Examining economic opportunity, unemployment, and even academic test scores at the neighborhood level, helps to better understand the factors related to crime perpetration within a community, according to Economic correlates of crime: An empirical test in Houston, published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and written by Howard Henderson, founding director of the Center for Justice Research and professor of Justice Administration at Texas Southern University, along with a research team from TSU and Stetson University.
Henderson’s team found that, in Houston, unemployment was a very strong predictor of violent crime. “It appears that violent crime is fairly directly related to opportunity loss,” Henderson writes. “That is to say, violent crime is more densely located in neighborhoods experiencing higher unemployment and fewer opportunities for social advancement, as indicated by academic test scores.” From that, the team concluded that this does suggest that policy programs that target low-employment, low-academic success neighborhoods for job training or academic enrichment “may help to reduce the motivation for crime at its source.”
Property crime, on the other hand, seemed more related to simple disadvantage and population pressure. “Perhaps put more simply, why not break things if the things aren’t valuable anyway, and the odds of getting caught are few,” Henderson writes. Yet while the team’s data showed that violent crime was related to reduced academic performance, property crime was related, paradoxically, to better academic performance. That may be explained if property crimes are increasingly tallied as neighborhoods advance in academic success. “(Neighbors) may be less inclined to shrug off property crimes as par for the course, and more likely to report such crimes to police,” he writes.
Because of those findings, the team’s results suggest that “programs designed to identify and provide opportunities for low-performing neighborhoods may help to reduce crime at the point of entry.”
Researchers have long found a negative correlation between income and crime rates, though the new paper describes socio-economic status, including employment, as only a single piece of the puzzle. Henderson’s research team analyzed levels of neighborhood-level economic factors and income inequality in Houston against property crime and violent crime, with an eye to helping policymakers better impact life trajectories, reduce incarceration and promote justice.
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