Between 1995 and 1999, the number of indictable crimes recorded in Ireland dropped by 21 per cent and the daily average prison population rose by 33 per cent. The Government has claimed that a causal relationship exists here: more prisoners means less crime. The purpose of this paper is to map recent trends in the use of prison and to explore the interaction between rates of crime and rates of ...

The persistence of criminal activity is well documented. While such serial correlation may be evidence of social interactions in the production of crime, it may also be due to the persistence of unobserved determinants of crime. Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that, particularly over a short time horizon, there may actually be a negative relationship between crime rates in a particu...

Several strands of research are consistent with the possibility that expansions in psychiatric medication usage have reduced crime and delinquency. Estimates suggest that medication usage has increased to as much as 9% of the youth population and up to 20% of the adult population in the United States and is high among populations associated with the criminal justice system. Studies show that fo...

A rchimedes said, “Give me the place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the Earth” (Hirsch, Kett, and Trefil, 2002, p. 476). Economists have their own powerful lever: the instrumental variable estimator. The instrumental variable estimator can avoid the bias that ordinary least squares suffers when an explanatory variable in a regression is correlated with the regression’s distu...

Crime supply functions are reestimated in this paper using data corrected for victim underreporting. It is found in both a meanvariance specification and a conventional crime supply function which includes measures of the offender's gains and losses involved in property crimes that certainty and severity of punishment still deter. When correction for underreporting is made, the effects on the r...

Contributing to a more nuanced and detailed understanding of media effects on crime, this paper presents empirical evidence that detailed media coverage of homicides, influences the probability that criminals use similar murder styles, but does not change overall crime rates. We tracked 31,676 homicides carried out by drug cartels operating at the US-Mexico border, its stylistic characteristics...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs–crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper provides an econometric assessment of the drugs–crime channel within a Becker–Ehrlich model of crime sup...