49 states which was evaluated through a series of path and regression analyses. The major findings revealed that crime rates were effectively predicted by social structural characteristics, primarily urban population characteristics, and in turn that prison admissions were predicted by crime rates. Prison releases were not as strongly influenced by structural characteristics as crime rates and prison admissions; however, prison admissions were found to significantly affect releases. Variations in social structural determinants of violent and property crimes were also observed. The implication of these results ore discussed and suggestions for future research are presented.