Crimes,arrests, and elections: Predicting winners and losers

Political candidates are frequently identified as being either “law and order” advocates or “soft” on crime; however, the importance of actual arrest and crime levels on election outcomes has not been examined empirically. One particular set of candidates for whom arrest and crime rates might be expected to be predictive is publicly elected law enforcement officials. Using 1976 Florida County Sheriff election data, this article examines the capacity for discriminating between winning and losing incumbent sheriffs by using county arrest and crime data in association with socioeconomic and political information. The findings show that a significant discrimination is obtained (significant = 0.009, canonical correlation = 0.59, and 76 percent of the counties were correctly classified) and that crimes and arrests are significant factors in determining the outcome of sheriff elections. The results indicate that although traditional political factors, such as party affiliation and number of terms in office, and socioeconomic factors, such as income, density, and unemployment rates, do well in discriminating winning from losing candidates, a sheriff-election model must also incorporate crime and arrest information, particularly information on murder and rape.     

Unemployment,business cycles,crime, and the Canadian provinces

Purpose

Test the Cantor and Land (1985) model using multiple measures of the state of the economy.

Methods

A panel data set of the 10 Canadian provinces, 1981 – 2009, is analyzed using a hybrid modeling approach called a decomposition model. Rather than one economy-related model, four are included in the analysis: gross provincial product, gross provincial product per capita, unemployment rate, and low income.

Results

All economy-related variables matter for property and violent crime, but the sign and magnitude of the estimated parameters vary based on context.

Conclusions

The relationship between the economy and crime is complex. Only including one economy-related variable appears to result in omitted variable bias. As such, any evaluation of the relationship between the economy and crime must consider multiple measures of the economy.     

Unemployment,Guardianship, and Weekday Residential Burglary

The absence of a consistent positive effect of the unemployment rate on the crime rate is perplexing, but it may be partly due to the countervailing effect of guardianship. Using weekly state-level data and a pooled cross-sectional time-series research design, we investigate whether the unemployment rate influences residential burglary. This study contributes to the extant literature by distinguishing between weekday residential burglaries, or those burglaries that occur between the hours of 6 am to 6 pm on weekdays, from weeknight/weekend burglaries. If unemployment increases guardianship because previously employed individuals are now at home during the workday protecting their possessions, the expectation is that the unemployment rate will have an instantaneous negative effect on residential burglaries that transpire during normal working hours. Results buttress the logic associated with the guardianship thesis in that a rise in the unemployment rate only engenders a decrease in weekday residential burglaries.     

Unemployment,living standards,and the working-class family in urban Canada in 1901

This article addresses a problem faced by many historians of living standards: what was the effect of unemployment on the real incomes of working-class families during industrialization? The 1901 Census of Canada offers a rare opportunity to answer this question, and to measure both unemployment and living standards while taking into account the contributions of all family wage-earners. The conclusion is that average weekly or monthly wages were more important than work duration in determining the living standards of poor families.     

Penalization and multidimensional poverty: improving our understanding of poverty amongst offenders in Ciudad Juarez,Mexico

Using a multidimensional approach to poverty measurement, this article aims to contribute to an improved understanding on the main aspects of deprivation experienced by former participants of organized crime in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a city that became the epicenter of violence due to the ‘war on drugs’ declared in 2006. A sample of 180 surveys and 20 in-depth interviews were implemented to evaluate multidimensional poverty amongst young men serving a prison sentence for a series of crimes related to organized criminal activity (aged 12 to 29) in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. An equal number of surveys were implemented to a group of non-offenders who had no criminal record and resided in a marginalized area of the same city. The research finds that while offenders fared worse in several non-income dimensions of poverty compared to non-offenders, qualitative evidence revealed that experiences of poverty of offenders were not homogenous, as suggested by existing studies. One of the key findings to emerge from the research is that participation in organized crime decreases income poverty; however, participation did not constitute an effective nor sustained pathway out of poverty nor did it decrease deprivation in other dimensions due to a highly skewed distribution of income in the illegal economy and the use of gains from illegal activity to fuel conspicuous consumption, findings that are similar in the established Western literature on youth gangs.     

Psychology,law, and the black community

Summary The present paper presented key applications of psychology and the law to the black community, embracing both civil and criminal law and legislation. The breadth of its focus preluded a more in-depth treatment of other areas relevant to black people which include issues related to psychiatric emergencies and involuntary hospitalization, child custody, and right-to-treatment litigation in prison and mental health facilities. In focusing attention on these applications and areas for activity, hopefully, I have not presented an unrealistic depiction of a responsive, socially sensitive, legal system capable and willing to exercise its powerful tools in the interest of the black community. To the contrary, there is considerable literature that identifies the historic role of the legal system in the enactments of laws to institutionalize and cement slavery, its failure to aggressively protect constitutional and civil rights of blacks, in imposing penalties differentially to blacks and whites in the criminal justice system, and more recently, conspiracies of law enforcement officials to deprive blacks of basic civil rights (Bell, 1975; Burns, 1973; Higgenbotham, 1973). The legal system, rather than being an effective instrument for justice and positive social changes, has often been a major source of racism. Thus, any meaningful attempts by lawyers or behavioral scientists in the interest of black people cannot ignore the racism that is embedded in the fabric of the legal profession and the behavioral sciences. Particular aspects of the law with significant social-psychological dimensions are: the cultural inertia, the archaicness of the law due to its roots in English common-law, historic and contemporary racism, conservatism associated with the principle of stare decisis, judicial elitism, and the substitution of administrative and judicial discretion for overt racism. Thus, in order for the legal system, or the field of psychology, to be reponsive to the needs of blacks and other oppressed groups, they must eradicate racism and injustice in their own ranks.Traditionally law has functioned as the hand maiden of the propertied class in our society. So it was to be expected that lawyers in the legislative halls, lawyers on the bench and lawyers in the executive branch of government would combine their talents to perpetuate by law this peculiarly American doctrine of racism predicated upon a claimed color inferiority.     

Anticipated impact of the 2009 Four Corners raid and arrests

Archaeological looting on United States federal land has been illegal for over a century. Regardless, the activity has continued in the Four Corners region. This paper discusses how the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) can be viewed as sumptuary law, and within a sumptuary context, subversion can be anticipated. An analysis of 1986 and June 2009 federal raids in the Four Corners will exemplify this point by identifying local discourses found in newspapers both before and after each raid, which demonstrate a sumptuary effect. Ultimately, this paper concludes that looting just adapted, rather than halted, after each federal raid and that understanding this social context of continued local justification and validation of illegal digging is a potential asset for cultural resource protection.     

Execution publicity and homicide in Georgia

A requisite of both general deterrence and brutalization theories of capital punishment is citizen awareness of executions. Yet this dimension is frequently left unmeasured in the literature on executions and homicide. Further, the current literature utilizes nationwide data, which introduces aggregation bias. The present study deals with these issues, testing the brutalization theory with data on publicized executions in the state of Georgia. Monthly data are used in order to capture any short-term brutalization effect. The results of a multivariate time-series model find that a publicized execution is associated with an increase of 2.6 homicides, or 6.8%, in the month of the publicized execution. Publicized executions were associated with an increase of 55 homicides during the time period analyzed. The results provide no support for the deterrence, victim mobilization, and normative validation perspectives on homicide. The findings can be interpreted, however, from several different varieties of brutalization theory.     

Identification of the unidentified deceased: turnaround times, methods, and demographics in Fulton County, Georgia

CONTEXT: Multiple methods may be employed in an attempt to identify deceased individuals who are unidentified when reported to the medical examiner or coroner. The success and turnaround times of various methods differ. OBJECTIVE: To determine the number of deaths initially involving unidentified individuals, their demographics, the methods used and turnaround times for cases in which identification was successful and the portion of cases that remain unidentified for significant periods of time. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Retrospective case review of all decedents who were initially unidentified when death was reported to the Fulton County Medical Examiner in Atlanta, Georgia, during a 1-year period between May 2003 and May 2004. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Rate per 1000 deaths which involved an unidentified decedent, tabulation of methods used to make identifications, and rate of cases remaining unidentified. RESULTS: Of 2279 deaths reported to the office, 100 were originally unidentified, resulting in a rate of 44 unidentified decedents per 1000 deaths reported. Those who remained unidentified involved 6 cases, resulting in a "cold case" rate of 2.6 per 1000 deaths. Seventy-eight percent were identified within 2 days, and the most common successful methods were visual identification (52%) and fingerprints (31%). Dental (10%), x-ray (4%), and other methods (6%) were least commonly used. Of the 94 persons identified, all identifications occurred within 29 days. DNA procedures were not needed in most cases, and in the few cases where such tests were needed, results were either unavailable or failed to show a match with known samples. CONCLUSIONS: The majority of unidentified deceased individuals were identified within 2 days, with visual verification or fingerprints accounting for about 83% of methods successfully employed. The medical examiner noted a rate of 44 unidentified deceased persons per 1000 death reports, with an ultimate "cold case" (long-term unidentified) rate of about 2.6 cases per 1000 death reports. These data may be useful in developing office policy and procedure regarding the procedural and temporal aspects of investigations centered on achieving identification and making dispositions of unidentified deceased bodies.     

National trends in female arrests, 1960–1990: Assessment and recommendations for research

Trends in female criminality from 1960 to 1990 are examined. The main focus is UCR arrest statistics but other sources of evidence are also used. Major findings include the following: (1) relative to males, the profile of the female offender has not changed; and (2) the principal change in the female percentage of arrests involves the overall rise in property crime, especially minor thefts and frauds. The effects of broad-based legal and societal trends on female criminality are discussed and an agenda for research on the issue of female crime trends is proposed.     

Economic vulnerability and poverty in Tajikistan

We examine the profile of poverty and vulnerability in Tajikistan using household level panel data for 2004 and 2005. The drop in poverty was largely due to increase in remittances from workers working overseas. Households are more likely to be poor if they live in (a) rural areas, (b) large households, (c) households with a large proportion of children; or are pensioners or live in a household whose head is a pensioner. One half of the households observed to be non-poor are vulnerable to poverty. With expected utility approach, our analysis suggests that vulnerability associated with inequality is very large, whereas that from idiosyncratic risk is moderate. Aggregate shocks have been favorable and reduced vulnerability. We advance several policy recommendations.     

Unemployment and the dynamics of offender populations

This paper models the increase in the participation rate of criminal behavior as either the initiation rate or the career length of criminals changes in response to increases in unemployment. Even with large instantaneous increases in unemployment, the models show a very slow increase in the criminal participation rate, giving a possible explanation of the failure of many studies to demonstrate a link between unemployment and crime levels.     

Economic conditions and punishment in Postbellum Georgia

This paper examines the relationship between economic conditions and incarceration in Georgia between 1868 and 1936. Time-series analysis provides evidence that declining cotton prices increased the rate at which both black and white males were incarcerated. Changes in cotton production, declines in racial economic inequality, and demographic shifts also affected incarceration rates. Each had quite different implications for black and white punishment, however. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for research on punishment in general and Southern punishment in particular.     

Sex disparities in arrests by residence,race, and age: An assessment of the gender convergence/crime hypothesis

In this report we examine whether differences in sex disparities in crime exist by population subgroup (residence, race, and age), using arrest data from the Uniform Crime Reports. We assess the utility of the gender equality/crime position as an explanation of any differences that do exist, and we propose alternative interpretations of the data. The major finding is that for most offenses, the differences in the female percentage of arrests (FP/A) are borderline or negligible. In those few instances where differences in FP/A exist across the comparison groups, they appear to have little or no relation to levels of gender-role convergence from one subgroup to another. Instead, we conclude that the differences in FP/A can be explained better as due to differences in willingness to sanction female offenders, to variations in opportunities for traditional female-based consumer crimes, and/or to differing levels of economic vulnerability among some groups of females.     

Missing pieces: Notes on crime,poverty, and social policy

A long and impressive criminological tradition links crime to what social scientists call ‘persistent poverty’-and, in particular, to the corrosive effects of inadequate labor markets on a variety of social institutions. But few anticrime policies have seriously confronted those conditions, even at the height of the Great Society of the 1960s. With only scattered exceptions, those policies have sought to enhance the individual capacities of children and youth without substantially altering the surrounding economic institutions. An anticrime strategy for the next century that is both more effective and consistent with what we know about the roots of crime must involve measures that more directly address the labor market itself. Among other things, these measures include direct public job creation, systematic efforts to up grade wages, and greater support for labor organization. This essay is a revised version of a background paper presented at The Social Science Research Council Policy Conference on ‘Persistent Poverty’ in Washington D.C., November, 1993.