BMC Immunology

This review focuses on the use of open-source data in criminology and criminal justice research, highlighting the field's advancements through these data, optimal practices for constructing open-source databases, and key methodological hurdles to confront. As the amount and types of available public information have grown, scholars have capitalized on this access by constructing open-source databases. Our review found extraordinary growth in this research area and that these flexible methods have been used to study a range of important topics, including issues that have been historically challenging to research. These methods have been most impactful in the study of rare events, such as school shootings, terrorism, and mass shootings. Some studies have become core works that significantly impacted criminology and other scientific disciplines, and the limits of the use of sources have yet to be determined. Our review of this literature found variations in the methodological approach to constructing such databases. Many studies did not evaluate the credibility of the open-source information they relied upon and often were not transparent in describing their research process. We identify the different processual elements of systematically developing and using such data. We highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, set forth best practices, and discuss how to improve methodological rigor and oversight in future research.

Criminology has been coincident with the motor age, at least in the Global North. The history of automobility is bound up—in mutually conditioning ways—with changing patterns of crime and social control. Yet the car has remained in relative obscurity as a focus of criminological attention—often present, sometimes investigated as a niche topic but at the same time somehow absent. Against this backdrop, this review describes some key elements of the close relation between automobility and the changing contours of control, order, and harm and offers some preliminary conceptual resources for identifying and investigating the criminological resonances of that most pervasive and mundane of modern objects: the automobile. By treating auto-dominance as a form of slow violence, we can, I argue, make the car into a vehicle for rethinking how to practice criminology in a time of climate breakdown.

There is great concern about algorithmic racial bias in the risk assessment instruments (RAIs) used in the criminal legal system. When testing for algorithmic bias, most research effectively uses arrest data as an unbiased measure of criminal offending, which collides with longstanding concerns that arrest is a biased proxy of offending. Given the centrality of arrest data in RAIs, racial differences in how arrest proxies offending may be a key pathway through which RAIs become biased. In this review, we evaluate the extensive body of research on racial differences in arrest as a measure of crime. Furthermore, we detail several ways that racial bias in arrest records could create algorithmic bias, although little research has attempted to measure the degree of algorithmic bias generated by using racially biased arrest records. We provide a roadmap to assist future research in understanding the impact of biased arrest records on RAIs.

I review the empirical literature on the effects of police staffing, police deployment, and styles of police enforcement. When cities put more police officers on the street, crime and violence have declined without a corresponding increase in arrests for the types of serious offenses that are most likely to lead to imprisonment. Investments in police therefore have the potential to generate a double dividend for society, reducing serious crime without driving up incarceration rates. At the same time, when cities have hired more police, those officers have ended up making many more quality-of-life arrests for minor crimes, thus widening the net of the justice system. The benefits of policing can be maximized and the costs can be minimized when police eschew strategies that revolve explicitly around making large numbers of stops and arrests and instead focus their efforts on more precise and problem-oriented approaches.

Born of sociology while absorbing ideas and scholarship from other specialties, criminology can legitimately tout its interdisciplinary bona fides. Yet within the field, integration and cross-pollination across subject areas is, far too often, absent. Concentrating on corporate crime and summarizing the literature across a variety of different domains, I demonstrate that criminology, as a discipline, benefits from knowledge generated by corporate crime scholarship and vice versa. I discuss why it is essential to build a multidisciplinary knowledge base that informs and draws from corporate crime scholarship while also addressing critical epistemological challenges and knowledge gaps that confound integrative efforts. I conclude with potential areas of synergy ranging from the theoretical (organizational life cycle/life course and decision-making in different contexts) to new/old forms of crime and crime control associated with the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

US cities have recently increased the share of their budgets devoted to policing and decreased the share devoted to social services. However, a growing body of research demonstrates that social services can durably reduce crime, raising the question of whether spending more on police and less on social services reduces crime in the short term only to increase it in the long term. This review addresses this question by first recounting recent trends in municipal budgeting. Then, it summarizes the causal evidence for which local government functions best reduce crime, focusing on policing, education, employment, and housing. Research suggests that education spending efficiently and durably reduces crime with fewer negative externalities than policing but with longer delays. Evidence that housing and employment spending suppresses crime is promising but nascent. Finally, the review recommends turning renewed scholarly attention to government budgets and the root causes of crime trends.

We propose the concept of short-term mindsets as an alternative to self-control as envisioned in Gottfredson & Hirschi's self-control theory (SCT). We lay out a competing perspective, short-term mindsets theory (STMT), based on this novel concept. STMT assumes that short-term mindsets are partly rooted in enduring individual differences and in part develop in response to criminogenic environments, events, and experiences. STMT connects individual-level perspectives to sociogenic views by explaining how several risk factors of crime (e.g., negative parenting, delinquent peers, substance use) all impact on short-term mindsets. Exposure to one risk factor encourages short-term mindsets that, in turn, make exposure to other risk factors more likely, thereby increasing the likelihood of crime. We show that STMT enjoys stronger empirical support than SCT, better aligns with other theory, and can account for phenomena typically considered at odds with, or outside the purview of, SCT.Updated on October 31, 2024. Changes may still occur before final publication

Criminology is haunted by state-structured biases. We discuss five. (a) With the spatial boundaries and the binary deontology they use to count crime, governments draw researchers into ecological fog and sometimes fallacy. (b) All legal systems encourage criminologists to promote untenable implications of socially stratified criminality. (c) To degrees that vary by time and place, the scope of criminological research is compromised by methodological nationalism. (d) State agencies use chronologies that repeatedly draw researchers away from examining the nonlinear temporalities that shape variations in criminal behavior. (e) State agencies produce data that facilitate explaining the why of crime, but scientific naturalism would first work out what is to be explained. We recommend a criminology that begins by describing causal contingencies in social life independent of governments’ labeling of crime.

Do jobs and income-transfer programs affect crime? The answer depends on why one is asking the question, which shapes what one means by “crime.” Many studies focus on understanding why overall crime rates vary across people, places, and time; because 80% of all crimes are property offenses, that is what this type of research typically explains. But if the goal is to understand what to do about the crime problem, the focus should instead be on serious violent crimes, which the best available estimates suggest seem to account for the majority of the social costs of crime. The best available evidence suggests that policies that reduce economic desperation reduce property crime (and, hence, overall crime rates) but have little systematic relationship to violent crime. The difference in impacts arguably stems in large part from the fact that most violent crimes, including murder, are not crimes of profit but rather crimes of passion, including rage. Policies to alleviate material hardship, as important and useful as those are for improving people's lives and well-being, are not by themselves sufficient to also substantially alleviate the burden of violent crime on society.

The article conducts a comprehensive analysis of literature spanning four decades (1980–2023) sourced from databases such as Scopus, JSTOR, and ScienceDirect. It critically examines the evolution and theoretical underpinnings of rural criminology, emphasizing its significance and illustrating key research themes within the field. Despite the domination of North American, Australian, and British scholarship, rural criminology has seen considerable growth and emerged as a dynamic and extensive field of study, engaging scholars from many countries worldwide from various disciplines. Studies show that although areas across the rural–urban continuum often exhibit lower crime rates in contrast to cities, they encounter distinctive safety challenges shaped by their inherited characteristics and the uneven impact of globalization. Misconceptions regarding rural life can conceal the actual occurrence of crime and violence, including acts against marginalized groups, the environment, and wildlife, making crime prevention initiatives a challenge.

Decades of research have recognized the phenomenon of repeat victimization and its policy relevance. Although there are continuing efforts to explain the theoretical underpinnings of repeat victimization, there are still measurement-related issues that limit our understanding of the topic and ability to inform interventions, including varying operational definitions, data constraints, and sampling and nonsampling error. In this article, we review theoretical advances in the literature over the past decade, propose operationalizations that can foster greater consistency across studies, comprehensively assess the data constraints around commonly used public data sources to study repeat victimization, and empirically demonstrate how one of these constraints—missing data—can be considered. Recommendations for future research in the area of repeat victimization are provided.

Our goals were to assess competing narratives within criminology about contextual variation in the age–crime curve (ACC)—most prominently, whether the ACC shows constancy or difference across societies and historically and whether the prevalence of adolescent lawbreaking is high, with a majority of teens committing crime, contributing to a steep peak followed by rapid, continuous descent among adjacent adult age groups. We analyzed historical and cross-national evidence from numerous sources that revealed significant variance in ACCs. Strongly at odds with invariance projections of an adolescent peak and rapid descent, the predominant age–crime patterns outside the United States were postadolescent peaks and spread-out age distributions. Teen prevalence was typically much lower than the projection that a majority of teens commit crime, whereas the prevalence of adult crime was often sizable and serious. We illustrate using understudied societies how a socio-cultural framework that draws on age-graded expectations, social control practices, age-structured crime opportunities and stressors, and resultant lifestyle differences across significant life stages (adolescence, young adulthood, midlife) can apply to understanding cross-national differences in the age–crime relationship. Methodological challenges and future areas of research are discussed.

This review integrates recent scholarship outside of criminology with primary source material from a broadened source base to trace underappreciated histories of political struggle to secure safety and address harm in Black communities. Much of the existing literature in criminology and related social science fields tends to overlook bottom-up sources and the creative safety practices and sites of safety provision that exist and, in so doing, contributes to a lopsided empirical narrative of policing in the United States. This review, however, highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives. Unearthing these often marginalized and misrecognized histories and sources of Black-led struggle for community safety enables an analysis of not only the forms that community-led practices and interventions can take but also the ongoing state-produced conditions—referred to in this review as safety deprivation—that give rise to them. More broadly, this review uses these histories as a lens through which to consider how empirical narratives of policing and safety are transformed when community-derived, bottom-up knowledge sources are accounted for both substantively and methodologically and offers the field a guide of available databases.

An agent-based model is a form of complex systems model that is capable of simulating how the micro-level behavior of individual system entities contributes to macro-level system outcomes. Researchers draw on theory and evidence to identify the key elements of a given system and specify behaviors of agents that simulate the individual entities of that system—be they cells, animals, or people. The model is then used to run simulations in which agents interact with one another and the resulting outcomes are observed. These models enable researchers to explore proposed causal explanations of real-world outcomes, experiment with the impacts that potential interventions might have on system behavior, or generate counterfactual scenarios against which real-world events can be compared. In this review, we discuss the application of agent-based modeling within the field of criminology as well as key challenges and future directions for research.

My interest in criminology grew as the Vietnam War escalated. I applied to two Canadian graduate schools and flipped a coin. The coin recommended the University of Toronto, but I chose the University of Alberta, which had a stronger criminology program. I wrote a dissertation about criminal sentencing, which led to an Assistant Professorship at the University of Toronto. Dean Robert Pritchard of Toronto's Law School encouraged my work and later successfully nominated me for a Distinguished University Professorship. My interests continued to grow in international criminal law. A MacArthur Distinguished Professorship at Chicago's Northwestern University and the American Bar Foundation facilitated my research at the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. I followed this by studying the crime of genocide in Sudan and later the trial of Chicago's Detective Jon Burge. Burge oversaw the torture of more than 100 Black men on Chicago's South Side. US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuted Burge when Illinois prosecutors would not. Despite many good things about Chicago, the periodic corruption of the government and police was not among them.