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In recent decades, the use of capital punishment has declined, but in its place, a ‘new death penalty’ has arisen: life without parole (LWOP), which is being used far more frequently and for more crimes than capital punishment ever was. Yet, LWOP has received far less scholarly attention than the death penalty. Because of its greater scale, assessing the effects of LWOP on crime has important policy implications and is a better test of extreme penalties. Existing studies of LWOP focus on humanitarian issues and ignore its potentially reciprocal relationship with crime. Therefore, we use available LWOP data to fill these gaps in the literature, using models specifically designed to control for potential reciprocal effects. The results indicate there is no reciprocal causation between LWOP and violent crime and, at best, LWOP’s impact on crime is small, temporary, and, most importantly, no greater than the impact of life with parole.

Residential segregation based on race/ethnicity is associated with higher crime rates. However, when there is greater diversity within a neighbourhood, there may be less clustering of crime. One sign of such diversity beyond direct measures of racial similarity may be the proportion of minority officers employed by municipal police departments. As such, the purpose of this paper is to test the effect of the proportion of minority police officers on violent crime within minority communities, controlling for residential segregation.

Multi-level modelling of 91 American cities from the 2000 National Neighbourhood Crime Study was used.

It was found that as minority populations within census tracts increase, violent crime also increases; and crime is associated with an increase in segregation. However, racial composition of police departments can moderate the impact that community racial composition has on violent crime.

The current findings point to crime control strategies relevant to municipalities which focus on creating neighbourhoods of racial heterogeneity and more diverse police agencies.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of crime on apartment prices for Hamburg, Germany, for the years 2012 to 2017.

The authors use a panel data setting with fixed effects estimators and temporal lags to moderate the endogeneity concerns related to crime. The authors consider the effect of total crime, violent and property crime and some sub-categories of crime.

The estimates show that it takes two to three years for prices to react, with the longer run elasticity reaching −0.12 for total crime, −0.15 for property crime and −0.06 for violent crime. The elasticities are much larger in high-crime areas (−0.22 for total crime, −0.28 and −0.09 for property and violent crime) and elevated also in low-income areas.

The finding that property crime matters more in terms of quantitative impact for housing values than violent crime provides reasonable grounds for rethinking the resource allocation of public spending on crime clearance and prevention in Germany. Far more emphasis on preventing property crime appears in order and especially so in the lower income or higher crime areas, which are significantly more affected by crime and in particular property crime than those in high income or low crime areas.

The estimates for Hamburg provide the first detailed results of the impact of crime on real estate prices in Germany. It is also the first study for Continental Europe using panel data.

Purpose – Video game violence has historically been offered by policy-makers and some scholars as one contributing factor to mass homicides, particularly with shooters who are young, male, and white. However, the evidence for or against such beliefs has not been closely examined.

Approach – The current chapter examines the research exploring violent video game playing and its links with violent and aggressive behavior. Further, research regarding mass school shooters is also examined. The chapter also engages in a sociological analysis of structural factors within both the general society and scientific community by which media is often identified as a potential cause of social problems.

Findings – Current evidence cannot support proposed links between video game violence and aggressive or violent behavior, whether mild or mass homicides. Efforts to blame mass homicides on video games appear to be due to unfamiliarity with games among older adults, prejudicial views of young offenders, and a well-identified cycle of moral panic surrounding media as a scapegoat for social ills. Poor peer-reviewing within the scientific community allowed scholars to participate in this moral panic.

Social implications – Time focused on video games as a cause of mass school shootings is time wasted. Discussions of mental health issues and mental health care are likely to bear more fruit in relation to mass school shootings.

Criminal law has dramatically expanded since the 1970s. Despite popular and academic attention to overcriminalization in the United States, empirical research on how court actors and, in particular, prosecutors, use the legal tools associated with overcriminalization is scarce. In this chapter, we describe three forms of overcriminalization that, in theory, have created new tools for prosecutors: the criminalization of new behaviors, mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, and the internal expansion of criminal laws. We then use a unique dataset of felony filings and dispositions in Florida from 1995 to 2015 to test a series of hypotheses examining how overcriminalization influences prosecutorial practices given three changes to the political economy during this time: the decline in violent and property crime, the Great Recession, and a growing call for criminal justice reform. We find that prosecutors have been unconstrained by declining crime rates. Yet, rather than rely on new criminal statutes or mandatory minimum sentence laws, they maintained their caseloads by increasing their filing rates for traditional violent, property and drug offenses. At the same time, the data demonstrate nonviolent other offenses are the top charge in almost 20% of the felony caseload between 2005 and 2015. Our findings also suggest that, despite reform rhetoric, filing and conviction rates decreased due to the Recession, not changes in the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal justice reform.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the combined crime rate and staffing levels of a patrol area affect patrol officers’ productivity. Specifically, the author identified and analyzed two macro-level correlates of patrol officer productivity: reported violent crimes per officer and reported property crimes per officer (a beat’s “crime-to-cop” ratios).

Using hierarchical linear modeling, the author estimated the effects of a patrol area’s violent crimes per officer ratio and property crimes per officer ratio on the annual number of traffic citations, warrants, misdemeanor arrests, and felony arrests generated by patrol officers (n=302). The author also examined the effect of these crime-to-cop ratios on a more advanced productivity metric.

The results suggest that a patrol area’s rate of property crimes per officer is associated with a moderate decrease in an officer’s annual number of traffic citations, warrant arrests, and misdemeanor arrests; a patrol area’s rate of violent crimes per officer is also associated with a moderate decrease in an officer’s annual number of traffic citations; and a patrol area’s rate of violent crimes per officer is associated with a moderate increase in an officer’s annual number of warrant and misdemeanor arrests. Notably, the crime-to-cop ratios are not correlated with a more sophisticated patrol productivity metric.

The author analyzed data from a mid-sized US police department that uses a generalists policing style. It is unknown if these results translate to smaller or larger police departments, as well as those agencies practicing a specialized policing style.

The findings suggest that police scholars should not only recognize how the crime-to-cop ratios of a patrol area might impact patrol officer productivity, but also incorporate more sophisticated metrics of patrol officer activity in future studies. These findings likewise signal to police practitioners that an area’s crime-to-cop ratios should be considered when allocating officers and other resources across patrol areas.

To the authors knowledge, this is the first study to identify and examine the link between a patrol area’s crime-to-cop ratios and patrol officer productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to recognise and provide an approach to estimate the value of an institution that produces a public good to the wealth of a nation. Specifically, the authors value utilitarian justice.

The paper employs the classical economic theories of crime and shadow pricing to estimate the total economic value and shadow prices or social productivity of police and higher court deterrence. These measures are estimated using the definitions provided by Dasgupta and by re-engineering key deterrence elasticity estimates gleaned from Australian econometric studies.

The empirical findings suggest a relatively high social value for police and higher court deterrence. Notwithstanding, addressing socio-economic disadvantage is likely to prevent more subsequent offences than directing more resources to the operation of the criminal justice system.

The key limitations involve the sensitivity of the estimates to error. Further work is required on all the estimates in the model and in particular the social costs of the serious offences. The next step is to estimate the opportunity cost of supplying police and court deterrence. The cost estimate can then be combined with the estimates of social benefits to estimate a benefit-cost ratio. The model in broad terms demonstrates a way forward to estimating the economic value of and the social productivity of the criminal justice system. The provision of retributive justice is also ignored in this contribution. This requires a separate analysis.

The social implications are that there appears a way to both justify and evaluate the criminal justice system and this methodology may be applied to the operation of other public services.

The originality of this paper lies in suggesting a method to solve the valuation problem for the jointly produced public goods of the higher courts and police.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test theory regarding a geographic halo effect, whereby foreign investors draw overly broad impressions about a country based on high levels of violent crime in specific locations impacting foreign direct investment (FDI) across the country.

The authors analyze the impact of homicides on FDI by source country into Mexican states from 2001 to 2015. They estimate fixed effect and dynamic panel models controlling for several determinants of FDI at the state level and the potential geographic spillover of such violence from adjacent states.

The authors find robust support for the existence of a geographic halo effect caused by violent crime. The results show that the highest number of state homicides is associated with lower FDI across states.

The research provides some evidence of the potential role of cognitive biases on FDI decisions. In addition, its focus on Latin America brings attention to an understudied region in international business research.

For practitioners engaged in FDI decisions, the results imply the need to be more aware of potential cognitive biases that may influence them.

Few papers have explored the influence of cognitive biases on FDI.

This study aims to investigate the potential moderating effect of the average annual ambient temperature in 24 European countries on the relationship between criminal thinking (reactive vs proactive) and juvenile offending (violent vs property).

The average annual ambient temperatures found in 24 European countries were correlated with measures of reactive vs proactive criminal thinking and violent vs property offending in 56,518 students (50.4% female) from the second International Self-Reported Delinquency Study. These data were analyzed using a multilevel model comprising three Level 1 (student) predictors – age, sex and family structure – one Level 2 (country) predictor – ambient temperature – and two outcome measures – a reactive: proactive criminal thinking index (RPI) and a violent: property offending index (VPI).

The RPI and VPI correlated significantly with the Level 1 predictors, and the annual ambient temperatures from these 24 countries (Level 2 predictor) correlated positively with RPI and VPI and moderated the effect of reactive criminal thinking (RCT) on violent offending.

These findings indicate that ambient temperature correlates with violent/aggressive offending after the effects of property/non-aggressive offending have been controlled and suggest that ambient temperature may moderate the relationship between RCT and violent offending by affecting the decision-making process.

The contribution made by this study to the literature is that it illustrates how a macro-level influence in the form of average annual temperature can impact on micro-level processes in the form of criminal thinking and violent behavior.

Purpose – This chapter uses preventive and responsive policing strategies in tandem to develop a multi-level theory that explains the relationship between the police and violence.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter brings together classical scholarship and more recent sociological research to demonstrate that an effective response to violence is critical in upholding the state’s monopoly on violence and that police officers can reduce violence by preventing it and responding to it.

Findings – Theoretical and practical evidence support the balanced use of responsive and preventive policing strategies to reduce violence. Findings from the literature are used to argue that (1) when law enforcement officers do not effectively respond to violence and/or crime prevention strategies are nonexistent in a community, neighborhood crime is increased and (2) when citizens do not perceive law enforcement officers as legitimate and effective agents of authority, they become more likely to engage in violent offending (Tonry, 1995; Tyler, 2006).

Originality/value – Research has supported the effectiveness of “proactive” (Braga, Papachristos, & Hureau, 2014; Weisburd & Telep, 2014) and “reactive” (Nagin, 2013; Paternoster, 2010) policing strategies in reducing violence, but no research has combined strategies of prevention and response to explain the relationship between the police and violence. The theory proposed in this chapter demonstrates the utility of explaining the instrumental and legitimacy functions of the police across various levels and brings under-protection to the forefront of research on policing and violence.