...Poverty and Crime CJA/344 October 29, 2015 Chris Manning Poverty and Crime Poverty refers to scarcity or state of lack money or lack possessions of a certain amount. Poverty may be either absolute or relative depending on magnitude and severity. In the case of absolute poverty, one cannot meet basic needs like shelter and food. The poverty results from broad issues such as inequality, unemployment and high population density (Raphael, & Tolman, R.1997). Crime, refers to act that is harmful to individual and community or state at large by the individual. Crime exists almost everywhere in the United States, in both rural and urban areas. For this topic, the research proved that poverty indicates a high likelihood of crime activities. Other factors such as unemployment, high population density and low-income family background play an important role in the increasing crime in our society today (Raphael, & Tolman, 1997). In the United States, poverty is a big issue amid areas that have high poverty levels. Factors that determine the poverty levels such minority population, high population density and unemployment increase the case of crime in the areas (Drake, & Pandey, 1996). The crime can be explained using some theories such high stress among the poor, which increase the likelihood of committing robbery, rape among other violent acts. The inferior education acquired by poor youth reduces chances of getting a good job, role model and increasing the possibility of spending...
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...EVILS ON PROPERTY AND VIOLENT CRIMES IN MALAYSIA Chor Foon Tang♣ University of Malaya ABSTRACT The main objective of this study is to investigate the effects of macroeconomic evils – unemployment and inflation on different categories of crime rates – property and violent crimes in Malaysia via the multivariate Johansen-Juselius and Granger causality techniques. This study used annual data from 1970 to 2006. Johansen-Juselius cointegration tests revealed that property and violent crimes are cointegrated with unemployment and inflation. Furthermore, the empirical evidence exhibit that unemployment and inflation are the driving factors for crimes in Malaysia. Therefore, supply-side economy may be an ideal choice of policy to reduce crime rates in Malaysia. Keywords: Crime, Inflation, Unemployment, Malaysia 1. INTRODUCTION Recent deliberation on whether “Malaysia is a safe haven for travel and investment?” was frequently asked by the international tourists and foreign investors owing to the increasing trend of crime rates in Malaysia. From the visual inspection in Figure 1, both property and violent crime rates in Malaysia has increased quite significantly between 1970 and 2006. Over a decade from 1970 to 1980, both property and violent crime rates in Malaysia increased more than two folds. The property crime rate increased drastically from 25 thousand cases in 1970 to 66 thousand cases in 1980. In the similar vein, violent crime rates increased from approximately...
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...Unemployment and crime: New evidence for an old question Kerry L. Papps Victoria University of Wellington Rainer Winkelmann* IZA and Centre for Economic Policy Research, London December 1999 This paper uses panel data techniques to examine the relationship between unemployment and a range of categories of crime in New Zealand. The data cover sixteen regions over the period 1984 to 1996. Random and fixed effects models are estimated to investigate the possibility of a causal relationship between unemployment and crime. Hypothesis tests show that two-way fixed effects models should be used. The main result of the paper is that there is some evidence of significant effects of unemployment on crime, both for total crime and for some subcategories of crime. We are grateful to Rachel Bambery, New Zealand Police National Headquarters, for her assistance in obtaining crime and population statistics. The staff of the University of Canterbury Library also gave invaluable help in unraveling the complexities of New Zealand unemployment and income data. The paper has benefited from useful comments by two anonymous referees, Simon Kemp, Jacques Poot and participants of the CEPR conference on “Metropolitan Economic Performance”, Lisbon, October 1998. *Corresponding author: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, 53072 Bonn, Germany; winkelmann@iza.org. “I know only of three ways of living in society: one must be a beggar, a thief, or a wage earner.” HONORÉ de MIRABEAU (1749-1791) 1. Introduction ...
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...Unemployment and crime together with its causes, has been studied over the world. In particular, there have been noted studies on the cost and benefit of crime, state of the economy and crime, and the core of the all this, unemployment and crime. Some researchers have found relationships between unemployment and crime, while others have not. However, a more controversial issue is the explicit relationship between unemployment and crime. Mainstream economists generally believe that unemployment is associated with crime because reduced expected value from appropriate work decreases the opportunity costs of unlawful work. A balanced economic growth of the economy is the ideal way of development when all utilities work in order to provide healthy business growth. One of the misbalance factors of the market economy is unemployment and crime. The relationship between economic conditions, crime and other types of crime like violence is complicated. Therefore, the existence of positive connection between low quality of life, which is a sequence of the economic situation, and committing robberies or burglaries is almost obvious, while the existence of such relationship with violent crime is less straightforward. Moreover, unemployment as such is considered to be the main cause of poverty. As a result, people may not afford basic necessities which in turn lead to various businesses performing poorly. This in turn causes the laying off of more people and this becomes a chain reaction...
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... four banks were attacked in an hour-and-a-half; one daytime raid took place just steps from the Lincoln Center in downtown Manhattan. The week before, San Diego had seen four bank holdups in a single day. Criminologists wondered if the holiday spree was the first sign of a looming crime wave in recession-battered America. Take an uptick in poverty and economic misery, toss in budget cuts to police departments across the country, and that should be a blueprint for chaos—right? Except, as it turns out, the exact opposite occurred. According to FBI statistics, crime rates went down across the board in 2009. Way down. Murder, rape, robbery, assault, auto theft—plummeted, one and all. Then, this week, the FBI released preliminary data for the first six months of 2010, and again the same pattern emerged. Violent crimes and property crimes alike have been falling in every region of the country. What gives? Have experts just completely misunderstood what causes people to commit crimes? There's certainly no shortage of theories for why crime rates have gone down over the past two years. The simplest is that crime just isn’t closely related to economic conditions. Consider, after all, the two big crime epidemics in the twentieth century—the first took root in the late 1960s, during a period of healthy growth; the other came during the economic doldrums of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The only constant here, it seems, is that both outbreaks were fueled by a major expansion of drug...
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...property crimes in the United States. Business executives and community leaders was taken at back. They chose to look for and find these determinants of property crimes and figure out how to remedy those issues. The task at hand was to provide evidence for or against common perceptions about property crime. Prove if crime rates are higher in urban areas or rural areas. Whether unemployment or education levels contributed to property crime rates, as well as public assistance? Lastly establish what other possible factors relate to property crimes? PCRIMES data was used to prepare a report on the characteristics of and determinants of property crimes in the United States. PCRIMES Property crime rate per hundred thousand inhabitants (property crimes include burglary, larceny, theft and motor vehicle theft); calculated as number of property crimes committed divided by total population/100,000 PINCOME Per capita income for each state DROPOUT High School Dropout rate (%, 1987) PRECIP Average precipitation in inches in the major city in each state over 1951- 1980 PUBAID Percentage of public aid recipients (1987) DENSITY Population/total square miles KIDS Public aid or families with children, dollars per family UNEMPLOY Percentage of unemployed workers URBAN Percentage of the residents living in urban areas STATE 50 States of America The task required that it show the association between crime and the different variables; such as location, income levels, education...
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...Crime Trends Crime trends have changed drastically throughout the years. Criminal activity has always been a challenging task to evaluate and monitor. What is a crime trend? A crime trend is defined as a significant change in the nature of selected crime types within a defined geographical area and time period (U.S. Legal, 2001). Crime trends tend to increase and decrease for different reason throughout the years. The essay will discuss the crime trend in America and the reason for a decline in 1999. In 1999 there were several reasons that could be the cause for a decrease in crime trends. Unemployment rates were low in 1999, in fact at the time rates had not been seen as low since 1969. There was also an increase in new jobs; under President Clinton administration the economy added 245,000 jobs per month. When President Clinton took office in 1992 the unemployment rate was at 7.5%, by 1999 the rate had dropped to 4.0%. Employment showed a promising reason for a decrease in crime (The Clinton-Gore Economic Record, 2000). Throughout the years researchers have been noticing when the economy is good it seem to reduce the amount of crime that happens. In the article Crime and Unemployment, the author refers to a study conducted in the United States that showed unemployment as a reason behind higher homicide rates and suicides; the study was conducted from 1940-1984. The study included five socio economic variables unemployment rates, gross national product...
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...Thesis statement: Research indicates that there is drastic increase of crime rates due to the high levels of unemployment, harsh economic conditions population density. Annotated Bibliography Fougère, D., Kramarz, F., & Pouget, J. (2009). Youth Unemployment and Crime in France. Journal Of The European Economic Association, 7(5), 909-938 Fougère, Kramarz, & Pouget have argued that when there is a large number of youths who are unemployed, the country may have increased criminal activities as most of them are idle and thus, they must find different ways in which they can earn a living to cater for their needs. Additionally, the economic also tends to affect the image of the country in terms of crime. The article seems to have facts that are accurate. This is because the author has presented different examples in order to support his arguments.. This author is a credible source because has a PhD in Economics from Univeriste Paris and he is a Professor at Ensae University. The article supports the statistics in the relation between crime rate rise and unemployment. Edmark, K. (2005). Unemployment and Crime: Is There a Connection?. Scandinavian Journal Of Economics, 107(2), 353-373. The main aim of the above article is to address whether there are any connection between the rate of unemployment and crimes. According to Edmark, lack of job may result in a higher rate of criminal acts. This is due to the fact that most of the people seem to be jobless and thus, they may attempt...
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...3.2 Unemployment effect on crime An additional problem linked with interpreting the empirical connection between joblessness and crime concerns the direction of causation. To the magnitude that criminal activity decreases the employability of lawbreakers, through either a scaring influence on imprisonment or a superior unwillingness among the criminally initiated to accept genuine occupation, criminal activity may in turn contribute to observed joblessness growth and add to regional joblessness levels. Hence, in addition to difficulties associated with excluded variables, previous inferences might also be flawed owing to simultaneity prejudice. To be more specific, simultaneity upwardly prejudices OLS (Ordinary least Squares) evaluations on crime, (Raphael and Rudolf, 2001:261). 3.3 Unemployment effect on family...
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...results of the study and design of the study. The study we're using is: Exploratory Study of the Relationship between Poverty and Crimes in Albany/Dougherty, Georgia by Nwaokoro, Amaechi N., Marshall, Clifford, Mittal, Shiwam, Journal of Business & Economics Research, 2013. Purpose of the Study For many communities it's easy to say the worse parts of town breed crime. Poor people are the ones who break the laws, they're the ones that need to be kept away from the higher class citizens. Is this really true? In some communities, it just may be. The purpose of this study was to determine if in fact poverty causes crime. Does a person's financial state and area of housing cause push that person into a life of crime? Another purpose of the study is to show if the area in question, Albany/Dougherty Georgia, had over time seen their crime rates rise as the population rose. Design of the study The design of the study is the Case Study Design, where a number of different factors are studied in the process of determining if poverty affected crime rates. One of the studies focused on explaining the rise of crime rates on financial motives. One example of this a person sees a car they know they can't afford, so they plot to and eventually do steal the car. Another study focused on single mothers who were of low education, and unable to raise their children to stay away from crime. The study suggested...
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...Criminology: Women and crime Despite the unreliability of official statistics, there does appear to have been a large increase in female indictable crime from 1951-1979 in England and Wales. Note that male crime was also increasing during the same period. It should also be pointed out that the proportion of crimes of violence committed by women had scarcely increased. Nevertheless, property crimes by women had increased from 13% to 22% of the total. Box and Hale (1983) in their research claimed that there was a link between unemployment rates and crime rates amongst women. The link was particularly strong for property crimes. Box concluded: The major factor accounting for most of the increase in property offences seems to be economic marginalization. In other words, as women become economically worse off, largely through unemployment and inadequate compensatory levels of welfare benefits, so they are less able and willing to resist the temptations to engage in property offences as away of helping to solve their financial difficulties. Another academic, Pat Carlen also studied the relationship between female crime and poverty. She carried out a study of 39 women between the ages of 15 and 46 who had criminal convictions. Most of the women were from the London area, were working class and had committed a variety of offences. 26 had convictions for theft or reset, 16 for fraud, 15 for burglary, 14 for violence, 8 for arson, 6 for drugs and 4 for prostitution. Carlen, like Box...
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...| Crime in the United States | Data Analysis Project | | Brad Davidson | | 12/2/2010 | | Executive Summary This purpose of this report is to answer the question, “what variables affect the level of crime in the United States?” With so many possible influences, the goal of this analysis will be to narrow the scope to the items which we feel will be most statistically significant when gauging the effect on the level of crime. The regression analysis methodology is best suited for this analysis since it can identify the influences of the different variables from past data and provide an equation to predict future values with an associated level of accuracy. The result of the analysis could then be shared with local and national representatives to help focus efforts on reducing the overall crime level and improve public safety. This report contains the following: (1) Brief introduction of the study, (2) Statistical Methodology, (3) Preliminary Analysis of the Data, (4) Regression Analysis, (5) Forecast, and (6) Conclusion. Introduction The current social climate in the United States was the motivation behind this analysis. With the current mid-term elections, there were many topics that would seem unsettling to most individuals and it’s our perception that most feel more unsafe now than say 10-15 years ago. Granted there are many factors that contribute to this type of fear or uneasiness, but one that we decided to investigate was related to crime...
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...Property Crimes Case Study # 49 Applied Managerial Statistics: GM533 Virginia Davis, Lauren Holder, Stanley Philip and Andrea Watson Executive Summary The Property Crimes study examined data provided by various U.S. government agencies on crime rates in the fifty U.S. states. Other data studied were eight possible contributing factors such as per capita income, high school dropout rate, average precipitation, population density, and urbanization. Analysis revealed, of the eight possible contributing factors, three of those variables (urbanization rate, high school dropout rate and population density) affected property crime rates. Of the given data, the model accounted for approximately 66% of the contributing factors associated with property crimes. Statistically, the data is generally considered to be strong, however, to account for the remaining 34% of factors contributing to property crime rates in the U.S., further data and evaluation of other possible factors would be necessary. Introduction Property crime, as defined by the U.S. Department of Justice (2011), is the taking of money or property without force or threat to victims and is inclusive of the following offenses: burglary; automotive theft, larceny and arson. An exception to the rule is arson, although it does not involve the taking of property, it does use force against victims. Additionally, crime is defined as an act of violence that is carried out by one or more individuals and can be toward another...
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...Introduction: In Canada, for many years there has been growing concern and controversy about the over-representation of Aboriginals within the Criminal Justice System, a considerable problem that has been found to be more even extreme with Aboriginals female offenders. For Aboriginal women the rates of incarceration are particularly disturbing. Aboriginal women are over-represented in the federal prison system. They represent only 4% of the women in Canada yet account for 32% of the women in federal prisons. The number of Aboriginal women federally incarcerated has increased by 151% between 1997 and 2006 (Elizabeth Fry Society, 4). Aboriginal women are not only disproportionately over-represented but also the fastest growing population sentenced to federal prisons. The over-representation is even more pronounced in terms of Aboriginal women incarceration rates: As of April 2010, Aboriginal women accounted for 32.6% of the total female offender population (SOURCE 5). This means that one out of every three women federally incarcerated is of Aboriginal descent (Correctional Service Canada, 2009/2010, at 18). Furthermore they are over-represented in the maximum security prison population, making up 45% of the maximum security federally sentenced women, 44% of the medium security population and 18% of minimum security women in 2006 (Elizabeth Fry Society, 4). The justice system has played a major role in the creation of poor social conditions in Aboriginal communities today...
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...social behavior and financial problems. Some countries suffering from poverty from the past have still not recovered as it is one of the greatest factor preventing the development of these countries. Nowadays, these countries are facing recession which is causing problems for both the governments and societies. Several causes and effects of poverty on society will be discussed in this essay. Firstly, one of the most common and main causes of poverty is due to social problems. Because of high levels of illiteracy, people are not aware of their rights; as a result, they might commit a wrong action. Therefore, they tend to lose their respect and social status to those who are educated. These people do not just suffer from poverty because they are poor, but also because they are deprived of their rights. Furthermore, they are not provided with necessities such as clean drinking water, education, health, employment and housing (Easterly, 2009). Moving on, there is an indirect relation between poverty and globalization. In addition, the rising inequality of wealth has been associated with globalization as the profits received from the trade are not always shared with the poor. In the developing and advancing world, the poor are overpowered by the powerful, which keeps them dependent; hence, this causes inequality. The upper class does not encounter problems with education and jobs, while the lower class struggles to fight for their rights and surpass their situation. Discrimination...
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