A note on crime and punishment

The models developed here are intended to convince the reader that Tsebelis' results — that increased punishment leaves the equilibrium level of crime unchanged — is an example of what is possible rather than a general result. To recap the argument in words: it is true that raising the penalty on a crime may cause the enforcing agency to divert attention away to other matters, so that theexpected penalty facing the prospective criminal is not as high as it would have been had the agency not adjusted; but it is not generally true that enforcing agencies will choose to lower their probabilities of enforcement just enough to exactly offset the increased penalty, leaving the expected penalty unchanged, hence the equilibrium level of crime unchanged.⁸ this result sounds unusual when stated in words and it is when modelled using the theory of games too.This work was supported by NSF grant SES-9022882.     

International organized crime

He has served as a consultant to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the National Security Council, and related agencies of the U.S. government. He has written, coauthored, or edited over sixteen books on intelligence and national security.     

The crime effect of refugees

We analyze the impact on crime of millions of refugees who entered and stayed in Turkey as a result of the civil war in Syria. Using a novel administrative data source on the flow of offense records to prosecutors’ offices in 81 provinces of the country each year, and utilizing the staggered movement of refugees across provinces over time, we estimate instrumental variables models that address potential endogeneity of the number of refugees and their location and find that an increase in the number of refugees leads to more crime. We estimate that the influx of refugees between 2012 and 2016 generated additional 75,000 to 150,000 crimes per year, although it is not possible to identify the distribution of these crimes between refugees and natives. Additional analyses reveal that a low-educated native population has a separate, but smaller, effect on crime. Our results underline the need to quickly strengthen the social safety systems, to take actions to dampen the impact on the labor market, and to provide support to the criminal justice system for mitigating the repercussions of massive influx of individuals into a country, and to counter the social and political backlash that typically emerges in the wake of such large-scale population movements.     

Cross-city evidence on the relationship between immigration and crime

Public concerns about the costs of immigration and crime are high, and sometimes overlapping. This article investigates the relationship between immigration into a metropolitan area and that area's crime rate during the 1980s. Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the Current Population Surveys, we find, in the cross section, that cities with high crime rates tend to have large numbers of immigrants. However, controlling for the demographic characteristics of the cities, recent immigrants appear to have no effect on crime rates. In explaining changes in a city's crime rate over time, the flow of immigrants again has no effect, whether or not we control for other city-level characteristics. In a secondary analysis of individual data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that youth born abroad are statistically significantly less likely than native-born youth to be criminally active.     

Protest and property crime: political use of police resources and the deterrence of crime

This article investigates the claim that the political use of police resources promotes crime. Using a panel of South Korean metropolitan areas, we show that (1) the reallocation of police resources toward the control of political protests reduces arrest rates for crime and (2) the resulting reduction in criminal arrests significantly increases the incidence of crime. Overall, the impact of the reallocation of police resources works mainly through tradeoffs with arrest rates. Our findings imply that it is not the size of the police per se, but the allocation of police resources toward crime control that deters crime.     

A cure for crime: Can mental health treatment diversion reduce crime among youth?

Youth crime is a serious social problem, as is the high proportion of young offenders in the juvenile justice system who have mental disorders. A recent policy innovation applies the theory of therapeutic jurisprudence and diverts youth with mental disorders to treatment in lieu of further court processing. The expansion of mental health diversion programs reflects an increasingly popular view that there is a causal relationship between youth mental disorders and crime. Policymakers who share this view place greater emphasis on rehabilitation and treatment as a way to reduce crime, rather than on stricter punishment. This paper considers the policy issues around youth mental health diversion programs. In addition, it evaluates the effect of a mental health diversion program for youth that was implemented in Texas. The paper finds that mental health diversion can be used effectively to delay or prevent youth recidivism.     

Psychopathy,sociopathy, and crime

He is a past president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and in 1990 he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology in the Public Interest. Dr. Lykken is the author of A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector(1981) and of The Antisocial Personalities(1995).     

White supremacist groups and hate crime

Hate group activity may incite criminal behavior or serve as protection from bias-based violence. I find that the presence of one or more active white supremacist chapters is associated with higher hate crime rates. I reject the hypothesis that chapter presence and hate crimes are symptomatic of the overall level of bias-based violence. Moreover, I reject the hypothesis that white supremacist groups form in response to an increase in antiwhite hate crimes, particularly those perpetrated by nonwhites.