Quantitative criminology

Notions of human agency are a prominent part of some but not all criminological theories. For example, McCarthy (Annu Rev Sociol 28:417–442, 2002) argues that rational choice theory, which allows persons great involvement in decision making, is more congenial with notions of human agency than others. It would appear from his argument that rational choice theory offers fertile ground to develop a clearly defined role for human agency in criminal behavior. In this paper we have taken up McCarthy’s view and argue that an important part of what is human agency consists of thoughtfully reflective decision making. We outline four elements of thoughtfully reflective decision making, and claim that it is a characteristic that varies both across persons and within persons over time. It is in short the process by which good decisions are made because by using this process one increases the likelihood that choices made will be consistent with preferences. We develop a clear operational definition of thoughtfully reflective decision making and link it to the concept of human agency. We also articulate testable hypotheses about the short-term and longer-term implications of thoughtfully reflective decision making. We conclude with a discussion of what we think lies ahead for future conceptual and empirical work.

ObjectivesTo disaggregate the crime impact of visitor inflows. There is increasing evidence that visitors can make a major contribution to levels of crime in a given neighbourhood: crimes by visiting offenders may add to those committed by local offenders, while visitors (and their property) may provide local offenders with additional opportunities for crime.MethodsUsing police-recorded crime data for a large Eastern Canadian city we determined whether individuals charged or chargeable for property and violent crimes were visitors or residents of census tracts (CT) where crimes had been committed. This information was combined with data from a large transportation survey, allowing us to estimate daily population flows into each CT for four purposes (work, shopping, recreation, and education). Negative binomial regression models including spatial lags were used.ResultsAn increase in visitor inflow not only increases the number of visitors charged with crimes but also the number of local residents charged. These effects vary significantly by visit purpose: more infractions are committed in tracts where visits are for recreation and, to a lesser extent, for shopping. Findings for work and education are mixed.ConclusionsOne important implication of our results is that, because most studies of aggregate crime counts or rates fail to account for whether crimes have been committed by visitors or residents, previous research may have provided hasty, partial, or even erroneous explanations for crime concentrations.

Criminological research has consistently uncovered a positive correlationbetween past and current criminal behavior. Continuity in offending overtime can be attributed to at least two processes—populationheterogeneity and state dependence. A population heterogeneity processattributes stability in offending over time to differences in ananti-social characteristic (self-control, impulsivity, psychopathicpersonality) across persons that is established early in life andtime-stable thereafter. An implication of a population heterogeneityexplanation for continuity in offending over time is that the anti-socialcharacteristic is likely to have reverberations throughout life, takingmany manifestations later in life (unemployment, drug addiction, maritalinstability). Any observed correlation between these later life events andcriminality, therefore, is spurious rather than causal, due to the factthat they are all the effects of a common cause. A state dependenceexplanation, in contrast, attributes observed stability in criminaloffending to a process of contagion. That is, criminal behavior has agenuine causal effect on subsequent criminality by eroding constraintsand strengthening incentives to crime. The implication of a statedependence process is that criminal conduct may be influenced by laterlife events. In this paper, we draw a connection between populationheterogeneity and state dependence processes and extant criminologicaltheory. We also review the literature that has investigated theplausibility of these two processes. Finally, concluding that weknow very little about them we make recommendations for future researchon population heterogeneity and state dependence.

This study investigated the relationship between the subjective perception of stress and support in the population (as independent variables) and the prevalence of homicide, robbery, and property offenses in society, while controlling for the effect of gender, i.e., how these crimes are related to the differential perception of stress and support among males and females. The theoretical framework is provided by a stress-support model which postulates that crime in society will be positively related to stress factors and negatively related to support systems. Eight stress indicators and four support (solidarity) indicators were included. The data regarding these indicators were derived from continuing surveys of representative samples of the urban population in Israel during the years 1967–1979. The theoretical model was supported by the findings, especially those relating to property offenses. The effects of the female indicators were strongest (and greater than those of males) with regard to property offenses. The regression coefficients of the female indicators were also consistently larger than those of males, indicating that women's perceptions of stress are better predictors of crime rates than those of males. The results are compared to those of previous studies and suggestions are made for future studies in this new line of criminological research.

ObjectivesThe logic of incapacitation is the prevention of crime via the forced removal of known offenders from the community. The challenge is to provide a plausible estimate of how many crimes an incarcerated individual would have committed, were s/he free in the community rather than confined in prison. The objective of this study is to provide estimates of the incapacitation effect of first-time imprisonment from a sample of convicted offenders.MethodsThe data are official criminal records of all individuals convicted in The Netherlands in 1997. Two different analytical strategies are used to estimate an incapacitation effect. First, the offending rate of the imprisoned individuals prior to their confinement in 1997 provides a “within-person counterfactual”. Second, imprisoned offenders are paired with comparable non-imprisoned offenders using the method of propensity score matching in order to estimate a “between-person counterfactual”. Incapacitation estimates are provided separately for juvenile imprisonment (ages 12–17) as well as adult imprisonment (ages 18–50), and for male and female offenders.ResultsThe best estimate is that 1 year of incarceration prevents between 0.17 and 0.21 convictions per year. The use of additional data sources indicates that this corresponds to between roughly 2.0 and 2.5 criminal offenses recorded by the police.ConclusionsThe current results suggest that, insofar as imprisonment is used with the primary goal of reducing crime through incapacitation, a general increase in the use of incarceration as the sanction of choice is not likely to yield major crime control benefits.

AbstractIntroduction The Welfare Act of 1996 banned welfare and food stamp eligibility for felony drug offenders and gave states the ability to modify their use of the law. Today, many states are revisiting their use of this ban, searching for ways to decrease the size of their prison populations; however, there are no empirical assessments of how this ban has affected prison populations and recidivism among drug offenders. Moreover, there are no causal investigations whatsoever to demonstrate whether welfare or food stamp benefits impact recidivism at all.ObjectiveThis paper provides the first empirical examination of the causal relationship between recidivism and welfare and food stamp benefitsMethodsUsing a survival-based estimation, we estimated the impact of benefits on the recidivism of drug-offending populations using data from the National Corrections Reporting Program. We modeled this impact using a difference-in-difference estimator within a regression discontinuity framework.ResultsResults of this analysis are conclusive; we find no evidence that drug offending populations as a group were adversely or positively impacted by the ban overall. Results apply to both male and female populations and are robust to several sensitivity tests. Results also suggest the possibility that impacts significantly vary over time-at-risk, despite a zero net effect.ConclusionOverall, we show that the initial passage of the drug felony ban had no measurable large-scale impacts on recidivism among male or female drug offenders. We conclude that the state initiatives to remove or modify the ban, regardless of whether they improve lives of individual offenders, will likely have no appreciable impact on prison systems.

In the 1830s Siméon-Denis Poisson developed the distribution that bears his name, basing it on the binomial distribution. He used it to show how the inherent variance in jury decisions affected the inferences that could be made about the probability of conviction in French courts. In recent years there have been a number of examples where researchers have either ignored or forgotten this inherent variance, and how operations research, in particular mathematical modeling, can be used to incorporate this variance in analyses. These are described in this paper, as well as other contributions made by operations research to the study of crime and criminal justice.

This article evaluates the utility of social development model constructs toassess the correlates of onset, escalation, deescalation, and desistance ofdelinquent behavior, from age 12 to age 15, using a dynamic classificationapproach. Dynamic classification places individuals into categories basedon changes in levels of delinquent behavior over time. These analyses assessthe extent to which specific constructs are associated with changes in thedelinquency status of individuals. Constructs of the social developmentmodel (SDM), including opportunities for conventional involvement, skillsfor conventional involvement, rewards for conventional involvement,proactive family management, bonding to conventional society, opportunitiesfor antisocial involvement, antisocial interactions, perceived rewards forantisocial involvement, and norms against drug use, were significantlyassociated with change in delinquent behavior over time. Many of theconstructs were particularly salient in distinguishing between youths whoremained involved in delinquency and youths who deescalated or desisted fromdelinquent behavior during this period. Implications for preventiveinterventions and criminological theory are discussed.

Refat Aljumily UK Refat.A.70@outlook.com This paper proposes a new approach to measure the " dark figure " of crime. Accurate probabilities to a variety of unrecorded or unreported crimes, including those that are difficult to measure, are needed to understand the level and type of crime occur in society, test and assess criminal activities and criminal behavior. Bayesian statistics is proposed to measure the " dark figure " of crime. The advantage of using Bayesian statistics is that a degree of belief or a state of knowledge that a criminologist or social scientist holds in a proposition plays an important role in those circumstances when very few observations or data are available. Bayesian statistics assigns probabilities to the degree of belief, or, more specifically, the degree of rational belief, and modifies or changes it mathematically based on relevant evidence relating to it. This view of Bayesian statistics is where it becomes particularly helpful in measuring the " dark figure " of crime and the two elements that constitute this figure: unreported crimes and crimes that are reported to the police but not recorded by them. The application of how we can integrate this methodology into crimes that are never reported to, or never recorded by, the police or any other legal or law enforcement agencies is explained in a simplistic manner with examples, along with the strengths and limitations associated with it. The proposed methodology is expected to provide an insight into the amount of unknown (unrecorded/unreported) crimes that take place in any given place at a given time and ensure that crimes outside the boundaries of all official/independent crime statistics can be accounted for quantitatively.

Our current understanding of the role of the social environment in crime causation is at best rudimentary. Guided by the theoretical framework of Situational Action Theory, and using data from the ESRC financed Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), this paper aims to propose how we can better theorise and study the role of the social environment, particularly the person and place interaction, in crime causation. We will introduce, and illustrate the usefulness of, a space–time budget methodology as a means of capturing people’s exposure to settings and describing their activity fields. We will suggest and demonstrate that, combined with a small area community survey and psychometric measures of individual characteristics, a space–time budget is a powerful tool for advancing our knowledge about the role of the social environment, and its interaction with people’s crime propensity, in crime causation. Our unique data allows us to study the convergence in time and space of crime propensity, criminogenic exposure and crime events. As far as we are aware, such an analysis has never before been carried out. The findings show that there are (a) clear associations between young people’s activity fields and their exposure to criminogenic settings, (b) clear associations between their exposure to criminogenic settings and their crime involvement, and, crucially, (c) that the influence of criminogenic exposure depends on a person’s crime propensity. Having a crime-averse morality and strong ability to exercise self-control appears to make young people practically situationally immune to the influences of criminogenic settings, while having a crime-prone morality and poor ability to exercise self-control appears to make young people situationally vulnerable to the influences of criminogenic settings.

This paper is a survey of statistical methods used to analyze the length of time until a specified event occurs. These models have often been used to analyze the survival times (i.e., time until death) of medical patients, and so the term survival analysis is natural. In criminology, the main application of these models has been to analyze the time until recidivism, but many other applications are possible. The paper summarizes the statistical literature on survival analysis, and describes its applications in criminology. The methods are illustrated by an application to the prediction of time until recidivism for a sample of North Carolina prison releasees.

This paper reviews quantitative criminological research, especially of a sophisticated mathematical nature, published by researchers in Australia and New Zealand since 1981. A statistical analysis of quantitative articles published between 1981 and 1995 in the leading academic journal.The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, showed that using the five topical categories developed by Farrington (this issue), there has been

Over the last 40 years, the question of how crime varies across places has gotten greater attention. At the same time, as data and computing power have increased, the definition of a ‘place’ has shifted farther down the geographic cone of resolution. This has led many researchers to consider places as small as single addresses, group of addresses, face blocks or street blocks. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of the spatial distribution of crime have consistently found crime is strongly concentrated at a small group of ‘micro’ places. Recent longitudinal studies have also revealed crime concentration across micro places is relatively stable over time. A major question that has not been answered in prior research is the degree of block to block variability at this local ‘micro’ level for all crime. To answer this question, we examine both temporal and spatial variation in crime across street blocks in the city of Seattle Washington. This is accomplished by applying trajectory analysis to establish groups of places that follow similar crime trajectories over 16 years. Then, using quantitative spatial statistics, we establish whether streets having the same temporal trajectory are collocated spatially or whether there is street to street variation in the temporal patterns of crime. In a surprising number of cases we find that individual street segments have trajectories which are unrelated to their immediately adjacent streets. This finding of heterogeneity suggests it may be particularly important to examine crime trends at very local geographic levels. At a policy level, our research reinforces the importance of initiatives like ‘hot spots policing’ which address specific streets within relatively small areas.

ABSTRACT Objectives Introduce and test the relative efficacy of two methods for modeling the impact of cumulative ‘exposure’ to drinking facilities on violent crime at street segments. Methods One method, simple count, sums the number of drinking places within a distance threshold. The other method, inverse distance weighted count, weights each drinking place within a threshold based on its distance from the street segment. Closer places are weighted higher than more distant places. Distance is measured as the street length from a street segment to a drinking place along the street network. Seven distance thresholds of 400, 800, 1,200, 1,600, 2,000, 2,400 and 2,800 feet are tested. A negative binomial regression model controlling for socio-economic characteristics, opportunity factors and spatial autocorrelation is used to evaluate which of the measure/threshold combinations produce a better fit as compared to a model with no exposure measures. Results Exposure measured as an inverse distance weighted count produces the best fitting model and is significantly related to violent crime at longer distances than simple count (from 400 to 2,800 feet). Exposure to drinking places using a simple count is significantly related to violent crime up to 2,000 feet. Both models indicate the influence of drinking places is highest at shorter distance thresholds. Conclusions Both researchers and practitioners can more precisely quantify the influence of drinking places in multivariate models of street segment level violent crime by incorporating proximity in the development of a cumulative exposure measure. The efficacy of using exposure measures to quantify the influence of other types of facilities on crime patterns across street segments should be explored.

This paper offers a methodological approach for estimating classification error in police records then determining the statistical accuracy of official crime statistics reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Classification error refers to the mistakes in UCR statistics caused by the misclassification of criminal offenses, for example recording a crime as aggravated assault when it should have been simple

Congress intended to make the sentencing process less discretionary and more equitable for similarly situated defendants when it passed the U.S. Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. Sentencing guidelines were devised to promote these changes. After more than a decade of implementation, however, little is known about the impact of the new policy. This paper examines sentences given between 1993 and 1994 in one federal circuit in an effort to determine whether this policy instrument has achieved success. The theoretical model of a rational case processing system (Gottfredson and Gottfredson, 1980) is used to guide the interpretation of our findings and the recommendations we offer for improvements.