Do hard times spark more crime?

As concern about economic inequality rises to the top of the issue agenda, it is instructive to note that the upturn in poverty of recent years has not been accompanied by a rise in violent crime. To the contrary, since 2008, unemployment and homicides have been inversely related.

Is this a puzzling anomaly? Most people assume that hard times cause crime spikes. They reason, plausibly enough, that financial pressures — as a consequence of, say, becoming unemployed — lead to stress, anger and violence.

Many criminologists agree. The "strain theory" of crime holds that high or rising unemployment and poverty rates may be indicators of increasingly unequal opportunities, and that periods of sharply unequal opportunity are likely to produce more crime.

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This is an op-ed from the LATimes.  Tom

Plant Tomatoes. Harvest Lower Crime Rates.

I suppose the easy thing to do would be to rail against food deserts, the dearth of fresh produce and other healthy foods for those living in impoverished neighborhoods. Or to enter the debate over whether there are, in fact, food deserts. (A couple of recent studies have suggested that proximity to decent grocery stores isn't the key problem of inner-city nutrition.) But considering Emily Schiffer's photos, I was reminded of Mother Teresa's visit to a housing project on Chicago's West Side in the mid-1980s. What rattled her was not the poverty of the pocketbook. She'd seen worse in India. Rather, it was what she called "the poverty of the spirit."

Looking at Schiffer's photos and talking with people involved in urban farming, I've come to realize that their efforts have less to do with providing healthy food than they do with a reclamation of sorts, taking ownership of their community and their daily lives. Growing Home is one of Chicago's larger urban farming projects, much of it located in Englewood, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. While it harvests 13,000 pounds of vegetables a year on a half-acre site, nearly all are sold to restaurants and at a farmers market on the city's more prosperous North Side. But Growing Home has altered the landscape of the neighborhood—and it employs local residents, many of whom because of past indiscretions have trouble finding work elsewhere.

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America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.

Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting called "broken windows," popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an influential article in The Atlantic. "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired," they observed, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." So too, tolerance of small crimes would create a vicious cycle ending with entire neighborhoods turning into war zones. But if you cracked down on small crimes, bigger crimes would drop as well.

Giuliani won the election, and he made good on his crime-fighting promises by selecting Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the NYPD's new commissioner. Bratton had made his reputation as head of the New York City Transit Police, where he aggressively applied broken-windows policing to turnstile jumpers and vagrants in subway stations. With Giuliani's eager support, he began applying the same lessons to the entire city, going after panhandlers, drunks, drug pushers, and the city's hated squeegee men. And more: He decentralized police operations and gave precinct commanders more control, keeping them accountable with a pioneering system called CompStat that tracked crime hot spots in real time.

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Who, What, Why: What happened to crime in New York City?

 

 

For more than 36 hours in New York City, no-one was shot, stabbed, or otherwise killed. The crime freeze began after 22:25 on Sunday, when a man was shot in the head, and continued until another man was shot at 11:20 on Tuesday.

Though the break in violent crime marked the first time in recent memory such an event had occurred, the figure doesn't surprise criminologists.

"I'm surprised it's just the first day this has happened," says Alfred Blumstein, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Considering, says Blumstein, that there were only 472 homicides in New York last year, with this year on track for even fewer, the odds of a violent-crime free day are favourable.

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This reminds me of the time crime took a holiday in Milan.  Tom
 

Welcome to "Crime," Slate's New Crime Blog About Crime

Hi, I'm Justin Peters, intrepid freelancer and general liability. Earlier this month, I wrote about my efforts to infiltrate the ranks of Manhattan hipster circles by growing a beard and shaving my pubes. Now, I'll be your guide to another seamy, amoral underworld.

Welcome to Slate's new crime blog, which we’ve imaginatively titled “Crime.” Consider it your cheerful, insatiably curious guide to everything illegal. I'll be examining the wide world of crime, punishment, and recidivism on a daily basis, writing about the most murderous gatmen and the most devious yeggs.

Why a crime blog? Mercy, everyone loves crime. More to the point, though, there's a dearth of smart, non-sensationalistic crime coverage on the Internet these days. I plan to write about horrible things in a non-horrible manner.

What are my qualifications? Well, I was burglarized last year, which was unsettling. (As it turns out, I have nothing of value to steal, which was even more unsettling.) I was a background extra in the movie Curly Sue, so I've got unparalleled insight into crimes involving homeless grifters with hearts of gold and their adorably sassy adopted daughters. I've read everything ever written by Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, and Franklin W. Dixon. And, of course, every Christmas I go down to the homeless shelter and distribute cakes laced with arsenic.

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Cold Cases: Unsolved Crimes That Keep Us Up At Night (QUIZ)

 

 

In TNT’s hit show, The Closer, Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson is the LAPD’s eponymous case-clincher. Known for her unorthodox tactics and razor-sharp instincts, she’s the one the Major Crimes Division turns to when there’s a case that needs a confession.

Throughout history, however, there have been crimes that have since gone unsolved. From Jack the Ripper to the Zodiac murders, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa to the drowning of Natalie Wood, the following are some of the cases that still keep us up at night with unanswered questions.
See if you can fill in the pieces to the puzzles below.

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Shooting response shows Tories have opposition cowed on crime

Six and a half years ago, the Boxing Day shooting of Jane Creba near Toronto’s Eaton Centre sent Paul Martin’s re-election campaign into a downward spiral from which it never recovered.

That may be why the opposition parties appeared to be going to such lengths to avoid any mention of Saturday’s fatal shooting at the Eaton Centre food court – proving, once again, that the criminal is political.

The Conservatives displayed no such reticence. Julian Fantino, the Associate Defence Minister and former head of the Toronto and Ontario police forces, declared that the attacks demonstrated the tougher sentencing provisions of Tory crime legislation were needed.

“If all else fails, the only thing we have left is the criminal justice system,” he said Monday on CTV. “We need to find ways to isolate law abiding, decent citizens from those who actively seek to victimize and continue their life of crime,” he said. “And jail is the answer, I’m afraid, if all else fails.”

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Economic unity beats out crime as hot issue, poll finds

More Canadians see strengthening the country’s economic unity as the top priority for government compared with a year ago, according to a poll ranking voter attitudes toward Conservative priorities.
The Nanos Survey poll asked 1,000 Canadians earlier this month which issue they considered the most important out of five listed on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s website as long-term priorities. The poll suggests Canadians have become less interested in cracking down on crime, asserting Arctic sovereignty and rebuilding the Canadian Forces.

Nearly 40 per cent of those surveyed this year said economic unity was their top priority, compared with close to 26 per cent last year, when the same poll question was asked soon after the Conservatives won their majority.
In Ontario, 46 per cent of respondents picked economic unity as the most important priority, more than any other province. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said earlier this year that the province has “no one to blame but themselves” for heading into deficits for six more years.

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Outcry at betrayal of domestic violence victims

Spending falls by one-third as a result of Coalition cuts

Women's lives are being put at risk as the spending squeeze cuts deep into the help offered to victims of domestic violence, campaigners warned last night.

Refuges for women suffering physical and mental abuse from partners are closing and specialist counsellors are losing their jobs following a 31 per cent cut in their funding.

Requests under the Freedom of Information Act have discovered that funding from local authorities to organisations working with domestic-violence and sexual-abuse victims fell from £7.8m in 2010-11 to £5.4m in the current financial year. The cuts come despite a severe shortage of refuge places and official estimates of almost 400,000 incidents of domestic violence in the year 2010-11. The figures will prove embarrassing to ministers as they attempt to rebut accusations that their policies are penalising women. David Cameron has urged advisers to pursue female-friendly policies after a leaked Downing Street document warned that the Government was "seen as having hit women, or their interests, disproportionately".

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Five things about crime and doing the time in Canada

The Post’s Sarah Boesveld lists five things you should know about the Statistics Canada Report on Cases in Adult Court by Province 2009-10:

1. Cases on the decline
Canada’s courts heard far fewer criminal cases during the period of 2009-10 than the year prior, dropping to 262,616 criminal cases from the 392,907 disposed of by judges in the 2008-09 period. The number of cases was almost the same the year before that, but about 3% higher than in 2006-07. Before that, criminal court case loads had been dropping for four years.

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Tough on crime, short on facts

The biggest problem for opponents of Bill C-10, the federal government's omnibus tough-oncrime bill, is that criminals and prisoners have no political constituency. The sort of people who will get swept up in the mandatory minimum sentences contained in the bill are dismissed by most voters as street thugs, pedophiles and gang members.

Eugene Oscapella, a veteran legal-reform advocate, knows this. And so he is careful to make his pitch in terms that respectable, middle-class Canadians - the sort of people with kids in high school or college - will appreciate.

"I teach a criminology course at the University of Ottawa," he told a crowd at downtown Toronto's Church of the Redeemer on Tuesday night. "Eighty percent of my students [would be] criminals under [Bill C-10]. About 10-20% of them would be liable for a mandatory minimum sentence of two years for simply passing a tablet of ecstasy at a party."

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Evaluating the Use of Public Surveillance Cameras for Crime Control and Prevention - A Summary

Abstract

A growing number of cities are using surveillance cameras to reduce crime, but little research exists to determine whether they’re worth the cost. With jurisdictions across the country tightening their belts, public safety resources are scarce—and policymakers need to know which potential investments are likely to bear fruit. This research brief summarizes the Urban Institute’s series documenting three cities use of public surveillance cameras and how they impacted crime in their neighborhoods.

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See this also:

Surveillance Cameras Cost-Effective Tools for Cutting Crime, 3-Year Study Concludes

Crime falls to 1973 levels as Tories push for sentencing reform

New statistics show the national crime rate is continuing its 20-year decline – reaching levels not seen since 1973 even as the federal Conservative government prepares legislation that would put more Canadians behind bars for longer periods of time.

It is a juxtaposition of politics and reality that has prompted critics to accuse the government of ignoring facts at taxpayers’ expense as it pursues a criminal-justice agenda focused on punishment rather than prevention.

Statistics Canada released it’s annual survey of police-reported crime on Tuesday. It shows the overall volume of criminal incidents fell by 5 per cent between 2009 and 2010, and the relative severity of the crimes took a similar dive.

Homicides, attempted murders, serious assaults and robberies were all down last year from the year before. Young people were accused of committing fewer offences. Even property crime was reported less frequently with reductions in both break-ins and car thefts.

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Weighty Tory crime bill targets drugs, sex offenders, ‘out-of-control' youth

The Harper government has taken the first step toward passing a massive nine-part crime bill – an effort to toughen Ottawa’s approach to the entire pantheon of offenders from drug dealers to sexual predators to what the Conservatives call “out-of-control young people.”

The Tories tabled the omnibus Safer Streets and Communities Act Tuesday, which rolls into one bill nine separate measures. These are all pieces of legislation the Conservatives had failed to enact into law during their minority government years but can now easily pass given their Commons and Senate majorities.

But even as he unveiled this huge justice bill, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson promised the Tories haven’t exhausted their enthusiasm for more crime legislation.

“This is not the end; this is just the beginning of our efforts in this regard,” Mr. Nicholson said during a news conference in Brampton, Ont., part of the majority Tory government’s new political base as a result of the May 2011 federal election.

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Gotta put someone in all the new prisons. Tom

Crime and conditional punishment

This is the last in a three-part series on proposed reforms to our justice system.

Until 1996, Canadian sentencing judges could impose a fine, a discharge, probation with various conditions, imprisonment or certain combinations of these. In 1996, Parliament added conditional sentences – a non-prison choice – to this list. It’s available for some cases that could otherwise have involved prison sentences of under two years; it’s never available for offenders deserving of a sentence of two years or more or who pose a danger to the community.

"House arrest” is usually one of the punitive conditions attached to conditional sentences. Hence, it’s often called “home detention.” Other conditions – punitive and therapeutic (community service and treatment, for example) – can be required. Conditional sentences must be proportionate to the gravity of the offence. And unlike prison sentences, offenders serving conditional sentences must serve their full sentences – there’s no parole or remission.

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10 Safest States In The U.S.: Institute For Economics And Peace

While the nation as a whole might be in financial disarray, some states have found surprising success in lowering government spending by reducing crime, according to a new report by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

When taken together, costs like incarceration, medical, judicial and policing leave the average single American tax payer paying roughly $1,425 per year, the report finds. And that's before taking into account the productivity lost from pulling potential workers out of the U.S. economy and sticking them in prison.

But costs range across states by significant amounts. Of the 10 most peaceful states, for example, seven also ranked in the top 10 for lowest cost of crime per person, with safest-state Maine spending just $656 per person. Compare that with Louisiana, which spends $2,458 per person.

The safest states in the U.S. not only scored well on the original five indicators, either. They also performed well in areas like education, one factor highly-correlated with safety, with the safest states tending to have high graduation rates and larger numbers of diplomas per person. Household income also correlates with the peacefulness of a state, with three of the five safest states found to be in the top 10 for household income.

According to the report, the U.S. as a whole has become 8 percent safer since 1995, and the country could save much more money if it became even less violent. If California could decrease violence by 25 percent, for example, the state could save the state $16 billion, the report contends. Even Vermont, a relatively small and safe state, could save $253 million if it reduced violence by that same amount.

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David Weisburd: Hot Spots of Crime and Crime Prevention

Is This the Year America Wakes Up to Its Prison Disaster? Why Conservatives Are Finally Jumping on the Bandwagon

As states' budgets bleed, some of them are shifting from "tough on crime" to "smart on crime."

Struggling with chronic budget crises, lawmakers in more and more states are embracing sentencing and other reforms in a bid to hold down corrections costs. But while sentencing reform has long been the domain of "bleeding heart" liberals, now conservatives are driving those efforts in some states.

It's not just about dollars. Although fiscal concerns are a driving force among conservatives, there are also signs they are recognizing and confronting the failures of our drug and criminal justice policies. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, none other than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote of "more humane, effective alternatives" to the national imprisonment binge

Still, as their states bleed red ink, some of them are shifting from "tough on crime" to "smart on crime." Leading the charge is a newly formed advocacy group, Right On Crime, endorsed by big conservative names including Gingrich, taxpayer advocate Grover Norquist, and former drug czar William Bennett.

Based in Texas, Right On Crime is touting the success the Lone Star State has had with sentencing reform to make such reforms more palatable to conservatives. In 2003, the state passed legislation ordering that small-time drug offenders be given probation instead of prison time, and in 2007, the state rejected prison-building in favor of spending $241 million on treatment programs for offenders.

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Scapegoating Immigrants: Arizona's Real Crisis is Rooted in State Residents' Soaring Drug Abuse

A Public Policy Study from the Centre on Juvenile and Criminal Justice

by Mike Males and Daniel Macallair

From 1990 to 2010, Arizona gained more than 1.3
million new Hispanic residents, approximately 1
million of whom located in the Phoenix metropolitan
area.1 With 2 million legal and an estimated 300,000
undocumented Hispanic residents in the state today,
approximately 31 percent of Arizona’s population and
perhaps as much as 35 percent of the population
within its borders is of Hispanic origin.2

This report examines crime and drug abuse trends in
Arizona over the last two decades of massive legal
and nonlegal Hispanic in-migration. Arizona’s recent
anti-immigrant law3 is based on the theory that crime
rates, especially related to drug distribution, and other
social ills are driven by increases in legal and
nonlegal immigration (see sidebar). Arizona’s
governor even stated that, “the majority of the illegal
trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona
are under the direction and control of organized drug
cartels, and they are bringing drugs in.”4

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Cutbacks force police to curtail calls for some crimes

By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

Budget cuts are forcing police around the country to stop responding to fraud, burglary and theft calls as officers focus limited resources on violent crime.

Cutbacks in such places as Oakland, Tulsa and Norton, Mass. have forced police to tell residents to file their own reports — online or in writing — for break-ins and other lesser crimes.

"If you come home to find your house burglarized and you call, we're not coming," said Oakland Police spokeswoman Holly Joshi. The city laid off 80 officers from its force of 687 last month and the department can't respond to burglary, vandalism, and identity theft. "It's amazing. It's a big change for us."

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