Stopping crime

spreading
Social interaction is the key to
understanding the evolution of crime

C
rime and the fear of crime have be- tive aspect of the criminal justice system over
come major concerns of the British the past 20 years, and, during the mid 1990s,
electorate. Particularly during the crime rates have begun to fall. Prison appears
prolonged run-up to the 1997election, it was to work. But the leading American liberal
understandable that the main political par- criminologist Elliott Currie was not alone
ties were terrified of appear- when he raised serious ques-
ing to be soft on this issue. tions about this strategy in his
Neither Michael Howard nor "The probability of a 1996lecture to the British Na-
Jack Straw went as far as Bill prison sentence will tional Association for the
Clinton in the 1992American have little efj'ect in Care and Resettlement of Of-
election campaign when, as deterring potential fenders (NACRO). Currie
Governor of Arkansas, he re- criminals according pointed out that in 1970,there
fused clemency in a very to the criminologists, were just under 200,000 in-
public way and allowed at whilstfor the mates in American state and
least one dubious execution economist its federal prisons. Today, the
to proceed. But the whole theoretical impact is figure is around 1.1million -
tenor of political debate in taken for granted, and a more than five-fold in-
Britain is moving in the di- the question is simply crease.He recognisesthat this
rection of controls, sanctions an empirical one." has had some effect in reduc-
and penalties. ing- crime. But crime rates to-
One can see why the Labour Party, at least, day, as a broad generalisation, have still not
is doing this. Crime statistics are notoriously fallen below their late-1980's level which, as
unreliable, but there clearly has been a big rise Currie states, "is not a good place to be". Cer-
in crime in recent years. And, just as clearly, tainly, American crime rates now are very
the costs of crime are borne disproportion- much higher than they were in the 1970s.
ately by the poorer groups in society. In pre- There is a crucial debate about whether the
war days, the poor were alleged to make a costs of a get tough policy outweigh the bene-
living by taking in each other's washing. On fits. This has been stimulated by the increas-
some estates today, it is almost as if they exist ing interest shown in crime by American
by committing crimes against one another. economists, for whom cost-benefit analysis is
The United States has intensified the puni- an integral part of their professional reper-
toire. The expense involved in building and
maintaining the necessarynumber of prisons
is, of course, enormous. But, it is argued, the
benefits of preventing crime are also large.
Crime imposes costs, and so reducing crime
brings a benefit to society.
What works best?
However, as Currie argues, the real debate
should be about which approach to the con-
trol of crime works best. Could the huge
amounts spent on the American prison sys-
tem be more effective if they were used in-
stead on strategies of crime prevention?
Unfortunately, the enormous literature on
the causes of crime and the behaviour of
criminals is wholly inconclusive.
Economic analysis of the phenomenon of
crime was stimulated in the late 1960sby the
distinguished Chicago economist Gary
Becker. In orthodox economic theory, the
agents involved in any particular market,
whether consumers or producers, are as-
sumed to act in accordance with the rules of
optimising behaviour. They are presumed to
be able to both gather and process substantial
amounts of information efficiently in order to
form expectations on the likely costs and
benefits associated with different courses of
action, and to respond to incentivesand disin-
centives in an appropriate manner. With a
fine sense of the value of propaganda, such
behaviour is described by economists as 'ra-
tional'. It is always important to remember
that in this context, 'rational' has a precise,
technical meaning which is not the same as
the use of the word in everyday English.
According to this view of the world, crime
canbe thought of analyticallyas a market. The
behaviour of those involved in crime,
whether criminals, law enforcers, purchasers
of stolen goods or victims, is cosrdinated
through adjustments in relative prices. The
decision whether or not to participatein crime
is made by weighing up the costsand benefits.
The benefit is obviously the gains from the
proceeds of crime, whilst the costs include the
actual costs incurred in carrying out a crime
(such as the purchase of a crowbar by a bur-
glar), the probability of being caught, and the
prospective penalty if convicted. In this
model, punishment by the criminal justice
system can be thought of as a tax on the sup-
ply of crime, which increases the cost and
hence reduces the amount which is supplied.
This view of crime as the outcome of a
rational assessmentby individuals of the rela-
tive costs and benefits involved is in marked
contrast to the tenets of conventional crimi-
nology, where the typical criminal is por-
trayed as having difficultyidentqing and as-
sessing alternative courses of action and
rarely thinking through the consequences.
The basic divergenceof views in conventional
economicsand criminology on how individu-
als behave is at the root of many of their dis-
agreementson policy. The probability of, and
severity of, a prison sentence will have little
effect in deterring many potential criminals
according to the criminological view of be-
haviour, whilst for the economist its theoreti-
cal impact is taken for granted, and the ques-
tion is then simply an empirical one of how
strong it is in practice.
This conventionalview of rational individ-
ualbehaviour has come in for strong criticism
from some economists. Nearly 30 years ago,
for example, the American mathematical
economist Roy Radner proved that, in order
for the propositions of free market theory to
hold, every individualhad to processso much
information that, literally, an infinite amount
of computing power is required. And re-
search in economictheory in the past ten years
or so has established that even small devia-
tions from the assumption of completely ra-
tional behaviour can lead to outcomes far re-
moved from those of the pure free market
model. But even amongst research carried out
within the common framework of orthodox
economic theory few clear policy condusions
on crime emerge.
Isaac Ehrlich was one of the first econo-
mists to take up the theme launched by
Becker, and last year published an excellent
exposition of the approach to crime based
upon such theory, which discusses much of
the empirical literature. Ehrlich remarks that,
despite the ’voluminous‘nature of thislitera-
ture, on the crucial question of the impact of
incentiveson crime, ’itwould be premature to
view the empirical evidence as conclusive’.
He notes that the quantitative estimates of
such effects vary, even to the extent of a mi-
nority of studiesfailingto find any effect at all,
and a substantial part of his paper is devoted
to a technical discussion of the potential rea-
sons for this.The precise details of thisdiscus-
sion need not concern us, except to note that
statistical analysis of crime data, which forms
the bulk of the empirical evidence, is by no
means a straightforward task, and there are
some formidable conceptual problems in-
volved. The potentially unreliable nature of
much of the data is but an additional compli-
cation.
His central point is that the empirical evi-
dence gives no real guide as to whether nega-
tive or positive incentives exert the more in-
fluence over crime. But this distinction is at
the very heart of the policy debate. ‘Negative’
incentives are those which deter and prevent
crime - the probability and severity of punish-
ment. ‘Positive’incentivesare those which en-
courage people to take up legitimate work
instead of crime, such as the probability of
obtaining a job at a decent wage, rehabilita-
tion programmes, and policies which help to
provide strong, nonaiminal role models for
those individualswho are most susceptibleto
commit crime. In short, the conventional ap-
proach based upon statistical analysis of ac-
tual data has made very little progress in our
understanding of crime. Alternatives are
needed.
Social interaction
and the dynamics of crime
Inhis NACRO lecture,Elliott Currie drew the
analogy between the spread of an epidemic
and the growth in crime. His specificpurpose
in so doing was to offer a criticism of the
American emphasis on incarceration, using
the analogy that a health policy of putting all
those who were ill in hospital would not be
regarded as a particularly successfulsolution
to the problem. Instead, the focus would be
on preventing people from getting the dis-
ease in the first place.
In what follows, we present an analytical
developmentof Currie’s suggestion,drawing
on work in mathematical biology to describe
how potential epidemics are either spread or
contained in a population.
Using mathematics has two distinct ad-
vantages. First, it offers a way in which the
often intimidating discipline of economics
can be tackled on its own ground, namely that
of analytical modelling. Second, maths
shouldbe thought of as simplya translation of
processes which are described verbally into a
different language which enables us to obtain
more insights than are available from purely
descriptive accounts.
The aim of the approach is not to account
for the path over time followed by any par-
ticular set of crime rates, whatever the degree
of reliability which might be attached to any
available data. The purpose instead is to give
a general description of the process by which
criminals are generated.
Conceptually, the population - whether
that of an entire country, a local neighbour-
hood, a particular age group, or whatever - is
divided at any point in time into a smallnum-
ber of discrete groups which differ in their
potential to commit crime.
In its most basic form, the model divides
the population into three groups. First, those
with a zero prob-
ability of commit-
ting a crime (N for
‘not susceptible’).
For example, most
groups of women,
certainly those over
25, might be placed
in this category, as
might most pen-
sioners. The second
group is made up of
the susceptibles (S),
those who have not
yet committed a
crime, but might
well do so. It is well
documented that
young men in their teens and early twenties
are particularly prone to commit crimes -
from acts of minor vandalism carried out in
what used to be known as ’high spirits’
through to far more serious crimes. The third
group is made up of those who are active
criminals (C). These three groups, N, S and C
by definition make up the whole population.
The essence of this approach is to describe
a set of flows between these groups whose
overall effect describes the evolution of crime
rates. The Chart gives an overview of these
flows, which are described in more detail be-
low. The focus on flows leads quite ~turally,
as in mathematicalbiology,to a description of
the dynamics of crime in the format of differ-
ential equations.
The flowsbetween these groups are postu-
lated to depend upon key elements such as
the impact of incentives or general social and
economic conditions. As we have seen, the
orthodox empirical literature on crime gives
widely differing views on the relative impor-
tance of such elements. When the model is
simulated, the sensitivity of the results to par-
ticular flows, such as those arising from social
and economicconditions, can be investigated
by assigning different strengths to that flow.
Individuals are assumed to form views on
external factors,
such as the overall
social and economic
conditions and the
punishment struc-
ture, and use these
to determine their
movement or other-
wise in or out of the
different categories
in the model. No
presumption is
made that they do
so in an economi-
caUy ‘rational’ way.
An essential ad-
ditional element in
this approach is the
ability of individuals to be affected by others’
behaviour. For example, the more likely a per-
son is to come into contact with criminals, the
more likely he or she is to become one. This
social interaction between individual agents
is crucial to the process of how crime rates
evolve over time.
The emphasis on social interaction is con-
spicuously different to the postulates of con-
ventional economics, in which the tastes and
behaviour patterns of individuals are fixed,
and they are assumed to react simply to
changes in relative prices. The behaviour of
others only changes the behaviour of any
given individual indirectly through the con-
sequences of their actions on prices. In con-
trast, in this approach how others act has a
directeffect on the conduct of the individual.
The importance of social interaction for
overall outcomes is one which is often
stressed in the conventional criminology lit-
erature and, more generally, within the disci-
pline of sociology. But it is rarely analysed in
a formal way in these disciplines. The tech-
niques used to analyse epidemics, which are ble determinantswere much more acute, yet
also inherently a social phenomenon in that according to both official data and the testi-
they are spread by contact with other indi- monies of those alive at the time, crime was
viduals, offer a method of so doing. much lower than it is today. A more general
Social interaction is introduced in our example of this phenomenon are the wide
model in two ways. First, the greater the pro- variations in crime rates which are often ob-
portion of people in any given population servedbetweentheruralandurbansectorsof
who are already criminals,the more likely it is poor economies,withcrimebeingvery much
that any other individualwill convert intobe- lower in the poor rural areas.
coming a criminal. Second, the greater the As it happens, the model outlined above
proportion of the population who are wholly leads quite readily to solutions in which the
disinterested in being criminals, the greater proportion of criminals in the population can
the pressure on those who are criminals to differ by a factor of ten or more, precisely be-
become law-abiding. cause of the presence of the social interaction
terms. In technical terms, these introduce non-
Explaining variability linearities which lead to the existence of multi-
Despite the rather abstract nature of the ple attracting equilibria (see Campbell and
methodology, there are some Ormerod, 1996 for fuller dis-
rather clear policy implica- cussion). But the process can
tions. But before considering "Social interaction be understood informally.
these explicitly, it is relevant resolves the seeming Consider, for example, what
to note how the model ac- paradoxes of the happens when we examine
counts for what is by far the desperate poverty of the consequences of making
single most important fact the 30s being the impact of social and eco-
about crime rates. This is their associated with much nomic factors gradually
enormous variability across lower m'me rates than more important in the deci-
both time and place. Even the affluent W s, or the sion to become a c r i m i ~ L
making due allowance for the low rates of crime in Not surprisingly, the
various problems of reliability
rural areas compared model suggeststhat thisleads
of the data, there are massive
to those of the cities to a gradual inmase in the
variations, even at the level of
where wage rates are proportion of the population
individual estates which are
much higher." who are a i m i d s.However,
virtually next door to each thisin tum leads to feedbacks
other. The variations are simply too large to through the influence of the socialinteraction
be accounted for plausibly by differences in terms. As the proportion of aiminals rises,
factors such as unemployment and the na- this in itself makes it more likely that the pro-
ture of the punishment system. Indeed, these portion will increase still further. And the
latter often appear to have perverse effects. more of a population which is criminal, the
A highly topical instance, which is fre- weaker are the sanctions of socialdisapproval
quently invoked in the current policy de- of the noncriminal part of the population, so
bate in Britain, is the contrast between crime the incentive to stop being a criminal is re-
rates in the 1930s and crime rates today. Un- duced.
employment and poverty are cited by lib- Once a critical point is reached, the
eral criminologistsas being important in ex- strength of these feedbacks intensifies, and
plaining the current high rates of crime. the proportion of criminals rises rapidly and
Conservatives counter this by pointing to dramatically. This does not mean that every-
the example of the 1930s when these possi- one eventually becomes a criminal, for the
strengths of the various flows in the model
will set limits to the proportion which ends up
in this category. But it does mean that two
populations, whose circumstances are very
similarbut who happen to lie either sideof the
critical point, will end up with dramatically
different crime rates.
Social interaction is the feature which re-
solves the seeming paradoxesof, for example,
the desperatepoverty of the 1930sbeing asso-
ciated with much lower crime rates thanis the
affluence of the 19%, or the often very low
rates of crime in rural areas of developing
economies compared to those of the cities
where wage rates are much higher. Britain in
the 1930s and many rural areas in the Third
World today are examples of societies which
possess strong community relationships. In
turn, these both foster a sense of belonging
and provide, in Currie's words, "the settingin
which informal social sanctions against ag-
gression and crime can operate effectively".
Build community values
Elements such as the probability of receiving
and severity of a prison sentence, or unem-
ployment, or the chances of getting a job at a
reasonable wage may all have some influ-
ence on how crime evolves. But the conven-
tional literature on crime is still far from
resolving their relative importance. Further,
it stretches plausibility to believe that these
determinants alone can account for the mas-
sive variability in crime over time and place.
Once allowanceis made for social interaction
terms, however, such variations can be ac-
counted for.
The model helps to illuminate the current
debate on the desirability or otherwise of the
so-called zero-tolerance policy of policing
adopted with apparently great success in
New York. The non-linearities of the model
imply that, from time to time, large and
seemingly inexplicable changes in crime rates
wilI take place. Inexplicable,that is, within the
linear mind set which looks for simple cause
and effect mechanisms. The fact that crime
rates are falling in other American cities
should alert us to the possibility that the
.internal dynamics of the process of crime are
moving the whole system down to a lower
level equilibrium. It is highly misleading to
conclude that zero-tolerance alone has
brought about the dramatic falls.
But this approach has clear positive
implications for policy. Actions which
reinforce respectable community values and
which provide strong, non-criminal role
models for those individuals who are at any
point in time most susceptible to commit
crime can have quite dramatic effects both in
reducing crime levels in high crime areas, and
in preventing explosionsof crime in relatively
low crime areas. The gains from successful
policies in these areas far outweigh those to be
had from the current obsession with fiddling
around with ever more punitive laws and
penalties 0