{"id":1284,"date":"2009-12-04T16:35:18","date_gmt":"2009-12-04T22:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=1284"},"modified":"2009-12-04T16:35:18","modified_gmt":"2009-12-04T22:35:18","slug":"bad-times-lower-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2009\/12\/04\/bad-times-lower-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"bad times = lower crime?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nr.187\"A recent piece in the New York Times<\/a> challenges the\u00a0conventional wisdom\u00a0that bad economic times are a hotbed for criminal activity:<\/p>\n

[New York] Police Department statistics show that the number of major crimes is continuing to fall this year in nearly every category, upending the common wisdom that hard times bring more crime.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea that everyone has ingrained into them \u2014 that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse \u2014 is wrong,\u201d said David M. Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. \u201cIt was never right to begin with.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To make sense of this, let’s call in the sociologists….<\/p>\n

Experts have long studied how shifts in crime might be attributed to economic indicators like consumer confidence, unemployment or a faltering housing market, particularly when it comes to property crime, burglary and robbery. The findings have been \u201crather equivocal,\u201d said Steven F. Messner, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied homicides in New York City.<\/p>\n

While there is generally thought to be a lag between changing economic conditions and new crime patterns, he said, it is curious that there has been no pronounced jump in street crimes associated with the most recent recession, which took root last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it could take a while to work its way through the system and into people\u2019s psychology,\u201d he said. \u201cI would say the jury is still out on the impact of this most recent economic collapse.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jesenia Pizarro, a criminologist at Michigan State, said that crime is indirectly related to the economy:<\/p>\n

Most crime is committed by the poor and uneducated, she said, and a bad economy can aggravate poverty in ways that are not obvious.\u00a0 \u201cThe bad economy leads to social processes that are then more directly related to crime,\u201d she said, citing \u201cless services for youth and young people who are less occupied and don\u2019t have the guardianship they need\u201d or cuts in education \u201cthat can lead to crime.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent piece in the New York Times challenges the\u00a0conventional wisdom\u00a0that bad economic times are a hotbed for criminal activity: [New York] Police Department statistics show that the number of major crimes is continuing to fall this year in nearly every category, upending the common wisdom that hard times bring more crime. \u201cThe idea that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[29,39116,403,131,119,117,133],"class_list":["post-1284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-class","tag-crime","tag-deviance","tag-economy","tag-poverty","tag-trends","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1284"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1291,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284\/revisions\/1291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}