FINAL REPORT TO THE CRIMINOLOGY RESEARCH COUNCIL UNEMPLOYMENT AND CRIME : RESOLVING THE PARADOX

While official crime statistics from many countries show that unemployed people have high crime rates and that communities with a lot of unemployment experience a lot of crime, this cross-sectional relationship is very often not found in time-series studies of unemployment and crime. In Australia there have been no individual-level or cross-sectional studies of unemployment and adult crime which have failed to find a positive relationship, and no time series studies which have supported a positive relationship. This is the paradox of unemployment and crime. Consistent with this pattern, a time-series of homicide from 1921 to 1987 in Australia reveals no significant unemployment effect. A theoretical resolution of the paradox is advanced in terms of the effect of female employment on crime in a patriarchal society. Crime is posited as a function of both total unemployment and female employment When female employment is added to the model, it has a strong effect on homicide, and unemployment also assumes a strong positive effect There is a large body of literature relating criminal behaviour to the state of the labor market. In general, these studies show that there is a strong positive association between crime and unemployment at the individual level, a clear positive association at the cross-sectional level that gets weaker as the level of geographical aggregation increases, but quite an inconsistent relationship over time. The paradox of unemployment and crime is explored in Part I of the paper through a brief review of the empirical evidence. In Part n, a theoretical resolution to the paradox is advanced based on the contention that crime in general is a function of both total unemployment and female employment. Although we expect various types of crime to provide differential support of this theory, the contention is that crime in general will rise with both total unemployment and female employment. Our empirical evaluation of this hypothesis (presented in Part III) is restricted to one type of crime (homicide) in one country (Australia). Finally, Part IV addresses some policy implications of the revised understanding of the relationships between unemployment and crime developed in the previous two parts. The paper therefore makes three quite separate contributions. Part I provides a synthesis of the literature which allows us to make sense of the confusion most criminologists feel about the state of the empirical evidence on unemployment and crime. There are good reasons to be cynical both about the claims of those who say that unemployment has been clearly shown to be associated with crime and those who say that unemployment has been discredited as an explanation. Part n is a contribution to the theory of unemployment and crime. It faults previous theoretical work for failing to think clearly about the separate effects of male and female unemployment and male and female employment in a patriarchal society. A theory that focuses on the significance of employment-unemployment in a patriarchal society not only opens up the prospect of an understanding of unemployment with more empirical bite; it also supplies a normative and historical framework for resisting the ill-conceived policy inference that keeping women in the home is a good way to fight crime. This issue is taken up in Pan IV. In this context, Part m is not even the beginning of a systematic test of the theory in Part n. It is simply an illustration of how the theory in Part n can guide a fruitful respecification of studies of unemployment and crime.