Prevalence of Crime Research Paper

1. Defining Crime

In popular discourse, crime is behavior that violates fundamental moral precepts and deserves to be denounced and punished. This commonsense definition implies that certain behaviors are inherently criminal and necessarily invite sanctions. Because moral precepts, as well as responses to their violation, vary substantially over time and place, commonsense definitions of crime cannot denote a fixed and natural category of behaviors.

In legal discourse, crime is behavior which leads to particular legal procedures and for which the law permits imposition of criminal penalties. Here crime is constituted by legal reactions, not by characteristics inherent in behaviors. Legal definitions of crime appear to be both more precise and more objective than commonsense definitions: crime is what the law defines and treats as such. Because legal systems are products of particular historical epochs, and legal definitions are created and applied through social and political processes, crime in this definition is both historically and socially constructed.

Social and behavioral scientists who study crime typically rely on legal definitions, and restrict their attention to acts defined as violations of the criminal law. They differ, however, on the questions they ask about crime. Some are interested primarily in behaviors defined as crime and people who engage in them, whereas others are interested in the processes through which particular behaviors and people are defined as criminal.

Determining how much crime occurs and explaining why people commit it have traditionally been the principal concerns of those who study crime. Because there is no common behavioral attribute that ties all crimes together, the task of explanation becomes quite complex. How, for example, can one account for behaviors as diverse as possession of heroin, price fixing, vandalism, bribery of public officials, and spouse assault? Each of these violates the criminal law of many countries.

The difficulty of explaining crime as behavior suggests why other researchers direct their attention to the social and political processes whereby acts and people are criminalized. Here, crime is both a product of, and a discourse used in struggles over how social order is defined and achieved; its lack of any essential attribute highlights its ideological character (van Swaaningen 1997 ). This approach, however, ‘implies a virtually unlimited legislative power to create crimes without regard to any restraining principles’ (Hughes 1983, p. 301) and neglects the near-universal criminalization of certain behaviors, such as murder, assault, theft, and arson.

Notwithstanding the conceptual challenges of de-fining crime, the combination of two elements is ordinarily recognized as critical: human behavior, and a state-sanctioned response to it. Crimes of greatest concern in most societies also involve a third element: intention to harm or wrong another. The more serious of these crimes—what are called mala in se (acts wrong in themselves)—are the target of substantial measurement efforts designed to answer questions about their prevalence, distribution, and causes.

2. Measuring Crime

Efforts to measure crime are usually guided by legal definitions within the jurisdiction of interest and rely on crime reports of legal officials. Most nations compile annual reports on the number of crimes known to police and the number of persons proceeded against. There are two principal difficulties with this approach to measuring crime. First, while legal definitions and official statistics provide a reliable guide to what is designated as criminal behavior within a given society, they may not measure accurately differences across societies in similar types of behavior. This is because legal definitions of even relatively serious crimes vary across societies.

The second difficulty is that, for a number of reasons, official statistics do not measure accurately levels of crime, even within a single society. Characteristics of official agencies that collect in-formation on crime, such as the police, inevitably influence how these acts are interpreted and recorded. Some acts that fit legal definitions of crime may be subject only infrequently to criminal enforcement, such as many white-collar or corporate crimes. Since the public is the primary means by which officials learn about crime, popular views on crime and the agencies that deal with it also influence which acts are reported to legal officials. So, for example, well under a half of all physical and sexual assaults are reported to police in most nations (Mayhew and van Dijk 1997). As a result, official statistics on crime do not reflect its true prevalence.

Unofficial sources of crime data, such as surveys of the general population, avoid some of these problems and shed light on the ‘dark figure of crime’—that is, crimes that do not come to the attention of legal officials. Victimization and self-report surveys, which ask people about their criminal victimization, or offending, over a specified period of time, yield higher estimates of the prevalence of crime than do official statistics. Victimization surveys also show that the likelihood that a crime will become known to officials depends in part on the characteristics of the victim, the offender, and their relationship; and that the more serious the crime, the more likely it is to be reported to officials. But because they rely on the honesty, memory, and perceptions of respondents, such surveys have their own limitations and biases.

All efforts to measure crime inevitably confront the problem of defining a crime: someone—a victim, a police officer, a witness, or a researcher—must apply a legal definition to a complex set of circumstances and human relationships. The difficulties in measuring crime, then, are not simply technical or statistical, but conceptual—and unavoidable. Consequently, it is impossible to determine the total amount of crime in any jurisdiction at any time. One can, however, count and describe with some accuracy events which are crimes according to the law, and which come to the attention of legal officials, as well as criminal events which people report to survey researchers. These estimates form the basis of knowledge about the prevalence and distribution of crime over time, place, and persons.

3. The Distribution Of Crime

Is there more crime now than in the past? For reasons outlined above, this question has no simple answer. To the extent that contemporary criminal law defines a wider range of behaviors as criminal, there is likely to be more crime. The most reliable historical evidence pertains to serious violent crimes, such as homicide, robbery, and serious assault, in Western Europe and North America. Their trends over the last six or seven centuries have undoubtedly been downward, albeit punctuated by short-term waves of violent crime after wars and other major social dislocations (Gurr 1989).

This long-term decline reversed somewhat in the late twentieth century. In the early 1970s, rates of serious violent crime rose and then plateaued in most Western nations but in many Eastern European nations, violent crime rates appear to have increased dramatically since the late 1980s. Nevertheless, violent predation has become a much less customary part of daily life over the long term. Whether the same can be said of property crime is unclear, because reliable historical data do not exist. But the best evidence suggests that, as societies developed, property crime rates increased, in part because consumer goods were more available and more portable.

Are some societies more crime-prone than others? Cautious comparisons can be made of direct-contact, predatory crimes by individuals using data from international victimization surveys (Mayhew and van Dijk 1997), and public health statistics on homicides (World Health Organization 1997). According to these data, rates of serious violent crime vary greatly, even across relatively similar societies. At the end of the twentieth century, for example, homicide rates were four times higher in the USA than in Canada, three times higher in Finland than in Norway, and four times higher in Venezuela than in Chile. Among advanced capitalist nations, homicide rates are higher in the New World countries (the USA, Canada, and Australia). Countries in North Africa and the Middle East tend to have relatively low rates of serious violent crime, as do many Asian countries (Heiland et al. 1992).

Homicides and other serious violent crimes make up only a small part of the total crime rate, however. In all nations, most crimes are crimes against property; national differences are much less pronounced for property crimes than for serious, violent crimes, especially in advanced capitalist countries. While the property crime rate is not necessarily a good predictor of the violent crime rate, nations with high rates of property crime are unlikely to have low rates of violent crime. Although there is little research and almost no systematic data on national differences in white-collar, corporate, and political crimes—for example, theft by corporations, environmental destruction, or illicit violence by state agencies—these appear to be more common in developing countries. In part, this results from lax enforcement and the ability of offenders to avoid prosecution. For similar reasons, activities of criminal organizations, such as trafficking in drugs, people, and weapons, money laundering, and cross- border terrorism, may also be more prevalent in countries with emerging or transitional economies.

As this suggests, the economic and political organization of a nation produces particular patterns of crime. For example, although the pre-1990s socialist countries of Eastern Europe had low rates of violent and predatory street crimes, other behaviors—worker sabotage, theft of nationalized property, bribery, and black market activity—were relatively widespread. Violent crime rates are higher in nations with greater inequalities in income and wealth, and in nations with fewer restrictions on the ownership and use of fire-arms. Nations that go to war more often also tend to have higher homicide rates during peacetime.

Many of the social processes, conditions, or policies commonly thought to affect crime rates often do not do so, or affect only some types of crime. Urbanization and unemployment, for example, typically are not accompanied by higher rates of violent crime, al-though they are associated with higher rates of property crime. Conversely, some social policies that are intended to decrease crime in fact do not. For example, there is little evidence that the death penalty deters homicides. During the twenty-first century, the social process likely to have the greatest impact on crime—from street crimes to crimes of transnational corporations—is globalization. ‘Globalization,’ ac-cording to Findlay (1999, pp. 1–2), ‘creates new and favourable contexts for crime’ and enables ‘the trans-formation of crime beyond people, places and even identifiable victims.’

Are some people more likely to engage in crime than others? Once again, the heterogeneity of the acts comprising crime demands a cautious answer. Serious, direct-contact, predatory crimes are the domain of young, economically disadvantaged males in virtually all nations. White-collar, corporate, and political crimes are also male-dominated, though these are, for obvious reasons, rarely the preserve of the young and the poor. It is largely for victimless crimes, such as prostitution, gambling, or drug use, that women’s involvement at times rises to the level of men’s.

4. Explaining The Distribution Of Crime

Most explanations for the distribution of crime feature one of three mechanisms: motivations, controls, or opportunities.

Motivational explanations focus on social conditions or processes that generate criminal tendencies in societies, groups, or individuals. Criminal motivations have their roots in both social structure— institutional patterns and processes that organize interactions and relationships—and in culture— accumulated traditions and shared experiences that shape the values of a society or group. Economic inequality is a structural factor thought to increase motivations for crime by fostering alienation and hopelessness (Hagan and Peterson 1995). Norms that advocate criminal acts under certain conditions are a cultural factor that may motivate criminal behavior.

Control explanations focus on social conditions and processes that weaken internal and external, informal and formal controls on crime. Both structural and cultural factors can affect social control (Sampson and Raudenbush 1999). Crime tends to be lower in societies with stable families and integrated com-munity networks because these strengthen controls on criminal behavior. Crime tends to be higher where group norms excuse crimes against certain victims (e.g., against spouses, organizations, sexual minorities, etc.) because these cultural features weaken controls.

While motivational and control perspectives are concerned primarily with potential offenders, opportunity explanations focus on the circumstances in which crimes occur. Situations in which a motivated offender encounters a suitable target in the absence of capable guardians create opportunities for crime (Cohen and Felson 1979). Patterns of routine daily activity that take people away from home foster opportunities for burglary, mugging, and vehicle theft. Criminal opportunities are also greater where small consumer items are mass-produced.

No general theory of the distribution of crime has been tested adequately enough to command wide-spread support. Indeed, there is still considerable debate over whether a general explanation of crime is possible or even desirable, given the heterogeneity of crime. Nevertheless, some generalizations about the sociocultural contexts that appear to discourage direct-contact, predatory crimes can be drawn. These are characterized by: (a) strong systems of informal social control reinforced by highly consensual normative systems, (b) strong networks of communal obligation and mutual interdependence, and (c) cultural orientations that discourage interpersonal aggression. Societies with these characteristics tend to be organized around collectivist rather than individualistic principles, which are reflected in their political, economic, and legal ideologies and practices (Pampel and Gartner 1995).

These generalizations are limited by their grounding in research on a restricted range of criminal behaviors. Too little is known to be able to develop similar generalizations about many types of crime, such as those perpetrated by transnational corporations and national governments. Crimes that cross national borders have also been neglected by researchers, although this is changing. New forms of crime emerging in some societies—cyber-crimes, for example— also need to be studied. Until documentation of these crimes is taken seriously, understanding of the prevalence and distribution of crime will be incomplete.

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