Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (3 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2011)

Theories make varying predictions regarding the functional form of the relationship between neighborhood poverty and crime rates, ranging from a diminishing positive effect, to a linear positive effect, to an exponentially increasing or even threshold effect.  Nonetheless, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists testing this functional form.  The present study estimates the functional form of the relationship between poverty and various types of serious crime in a sample of census tracts for 25 cities, and finds that a diminishing positive effect most appropriately characterizes this relationship whether estimating the models nonparametrically or parametrically.  Only for the crime of murder is there some evidence of an accelerating effect, although this occurs in the range of 20 to 40% in poverty, with a leveling effect on crime beyond this point of very high poverty.  Thus, there is no evidence here in support of the postulate of scholars extending William Julius Wilson’s insight that neighborhoods with very high levels of poverty will experience an exponentially higher rate of crime compared to other neighborhoods.

    Cover page: Ghettos, thresholds, and crime:  Does concentrated poverty really have an accelerating increasing effect on crime?
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2009)
    This study utilized a unique dataset that combines information on parolees in the city of Sacramento, CA over the 2003-06 time-period with information on monthly crime rates in Sacramento census tracts over this same period, providing us a fine-grained temporal and geographical view of the relationship between the change in parolees in a census tract and the change in the crime rate. We find that an increase in the number of tract parolees in a month results in an increase in the crime rate. We find that more violent parolees have a particularly strong effect on murder and burglary rates. We find that the social capital of the neighborhood can moderate the effect of parolees on crime rates: neighborhoods with greater residential stability dampen the effect of parolees on robbery rates, whereas neighborhoods with greater numbers of voluntary organizations dampen the effect of parolees on burglary and aggravated assault rates. Furthermore, this protective effect of voluntary organizations appears strongest for those organizations that provide services for youth. We show that the effect of single parent households in a neighborhood is moderated by the return of parolees, suggesting that these re-united families may increase the social control ability of the neighborhood.
      Cover page: Do returning parolees affect neighborhood crime?A case study of Sacramento
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2009)
      This study used a unique data set that combines information on parolees in the city of Sacramento, CA, over the 2003-2006 time period with information on monthly crime rates in Sacramento census tracts over this same period, providing us a fine-grained temporal and geographical view of the relationship between the change in parolees in a census tract and the change in the crime rate. We find that an increase in the number of tract parolees in a month results in an increase in the crime rate. We find that more violent parolees have a particularly strong effect on murder and burglary rates. We find that the social capital of the neighborhood can moderate the effect of parolees on crime rates: Neighborhoods with greater residential stability dampen the effect of parolees on robbery rates, whereas neighborhoods with greater numbers of voluntary organizations dampen the effect of parolees on burglary and aggravated assault rates. Furthermore, this protective effect of voluntary organizations seems strongest for those organizations that provide services for youth. We show that the effect of single-parent households in a neighborhood is moderated by the return of parolees, which suggests that these reunited families may increase the social control ability of the neighborhood. © 2009 American Society of Criminology.
        Cover page: DO RETURNING PAROLEES AFFECT NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME? A CASE STUDY OF SACRAMENTO*
        Top