The Changing Structure of Property Crime in an Affluent Society

This study examines the relationship between two forms of property (cash and coin in banks and registered motor vehicles) and the amount of theft against that property for the years 1930 through 1965. The study finds that the relationships (using both raw and detrended data) are negative during the 1930's and early 1940's, but positive thereafter. A timelag analysis shows that the relationships apparently are not spurious and that changes in the abundance of property precede changes in the amount of crime against that property. That the sign of the relationship has changed from negative to positive is attributed to changes in the population of criminals who prey on these forms of property and their varying responses to property abundance. T he study of deviance a decade ago was almost exclusively the study of deviants. Why do people commit crimes? Why do people become mentally ill? Why do people become alcoholics, or drug addicts ? These were the types of questions most often asked. Today, a much broader range of questions is being asked about deviance: How do people get assigned to the role of deviant (Becker, 1963) ? What are the processes by which norms or laws come into existence, and what are the processes by which they are applied to the conduct of individuals (Becker, 1963) ? How do agents of social control, like the police, enforce the rules of society (Skolnick, 1967) ? What is the impact of deviance on the structure of society (Erikson, 1966) ? These questions seem to reflect a growing awareness that deviance probably cannot be understood well by studying only the actions and past histories of deviants. Indeed, they seem to reflect an awareness that deviance, in its broadest sense, is not an individual matter, but a process which involves the interactioln between many social units. Deviance involves not only a person who commits a deviant act, but the institutions in society which define certain activities as being deviant. Deviance also involves the people and institutions which detect the act and apply sanctions or treatment to the offending party. Criminal deviance, as others have noted (cf. Camp, 1967), involves all of these elements and more: it also involves a victim.1Recognition of this involvement is not new, but the meaning of the involvement is. Historically, the victim's role in crime was considered primarily a legal, rather than an etiological, matter (Schafer, 1968). That is, much more attention was given to the victim's rights and obligations as a victim than to any role he might have played in causing the crime to occur in the first place. Some criminologists, to be sure (cf. von Hentig, 1948; Wolfgang, 1958), have been concerned with this etiological issue, but so far little victimological research has been conducted and that research which does exist involves almost exclusively crimes of violence (cf. von Hentig, 1948; Schafer, 1968), or sexual abuse (cf. Gagnon, 1965). Little has been done to examinie the role of property victims in the etiology of property crime.2 * I wish to extend my appreciation to J. Zvi Namenwirth for statistical assistance and critical advice, to Kai Erikson and Lloyd Rogler for critically reading an early draft of the paper, and to Mark Moore for research assistance. 1 Crimes of vice might be an exception since no one (except possibly society itself) has been victimized in the usual sense of the word. Even in this case, however, there is still usually a second party to the crime, even if the second party is a willing participant. 2 That research which lhas been conducted to date is summarized by Schafer (1968:37-104). In all cases, however, the research has been conThis content downloaded from 207.46.13.183 on Thu, 21 Apr 2016 05:22:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms