Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) is widely recognized as one of the first people to bring scientific methods to bear on the study of crime. A physician, psychiatrist, and prolific author, Lombroso is best known as the founder of criminal anthropology, the study of the body, mind, and habits of the “born” criminal. Lombroso's theory of the atavistic offender dominated criminological discussions in Eu...

Objectives Recent evolutions in actuarial research have revealed the potential increased utility of machine learning and data-mining strategies to develop statistical models such as classification/decision-tree analysis and neural networks, which are said to mimic the decision-making of practitioners. The current article compares such actuarial modeling methods with a traditional logistic regre...

Title of Dissertation: COST MATTERS: APPLICATION AND ADVANCEMENT OF ECONOMIC METHODS TO INFORM POLICY CHOICE IN CRIMINOLOGY David M. Bierie, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor Doris L. MacKenzie Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice This project develops and applies a cost-benefit analytic framework to evaluate a specific policy option facing the state of Ma...

Making realistic predictions about the occurrence of crime is a challenging research area. City-wide crime patterns depend on the behaviour and interactions of a huge number of people (including victims, offenders, and passers-by) as well as a multitude of environmental factors. Modern criminology theory has highlighted the individual-level nature of crime—whereby overall crime rates emerge fro...