correlates of crime
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The correlates of crime explore the associations of specific non-criminal factors with specific crimes. The field of criminology studies the dynamics of crime. Most of these studies use correlational data; that is, they attempt to identify various factors are associated with specific categories of criminal behavior. Such correlational studies led to hypotheses about the causes of these crimes. ''The Handbook of Crime Correlates'' (2009) is a systematic review of 5200 empirical studies on crime that have been published worldwide. A crime consistency score represents the strength of relationships. The scoring depends on how consistently a statistically significant relationship was identified across multiple studies. The authors claim that the review summarizes most of what is currently known about the variables associated with criminality. Writing in 2019, criminologist Greg Ridgeway argued that criminology was still trying to conclusively determine what causes crime.


Sex and biology

Crime occurs most frequently during the second and third decades of life. Males commit more crime overall and more violent crime than females. They commit more property crime except
shoplifting Shoplifting is the theft of goods from an open retail establishment, typically by concealing a store item on one's person, in pockets, under clothes or in a bag, and leaving the store without paying. With clothing, shoplifters may put on items ...
, which is about equally distributed between the genders. Males appear to be more likely to reoffend. Measures related to arousal such as
heart rate Heart rate (or pulse rate) is the frequency of the heartbeat measured by the number of contractions (beats) of the heart per minute (bpm). The heart rate can vary according to the body's physical needs, including the need to absorb oxygen and excr ...
and
skin conductance Electrodermal activity (EDA) is the property of the human body that causes continuous variation in the electrical characteristics of the skin. Historically, EDA has also been known as skin conductance, galvanic skin response (GSR), electrodermal ...
are low among criminals. Mesomorphic or muscular body type is positively correlated with criminality, in particular with sexual crimes. When controlling for age and sex, strong genetic correlates with criminality. Low monoamine oxidase activity and low
5-HIAA 5-Hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA) is the main metabolite of serotonin. In chemical analysis of urine samples, 5-HIAA is used to determine serotonin levels in the body. Clinical significance 5-HIAA is tested by 24-hour urine samples combin ...
levels tend to be found among criminals.
Monoamine oxidase A Monoamine oxidase A, also known as MAO-A, is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the ''MAOA'' gene. This gene is one of two neighboring gene family members that encode mitochondrial enzymes which catalyze the oxidative deamination of amines, ...
(dubbed the "warrior gene" in the popular press) is strongly tied to an increased tendency towards
violent crime A violent crime, violent felony, crime of violence or crime of a violent nature is a crime in which an offender or perpetrator uses or threatens to use harmful force upon a victim. This entails both crimes in which the violent act is the objecti ...
. In addition, CDH13, a gene previously tied to an increased risk of substance abuse, has been tied to violent crime. These tendencies are ostensibly related, as the majority of all individuals who commit severe violent crime in Finland do so under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The presence of the genetic profile is not determinative, although it increases the likelihood of
delinquency Delinquent or delinquents may refer to: * A person who commits a felony * A juvenile delinquent, often shortened as delinquent is a young person (under 18) who fails to do that which is required by law; see juvenile delinquency * A person who fa ...
in cases where other factors are present. Ferguson stated, 'a large percentage of our behaviour in terms of violence or aggression is influenced by our biology - our genes - and our brain anatomy.' Schnupp stated, 'To call these alleles "genes for violence" would therefore be a massive exaggeration. In combination with many other factors these genes may make it a little harder for you to control violent urges, but they most emphatically do not predetermine you for a life of crime.'


Race, ethnicity and immigration

Associated factors include
race and crime Race is one of the correlates of crime receiving attention in academic studies, government surveys, media coverage, and public concern. Research has found that social status, poverty, and childhood exposure to violent behavior are causes of the r ...
and status as an immigrant. In some countries, ethnically/racially diverse geographical areas have higher crime rates compared to homogeneous areas, and in other countries, it is the other way around. Some studies on
immigrants Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, a ...
found higher rates of crime among these populations; these rates vary according to the country of origin (immigrants from some regions having lower crime rates than the native-born population). Notions about the propensity for immigrants to commit crime vary among geographical regions. Likewise, the propensity for immigrants to commit more or less crime than the native-born population also varies geographically. For instance within the United States, census data shows that immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated for a crime than residents who were born within the United States. The census includes both legal and illegal immigrants, as it counts the total number of people residing in an area regardless of citizenship status.


Early life

Associated factors include maternal smoking during pregnancy,
low birth weight Low birth weight (LBW) is defined by the World Health Organization as a birth weight of an infant of or less, regardless of gestational age. Infants born with LBW have added health risks which require close management, often in a neonatal inten ...
,
perinatal Prenatal development () includes the development of the embryo and of the fetus during a viviparous animal's gestation. Prenatal development starts with fertilization, in the germinal stage of embryonic development, and continues in fetal devel ...
trauma/birth complications,
child maltreatment Child abuse (also called child endangerment or child maltreatment) is physical, sexual, and/or psychological maltreatment or neglect of a child or children, especially by a parent or a caregiver. Child abuse may include any act or failure t ...
, low parent-child attachment, marital discord/family discord,
alcoholism Alcoholism is, broadly, any drinking of alcohol that results in significant mental or physical health problems. Because there is disagreement on the definition of the word ''alcoholism'', it is not a recognized diagnostic entity. Predomi ...
and drug use in the family, low parental supervision/monitoring, family size and birth order,
nocturnal enuresis Nocturnal enuresis, also informally called bedwetting, is involuntary urination while asleep after the age at which bladder control usually begins. Bedwetting in children and adults can result in emotional stress. Complications can include urina ...
or bed wetting, bullying, school disciplinary problems,
truancy Truancy is any intentional, unjustified, unauthorised, or illegal absence from compulsory education. It is a deliberate absence by a student's own free will (though sometimes adults or parents will allow and/or ignore it) and usually does not refe ...
, low grade point average, dropping out of high school and childhood lead exposure.


Adult behavior

Associated factors include high alcohol use, alcohol abuse and alcoholism, high illegal drug use and dependence, early age of first sexual intercourse and the number of sexual partners, social isolation, criminal peer groups and gang membership.


Religiosity

A few studies have found a negative correlation between
religiosity In sociology, the concept of religiosity has proven difficult to define. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests: "Religiousness; religious feeling or belief. ..Affected or excessive religiousness". Different scholars have seen this concept as ...
and criminality. A 2001
meta-analysis A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies. Meta-analyses can be performed when there are multiple scientific studies addressing the same question, with each individual study reporting me ...
found, "religious beliefs and behaviors exert a moderate deterrent effect on individuals' criminal behavior", but that "studies have systematically varied in their estimation of the religion-on-crime effect due to differences in both their conceptual and methodological approaches". This suggests that religiosity has been operationalized in varying ways, impacting the results of the findings. Additionally, 1995 paper stated that " though a few researchers have found that religion's influence is noncontingent, most have found support—especially among youths—for effects that vary by denomination, type of offense, and social and/or religious context," suggesting a complex relationship between religiosity and crime. They also "found that, among our religiosity measures, participation in religious activities was a persistent and noncontingent inhibiter of adult crime" when controlling for other factors, such as social ecology and secular constraints. An individual with high religious saliency (i.e. expressing the high importance of religion in their life) is less likely to be associated with criminal activities; similarly, an individual who regularly attends religious services or is highly involved in them tends to be less involved in criminality, with the exception of property damage. Other meta-analysis research suggests that those who subscribe to more orthodox religious beliefs are less likely to engage in criminal behavior than those who do not. A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality. A 1997 study of six public high schools found no statistically significant negative correlations between religiosity and crime, or religiosity and drug use, and the only relationship between religiosity and alcohol was statistically significant. A more recent review concludes that there are insufficient data to indicate any correlation between religiosity and crime. Furthermore, any possible correlations may not apply universally to all relatively nonreligious groups, as there is some evidence self-identified atheists have had significantly lower incarceration rates than the general public in the United States. Most studies examining correlation to date do not distinguish between different types of low religiosity.


Political ideology

A 2016 study found statistically significant evidence that political ideology is moderately correlated with involvement in non-violent crime, among white individuals and particularly among white women. It suggests that liberal self-classification can, among some groups, be positively associated with non-violent criminal behavior compared to conservative self-classification.


Psychological traits

Associated factors include childhood
conduct disorder Conduct disorder (CD) is a mental disorder diagnosed in childhood or adolescence that presents itself through a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior that includes theft, lies, physical violence that may lead to destruction, and reckles ...
, adult antisocial personality disorder (also associated with each other),
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by excessive amounts of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity that are pervasive, impairing in multiple contexts, and otherwise age-inap ...
(ADHD), minor depression, clinical depression, depression in the family, suicidal tendencies and
schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social wit ...
. The
American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
's 1995 report ''Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns'' stated that the correlation between
intelligence quotient An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. The abbreviation "IQ" was coined by the psychologist William Stern for the German term ''Intelligen ...
(IQ) and crime was -0.2. This association is generally regarded as small and prone to disappear or be substantially reduced after controlling for the proper covariates, being much smaller than typical sociological correlates. In his book '' The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability'' (1998), Arthur Jensen cited data which showed that IQ was generally negatively associated with crime among people of all races, peaking between 80 and 90. Learning disability is a substantial discrepancy between IQ and academic performance and is associated with crime. Slow reading development may be particularly relevant. It has also been shown, however, that the effect of IQ is heavily dependent on socioeconomic status and that it cannot be easily controlled away, with many methodological considerations being at play. Indeed, there is evidence that the small relationship is mediated by well-being, substance abuse, and other confounding factors that prohibit simple causal interpretation. A recent meta-analysis has shown that the relationship is only observed in higher risk populations such as those in poverty without direct effect, but without any causal interpretation. A nationally representative longitudinal study has shown that this relationship is entirely mediated by school performance. Several personality traits are associated with criminality: impulsivity,
psychoticism Psychoticism is one of the three traits used by the psychologist Hans Eysenck in his P–E–N model ( psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism) model of personality. Nature Psychoticism is conceptually similar to the ''constraint'' factor ...
,
sensation-seeking Sensation seeking is a personality trait defined by the search for experiences and feelings, that are "varied, novel, complex and intense", and by the readiness to "take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experiences ...
, low
self control Self-control, an aspect of inhibitory control, is the ability to regulate one's emotions, thoughts, and behavior in the face of temptations and impulses. As an executive function, it is a cognitive process that is necessary for regulating one' ...
, childhood aggression, low
empathy Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, co ...
and low altruism.


Socioeconomic factors

Socioeconomic status (usually measured using the three variables income or wealth, occupational level, and years of education) correlates negatively with criminality, except for self-reported illegal drug use. Higher parental socioeconomic status probably has an inverse relationship with crime. Unstable employment and high frequency of unemployment correlate positively with criminality. Low socioeconomic status is thought to be positively correlated with higher levels of stress, and therefore the mental and psychological ill-effects of stress. These higher stress levels would probably be correlated positively with the propensity to commit a crime. Somewhat inconsistent evidence indicates a positive relationship between low income levels, the percentage of population under the poverty line, low education levels, and high
income inequality There are wide varieties of economic inequality, most notably income inequality measured using the distribution of income (the amount of money people are paid) and wealth inequality measured using the distribution of wealth (the amount of we ...
in an area with more crime in said area. A 2013 study from Sweden argued that there was little effect of neighbourhood deprivation on criminality per se and rather that the higher rates of crime were due to observed and unobserved family and individual level factors, indicating that high-risk individuals were being selected into economically deprived areas. A
World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Inte ...
study said, “Crime rates and inequality are positively correlated within countries and, particularly, between countries, and this correlation reflects causation from inequality to crime rates, even after controlling for other crime determinants.” Researchers in criminology have argued the effect of poverty upon crime is contextual:
As Levi (1997: 860) noted, macrolevel accounts ‘seldom generate anything close to a causal account which makes sense of nonviolence as well as of violence’. Put another way, the vast majority of individuals who live in conditions of poverty or disadvantage do not resort to violence at any time. Hence, in order to understand the patterns of violence that actually occur, it is imperative to study the social experiences of those who engage in it (Athens 1992).


Geographic factors

Associated factors include areas with population size, neighborhood quality, residential mobility, tavern and alcohol density, gambling and tourist density, proximity to the equator, temperature (
weather Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloud cover, cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmos ...
and season). The higher crime rate in the southern US largely disappears after controlling for non-climatic factors.


Parent/child relationships

Children whose parents did not want children are more likely to commit crimes. Such children are less likely to succeed in school, and are more likely to live in poverty. They tend to have lower mother-child relationship quality. Which cites: * * * *


Biosocial criminology and other analysis of environmental factors

Biosocial criminology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to explain crime and antisocial behavior by exploring both biological factors and environmental factors. While contemporary criminology has been dominated by
sociological Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and ...
theories, biosocial criminology also recognizes the potential contributions of fields such as
genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...
, neuropsychology and
evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evol ...
. Aggressive behavior has been associated with abnormalities in three principal regulatory systems in the body: * serotonin systems, * catecholamine systems, * and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis. Abnormalities in these systems also are known to be induced by
stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
, either severe, acute stress or chronic low-grade stress. In environmental terms, the theory that crime rates and lead exposure are connected, with increases in the latter causing increases in the former, has attracted much scientific analysis. In 2011, a report published by the official United Nations News Centre remarked, "Ridding the world of leaded petrol, with the United Nations leading the effort in developing countries, has resulted in $2.4 trillion in annual benefits, 1.2 million fewer premature deaths, higher overall intelligence and 58 million fewer crimes". The
California State University The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 485,550 students with 55,909 faculty and staff, CSU is the largest four-year public univers ...
did the specific study. Then U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director
Achim Steiner Achim Steiner (born 17 May 1961) is a Brazilian-born environmentalist who currently serves as the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chairman of United Nations Sustainable Development Group. Before joining UNDP, he w ...
argued, "Although this global effort has often flown below the radar of media and global leaders, it is clear that the elimination of leaded petrol is an immense achievement on par with the global elimination of major deadly diseases."


See also

* Causality * Crime statistics * Criminology ** Biosocial criminology **
Environmental criminology Environmental criminology focuses on criminal patterns within particular built environments and analyzes the impacts of these external variables on people's cognitive behavior. It forms a part of criminology's Positivist School in that it applie ...
**
Lead and crime hypothesis Lead is a chemical element with the symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metal that is denser than most common materials. Lead is soft and malleable, and also has a relatively low melting point. When freshly cut, ...
* Sex differences in crime *
Racial differences in crime Race is one of the correlates of crime receiving attention in academic studies, government surveys, media coverage, and public concern. Research has found that social status, poverty, and childhood exposure to violent behavior are causes of the r ...


References


Sources

{{Race and crime Behavioural sciences Criminology Forensic psychology * Anthropology Covariance and correlation