Shifting Patterns in Wisconsin Crime Rates

In this study we explore shifting patterns in crime across Wisconsin counties between 1990 and 2000. Building on the three core ecological theories of criminology including strain/anomie, social disorganization and economic rational choice theories we hypothesis that socioeconomic well-being can be used to identify predictable patterns of change in crime. The data generally support the notion that higher levels of socioeconomic well-being at the beginning of the period are associated with lower levels of both violent and property crime at the end of the study period. Introduction The 1990s witnessed a remarkable decline in crime rates across the US and Canada. While this trend is positive from a sense of social well-being, it has presented social scientists, and in particularly criminologists, with a range of new questions. The dominant theories of crime, including economic rational choice theory (Beccaria 1764; Bentham 1789; Fleisher 1966; Becker 1968, 1993; Ehrlich 1973), anomie and strain theory (Durkheim 1893; Merton 1938) and social disorganization theory (Park and Burgess 1925; Shaw and McCay 1931, 1942, 1969), were unable to predict the stagnation in the growth of crime during the 1980s and the ensuing decline during the 1990s (Ouimet 2002). A second, perhaps less fundamental problem with the dominant theories of crime is that the macro-empirical evidence is often inconclusive at best and contradictory at worse (Chirico 1987; Patterson 1991; Bausman and Goe 2004). This latter problem is compounded in the handful of studies that focus on rural crime patterns (Rephann 1999; Jobes 1999; Osgood and Chambers 2000; Wells and Weisheit 2004). The statistical patterns that tend to appear in urban focused studies tend to not hold when using rural data. This latter result is troublesome because a comprehensive theory of crime should not have caveats. While the criminology literature is vast and richly interdisciplinary there is still a vast amount of work to be undertaken, both theoretically and empirical. Beyond our academic interest in better understanding why crime occurs, the policy implications of this line of work are profound. In Wisconsin, for example, public expenditures per $100 of personal income on corrections (prisons and jails) increased slightly less than six percent annual over the 1990s, while the average for the US was less than two percent. Do expensive “get tough on crime” policies that have been popular in the US, and particularly Wisconsin, deter 1 Within the criminology literature macro-empirical analysis refers to studies that use regional data such as cities, counties or states as the unit of analysis while micro-empirical analyses use individual level data in the form of survey or interview data.