A COMPARISON OF DELINQUENCY TRENDS

Comparative data are presented assessing trends in the juvenile crime rates for Japan and the United States over the past decade. Both court and arrest records show that the rate of juvenile crime has increased substantially in the United States while remaining essentially stable in Japan. The analyses demonstrate that this conclusion holds even when appropriate controls are introduced for the age groups involved. Suggestions are made for future research that might explain the differences reported for the two nations.     

Cross-national comparison of homicide: Age/sex-adjusted rates using the 1980 U.S. homicide experience as a standard

Cross-sectional studies of crime have typically relied on crude crime rates when making comparisons between countries. Crude rates control for population size but implicitly assume that all members of the population are equally at risk. Empirical studies have shown that, cross-nationally, risk varies by age and sex. Standardization of crime rates removes the confounding effects of variable age and sex population distributions. Since age/sex-specific crime rates are generally unavailable for many countries, the method of indirect standardization is the most desirable technique. Age/sex-adjusted homicide rates for 76 countries are presented, and two comparative measures are suggested. It is shown that while the United States has a higher homicide rate than all but 15 countries; in most cases, the magnitude of the difference, not controlling for age/sex differences, is overestimated. Crude rates underestimate differences between the United States and countries with higher rates of homicide.     

Crime,politics, and minority populations: Use of official statistics in the united states and Japan

Although the governments of the United States and Japan differ markedly in racial ideology, official crime statistics in both nations reflect political arrangements which marginalize minority populations. In both nations, official crime statistics reveal more about the attempts of majority populations to label minority populations as a criminal class than about variations in criminal behavior across racial populations. While there is no racially pure Black population in the United States, there is a “black” category within official statistics, and the statistics are used to justify crime control policies which have a disparate impact on the diverse peoples who are socially‐perceived as Black. While there are undeniably non‐Japanese populations in Japan, there are no racial categories for them in official statistics which define them out of existence; except where crime statistics are concerned, so that the police can monitor the criminality of “foreigners.” In both societies, official categorization of race in crime statistics implies that crime is a minority problem; government statistics reinforce official ideology that crimes by “foreigners” and “black violence” are the real threats to civil society.     

Youth Crime in Canada: Observations for Cross-Cultural Analysis

Despite its proximity to the United States, Canada provides a unique context within which youth crime can be examined and utilized for comparative analyses. Canada's demographics, cultural mosaic, and the legislative and political bases of criminal justice are quite distinct from those of the United States. While Canadian youth generally experience lower rates of crime than their U.S. counterparts, there are areas where such rates are comparable and require close examination. Among the emerging concerns in youth crime are crime in urban areas, ethnic youth gangs, and the high rates of involvement of aboriginal youth in crime in many areas of the country. The notions of vulnerable youths and viable communities are offered as two useful concepts for the study of youth crime on a national and cross-national basis. High on the research agenda are studies of youth crime in the urban/rural/remote areas of the country, the impact of immigration policy on the emergence of specific types of youth crime, and longitudinal studies of male and female youth crime.     

Differences in levels of deviance between Japanese and American students: the influence of peer deviance

In the current study, by drawing on the literature concerning peer deviance and criminological social learning theory, and on theory and research concerning cultural variability in uncertainty avoidance, we offer a rationale for predicting that peer deviance will be lower among Japanese than among Americans. The lower level of peer deviance among Japanese, in turn, might explain why crime and deviant behaviour are less common in Japan compared to the United States. Analyses of comparable survey data from college students in Japan and the United States (N = 1271) provide strong support for our hypothesis.     

Black Mist and White Collars: Economic Crime in the United States and Japan

Comparative studies of crime have persistently challenged and daunted criminology scholars. For criminologists studying Japan, interest has traditionally been focused on the country’s much-heralded low crime rate. The current study examines white-collar lawbreaking in both the United States and Japan, focusing on similarities and differences in culture, law, criminal justice system response, corporate governance, and regulation. The study concludes that if Japan’s low crime rate is an enigma to criminologists, then its ample amounts of white-collar and corporate crime appear that much more puzzling. Given that the depth of the problem of white-collar crime goes far beyond adjudicated cases, Japan’s remarkably low rate of common crime is likely eclipsed by its rate of white-collar and corporate crime. The study concludes that the different legal and cultural contexts of the “law in inaction” go far in explaining the official nonrecognition of white-collar and corporate crime in both the United States and Japan.

STUDYING CRIME TRENDS: NORMAL SCIENCE AND EXOGENOUS SHOCKS*

The study of crime trends has proceeded along two paths: 1) normal science investigations of slow‐moving and tractable changes in crime rates and explanatory conditions and 2) research encounters with unexpected and abrupt changes in crime rates resulting from exogenous shocks. I draw from my research on the relationship between crime rates and changing macroeconomic conditions to illustrate the pains and pleasures of studying crime trends with the tools of normal science. I describe my exploratory investigations of the recent homicide rise in the United States to underscore the theoretical importance and methodological challenges of research on exogenous shocks to crime rates. Finally, I hope to convey to the next generation of criminologists the intellectual excitement that comes from the study of crime trends.     

The Etiology of Juvenile Delinquency: The United States and Switzerland Compared

Both Switzerland and the United States are highly affluent societies and rank consistently among the top five countries in the world in per capita income, both are Western democracies, both are highly urbanized, and both are highly industrialized. Thus, it is quite surprising to discover that Switzerland has much lower rates of crime and delinquency than is the case for the United States, a fact which is especially true for violent crimes. This paper attempts to explain the sources of the differences in crime rates between the two countries and gives special attention to a comparison of juvenile misconduct in the two countries.

In the first section, difficulties are discussed concerning the measurement of crime and delinquency in Switzerland, a country which collects few data on social problems in general. Some general trends are shown to be clear, however, including marked increases in drug abuse and suicide cases among the young in Switzerland. In the subsequent section, previous explanations of crime in Switzerland as compared to the United States are reviewed with special emphasis on Clinard's famous Cities with Little Crime: The Case of Switzerland (1978). The limitations of earlier interpretations are considered in detail. Finally, this paper ends by generating a set of theoretically and practically informed hypothesis for explaining the differences in crime rates between the two countries. It is hoped that these hypotheses will form the basis for more detailed research in the future.     

Violent crime in Russia and the United States: 1990–1996

In spite of significant press attention to the dimensions of the crime problem in Russia during the 1990s, the scholarly literature on crime in Russia remains limited. In an attempt to address this limitation, this paper examines trends in violent crime in Russia during the period 1990–1996. To place the data in a comparative framework, we also examine data on reported violent crime in the United States during this period. Findings indicate the persistence of dramatically higher homicide rates in Russia, dramatic increases in reported robbery and aggravated assault rates, yet declines in rape rates. With the exception of homicide, violent crime rates remained below those in the U.S. We discuss implications of the findings and suggest additional research.     

‘Endemic to the species’: ordering the ‘other’ via organised crime

The United States has been the prime mover in the establishment of both the concept of organised crime and the use of the concept in its attempt to establish global hegemony, in which law enforcement became a little more than a front for a government-backed central casting agency, stereotyping both heroes and villains. This article offers an account of how the ‘Other’ has been used as prism for the construction of organised crime primarily in the United States and how this construction, as a franchise, has been exported on the international level and on heterogeneous criminal landscapes.     

POLICE PRODUCTIVITY AND CRIME RATES: 1973-1992*

According to the Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime rates increased dramatically over the past two decades. National Crime Victimization Survey data, on the other hand, indicate that the rates of violent crime remained relatively stable or dropped during this period. Which series provides a “correct” estimate of crime-rate trends is of more than academic interest. Highly publicized statistics on crime trends influence the public's concerns about crime and the decisions of policymakers both directly through their own perceptions of crime trends and indirectly through demands by the general public to control crime. This article compares these two major series on trends in violent crime rates in the United States for the period 1973–1992, with the goal of assessing the extent to which they measure the same underlying phenomenon: fluctuations in violent crime rates. The series are related (but not strongly). My conclusion, with some reservation, is that changes in law enforcement agencies rather than changes in the rates of violent crime incidents have created the upward trend in UCR violent crime rates during the past two decades.     

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.     

Islam, modernization and crime: A test of the religious ecology thesis

Using a United Nations (United Nations, 1977) cross-national data set on offender and offense rates for a variety of crimes, this article qualifies recent research into religiosity by investigating the relationship between Islamic religion, economic development, and crime rates. Considerable research has demonstrated a positive correlation between economic development (often defined as modernization) and crime. Other research has suggested that religion is an impedence to crime, although the results are a little less clear. No previous studies have examined the relationship between the Islamic religion and crime. Results suggest that, when level of economic development is held constant, Islamic countries do not differ significantly in crime rates compared to nonIslamic countries.     

Social support and homicide: a cross-national test of an emerging criminological theory

The social support (also known as social altruism) perspective in criminological theory has emerged as a potentially important explanation of aggregate levels of crime. Recent studies have tested the theory's ability to predict levels of violent and property crimes at the city and state levels in the United States, yet a formal test of the theory using data from outside of the U.S. has yet to be conducted. Accordingly, this article draws on insights from social support theory in a cross-national context. Consistent with the core proposition of the theory, the analyses show that, net of statistical controls, the indicator of social support is inversely and significantly related to rates of violent crime (measured by homicides). The implications of these results for criminological theory development and for the construction of effective crime control policies are discussed.     

Will Inflation Increase Crime Rate? New Evidence from Bounds and Modified Wald Tests

This paper employs the modified Wald (MWALD) causality test to re-examine the relationship between crime and its determinants (inflation and unemployment) in the United States from 1960 to 2005. Bounds test approach is employed to investigate the existence of a long-run relationship. The empirical evidence suggests that inflation and crime rates are cointegrated with a positive relationship. Moreover, the causal link is from inflation and unemployment to crime.     

Culture,Philosophy and Crime: The Japanese Experience

As societies modernize, one usually sees rapidly increasing rates of conventional crime. Contrary to this trend, Japan has experienced patterns that have either declined or remained basically horizontal during this process. In fact, this Oriental society is one of the few nations that has not had a positive development/crime correlation. Expanding on a societal explanatory approach suggested by Reischauer, this article describes how cultural traditions within Japan may explain this phenomenon, how their dark side of crime is also related to these cultural features, and how Implications for research are specified.     

Locking up my generation: Cohort differences in prison spells over the life course

Crime rates have dropped substantially in the United States, but incarceration rates have remained high. The standard explanation for the lasting trend in incarceration is that the policy choices from the 1980s and 1990s were part of a secular increase in punitiveness that has kept rates of incarceration high. Our study highlights a heretofore overlooked perspective: that the crime–punishment wave in the 1980s and 1990s created cohort differences in incarceration over the life course that changed the level of incarceration even decades after the wave. With individual-level longitudinal sentencing data from 1972 to 2016 in North Carolina, we show that cohort effects—the lingering impacts of having reached young adulthood at particular times in the history of crime and punishment—are at least as large (and likely much larger) than annual variation in incarceration rates attributable to period-specific events and proclivities. The birth cohorts that reach prime age of crime during the 1980s and 1990s crime–punishment wave have elevated rates of incarceration throughout their observed life course. The key mechanism for their elevated incarceration rates decades after the crime–punishment wave is the accumulation of extended criminal history under a sentencing structure that systematically escalates punishment for those with priors.     

THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC CONDITIONS ON ROBBERY AND PROPERTY CRIME: THE ROLE OF CONSUMER SENTIMENT*

Despite its long history in criminology, research on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and rates of common crime remains limited. That is in part because many analysts doubt that any systematic relationship exists and in part because of disagreement with regard to the validity of the indicators typically used to measure economic conditions. We argue in this article that good theoretical reasons exist to expect macroeconomic effects on crime rates, but many theories imply that collective perceptions of economic hardship should have effects on crime that are independent of those of more “objective” economic indicators. To evaluate this argument, we examine the relationships between the Index of Consumer Sentiment and regional robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft rates in the United States between 1970 and 2003, which was a period of large swings in both consumer sentiment and instrumental crime. Controlling for several factors thought to influence temporal variation in crime rates, we find that consumer sentiment had significant effects on robbery and property crime rates over the period that were largely independent of the effects of unemployment and economic growth. We also find that consumer sentiment accounted for a sizable fraction of the crime decline during the 1990s and yields reasonably accurate predictions of changes in the four offenses in 2004 and in two of the four offenses in 2005. We conclude that the effects of collective economic perceptions should become an important focus of future research on crime trends.     

When crime reporting goes high-tech: An experimental test of computerized citizen response to crime

This study investigates the importance of the reporting mode as a factor contributing to citizen crime reporting decisions in the United States. A randomized experimental design involving 140 subjects was used to compare the treatment effects of two crime reporting modes: one which was telephonic and the other computer interactive. The findings of this exploratory study of citizen crime reporting within a controlled laboratory setting revealed significant increases in reporting rates for subjects assigned to the computer reporting mode condition relative to those assigned to the telephonic reporting mode condition. This relationship persisted for reporting behavior examined at both low and moderate levels of crime seriousness. The implications of these findings for predicting future changes in the incidence and distribution of reported criminal behavior or illegal incidents are presented and discussed.