The authors estimate the relationship between trees and three crime aggre­ gates (all crime, violent crime, and property crime) and two individual crimes (burglary and vandalism) in Portland, Oregon. During the study period (2005­2007), 431 crimes were reported at the 2,813 single­family homes in our sample. In general, the authors find that trees in the public right of way are associated with ...

Empirical evidence about the relationship between legal gambling and crime is mixed; some studies find that legalized gambling increases crime and others find no relationship between legalized gambling and crime, controlling for other factors like hotels. We develop a utility maximizing model of time spent in legal work, crime, and leisure and use this model to understand the relationship betwe...

Fear of crime is a very prevalent issue today. It challenges the safety of cities. For this reason it has gained considerable attention among the sociologists and criminologists over the last 20 years. Whilst men experiencing relatively high rates of violence, they report their fear of crime less than women. In the contrary women have a much greater fear of crime than men, but are victimized le...

Whether, and the extent to which, stiffer sanctions deter crime is an integral question in fashioning corrections policy. To the extent that the behavior of the criminally inclined is completely insensitive to variation in punishment severity, crime-control policy should focus on incapacitation. Sentences should be long enough to ensure that offenders are removed from society during the period ...

The project has two goals. First, it seeks to explain both the overall trend of rising imprisonment and rising racial disparities in imprisonment, and geographic and temporal differences in these trends. Official data sets on arrests, imprisonment, and social, economic, and demographic factors are merged to create a new longitudinal data set that permits the researchers to control for current a...

Statement of Purpose While there is a burgeoning research literature on crime trends, much of the extant research has adopted a relatively narrow approach, efforts across studies are highly variable, and the overall conclusions that can be drawn are ambiguous. In our judgment, one reason for this state of affairs is that the current data infrastructure that supports crime trends research is inc...

Some studies of assaults on intimate partners have found that most of the perpetrators are not violent outside the family, which suggests a specialized type of crime. However, other studies found domestic violence offenders tend to have extensive criminal histories. To further investigate the extent to which partner assaults are part of a more general pattern of criminal behavior or a specializ...

The United States has a high teenage birth rate relative to other developed countries. Children of teenagers experience more difficult childhoods than children born to other mothers, and hence may be more likely to commit crimes subsequently. I assess to what extent international patterns in teen birth rates can explain why the United States had the highest crime rates of developed countries in...

Beginning with the moral statisticians Guerry and Quetelet and continuing to the present, criminologists have repeatedly shown that serious crime rates vary across geographic units. The most prominent framework for explaining this variation is the macrosocial perspective, which asserts that the crime rate is a reflection of social organization. In this paper, I review research from the past few...