Criminology, Law & Society

Abstract Whereas much ecology of crime research employs cross-sectional study designs, these studies assume that crime does not cause various neighbourhood measures to change over time. However, longitudinal research evidence suggests this is not a plausible assumption. The present study explores this question using neighbourhood data in US cities in Southern California covering over 6.7 million residents. Using data from two time points—2000 and 2010—instrumental variable models account for this endogeneity. The results demonstrate sharp differences between models that do or do not account for endogeneity: several measures yield completely reversed results from positive to negative or vice versa, some measures exhibit much stronger results, whereas others have much weaker, or nonsignificant, results. The findings highlight the importance of accounting for endogeneity in the US context, and that the differences are potentially not modest, but large enough that failing to account for endogeneity may limit our understanding of these social processes that criminologists have theorized. Whether such results generalize to non-US contexts will need to be a focus of future research.

In the aftermath of one of the worst recessions in US history, high unemployment has placed millions of Americans in precarious financial positions. More than ever, Americans are opting out of traditional financial services, relying instead on “fringe lenders” such as check cashers, payday lenders, and pawnshops to manage their finances. Given their tremendous growth and the concern that consumers who are least able to pay for high-cost, high-risk financial products are most likely to use them, fringe lenders have been the subject of controversy and the focus of much research. Largely unknown, however, are the effects of fringe lenders on the communities where they are located. Given their spatial concentration in low-income neighborhoods with greater concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities—areas with typically more crime—of concern is whether fringe lenders themselves are criminogenic. We consider this by examining the impact of several types of fringe lenders on neighborhood crime rates in Los Angeles. Our findings reveal that the presence of fringe banks on a block is related to higher crime levels, even after controlling for a range of factors known to be associated with crime rates. The presence of a fringe bank also impacts crime, particularly robbery, on adjacent blocks. Whereas we find that pawnshops have little impact on crime levels, payday lenders and check cashers have a much stronger impact. Finally, we discover there are moderating effects, as the fringe lender–crime relationship is considerably reduced if the lender is located in a higher population density area.

When Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1757) first visited Jamaica in 1687, he witnessed women feeding sick children a mixture of milk, sugar, and cocoa. Sensing opportunity, he brought the recipe back to England and began marketing "Sir Hans Milk Chocolate" for medicinal uses. Aside from his entrepreneurialnterests, Sloane began a program of collecting, transporting, cataloguing, and studying plants from the Caribbean, many of which ended up in the Chelsea Physic Garden, an institution from which emerged such innovations as double-glazed glass windows for greenhouses, cultivated teas exported to plantations on the Indian Subcontinent, and cultivated rubber trees, sent to Malaysia. Sloane's chocolate became big business; the recipe was bought by Cadbury's. It is easy to read Sloane's story as a familiar tale of the intertwining of science, the market, and colonial extraction. It is more challenging, and more important, to ask how the intellectual project, the system of knowledge/power Sloane represents, is replicated by contemporary Caribbeanist scholarship and its forms of knowledge. The author of this stunning book poses this latter question and, in the process, calls upon contemporary Caribbeanists to consider the ethics and politics of the way Caribbean studies as a field has helped to constitute the objects of its investigations