Summertime=Crime Time?

Because it’s now the middle of July, it’s appropriate to talk about U.S. crime rates during the summertime. Violent and property crime rates are typically higher during the summer than during other times of the year. What accounts for this seasonal trend? A major reason has to do with the opportunity for crime and victimization.

During the summer, people interact more than during colder months of the year. Once they interact, tempers can flare for all kinds of reasons, and interpersonal violence can result. The summer heat can also cause tempers to be short, again leading to violence. A crime like robbery is also more common during the summer than the winter. During the winter, fewer people (i.e., potential robbery victims) are out on the streets at night, and fewer robbers are out on the streets as well. Because there is a lower “supply” of both robbers and victims, robbery rates are lower.

What about property crime? Here, too, opportunity matters. During the summer, people spend more time away from their homes, and, when they do so, are more likely to leave a window open. Their homes are thus easier targets for burglars during the summer than during other times of the year. For similar reasons, there is also more opportunity for larceny—pickpocketing, shoplifting, bicycle theft, and so forth—and motor vehicle theft to occur.

Seasonal crime rates are very interesting but, after some reflection, not very surprising. The warm days of the summer promote crime and victimization, while the cold days of the winter (at least in areas of the nation that have winter!) inhibit crime and victimization. Perhaps it’s no accident that the states with the lowest crime rates are those at the top of the U.S. map. They tend to be cold much of the year, and they also tend to be fairly rural (partly because they’re so cold). As I always tell my students here in Maine, never leave our great state if you want to be safe from crime!

Do more prisons equal less crime?

Recently George Will, the national syndicated columnist, wrote a column in which he argued that the prison expansion of the last few decades led to a significant decline in the U.S. crime rate.

Although Will cited several kinds of evidence for his argument, The Sentencing Project soon issued a report, “Do More Prisoners Equal Less Crime? A Response to George Will” (http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin%5CDocuments%5Cpublications%5Cwill_overall%20response.pdf) that refuted his evidence. Among other things, this report pointed out that states with lower increases in incarceration during the 1990s had greater crime declines than states with higher increases in incarceration. Other evidence cited by the report shows that increasing incarceration during the 1990s accounted for only about 25% of the crime decline during that decade; factors such as a change in drug trafficking markets and an improved economy probably played a much more important role. This increasing incarceration cost the nation billions of dollars that would have reduced crime more effectively had it been instead spent on crime prevention programs, such as early childhood intervention efforts directed at families whose children are most at risk for delinquency and crime as they grow up.

It is tempting and almost natural for Americans to believe that harsher sentencing practices and higher incarceration rates must be very effective in reducing crime. However, much research finds that this is not the case. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that the nation has wasted (in terms of reducing crime) most of the tens of billions of dollars it has spent on prisons and prisoners during the past few decades. This huge expenditure has certainly not made the nation much safer, and there is good reason to believe that it aggravates the very crime problem it is intended to relieve. I’ll return to this theme in a later posting.