Categoría gramatical

The identification of unemployment as a factor related to the variability of crime over time was a manifestation of the trend towards the recognition of links between crime and the economic cycle. Almost traditionally, unemployment has been adopted as one of the more illustrative indicators of the state of a national economy, and for the same reason it occupies an important place in the works studying the links between economy and crime. A review of the literature does not need to spend much time to detect that the unemployment-crime relationship has been filled to the brim with problems and contradictory findings rather than with solid arguments.

The study of the effects of unemployment on different forms of crime has been present in the specialized literature, particularly the American, since the late 1930s. As with other types of indicators of the economic cycle (e.g. inflation, GDP, industrial production, consumer price index), the study of unemployment and crime has set a wide palette of arguments. One of the most famous studies of the first half of the 21^st century was Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure (Rusche and Kirchheimer

1939). Their focus, however, was directed towards the impact of the economic cycle on imprisonment. In their innovative comparative research between England, France, Germany and Italy, the authors found relationships between periods of economic recession and the increment of prisons’ population. The central argument of their study is that when capitalistic societies enter into the recession phase, a considerable number of people will lose their jobs, drastically incrementing the unemployment rate. Subsequently and in response to the loss of economic sources, large sectors of society will be pushed to illegal activities to find the material resources that had been taken apart by the economic crisis, and therefore incrementing levels of incarceration.¹⁶ Another form of explanation is that of Lessan (Lessan 1991) but with the mediation or influence of inflation as a factor limiting state’s capacities to soften the distress caused by a period of crisis, worsening the effects of unemployment in incarceration.

Although a considerable number of works have found negative effects of unemployment in criminality, there is also other group showing that the effects of unemployment can be quite different. Taylor identified that one of the first studies (Taylor 1997) exploring the counterintuitive relation was the work of Wiers (Wiers 1945). Where, trying to explore the long-term relation between some economic conditions and the number of juvenile court cases of a county in Detroit, the author found a stronger relation with indicators measuring economic prosperity than distress. Nonetheless, the most famous study of this relation is the work of Cantor and Land Unemployment and crime rates in the post World War II United States: A theoretical and empirical analysis (Cantor and Land 1985). The basic theoretical argumentation of their text is that the effects of unemployment on crime can be analysed from a two-fold perspective: from their effects on motivation and from the variation of criminal opportunity. The model of Cantor and Land specifies that the effects of the variation of economic conditions, measured through unemployment, on crime are both negative and positive. Poor economic conditions help to decrease crime by incrementing people’s guardianship of their properties, which is translated into a reduced number of criminal opportunities. Nonetheless, there is also a positive influence of economic hardship on crime by increasing the motivation toward criminal conducts in order to alleviate the economic situation.¹⁷

16 The authors did not only post a direct relation between the changes in the economic cycle and crime. Their argument is also fuelled with a very clear critique of the capitalistic system of production and its necessity of chronic instability in the labour market.

17 An interesting finding of this study is the form in which the effects of the fluctuations in the economy cycle are also affected by time lags, for example the effects on guardianship are present while the motivation effect is lagged in time.

The concept of the economy as business cycle affecting the variation of crime has also been present in the cross-national literature. However, because of the variability of its significance according to levels of observation, the indicator unemployment has not performed very well in comparative research. There is small support for unemployment as a relevant independent variable at national level. However, its significance in relation with crime tends to disappear across lower aggregation levels (Pratt and Cullen 2005).

By and large, the business cycle perspective, particularly the studies using measures of unemployment as proxy, has found some interesting obstacles and critiques to deal with. One important issue to resolve is connected with differential effects of unemployment if other socio-demographic variables are taken into account. Support for this idea comes from studies following the work of Blau & Blau (Blau and Blau 1982) and their application of decomodification indices. The basic scheme says that situations of economic distress (like unemployment) can only be criminogenic if they are associated with some element of social stratification like ethnical-group membership (for the case of USA). Following this idea, to find the criminogenic effects of unemployment we first need to identify the relevant stratification characteristic of a particular social unit.

Another important obstacle is related to the usage of unemployment as an indicator of different economical processes. As we saw, unemployment has mainly been used as an indicator for the economic cycle. However, its usage as a measure for other phenomena has been so extended that unemployment could be considered as a standard control variable of general economic aspects. With a fast review of the literature on crime research, it can easily be found that although unemployment is an often used indicator to assess the economic dimension of crime; its importance is not reflected in the same form in theoretical arguments.

As a consequence, it has been used to measure relatively distant concepts like economic decline, labour market, deprivation, economic development and wealth. The principal problem with this almost indiscriminate application is two-fold: the poor empirical performance of the indicator, and the absence of theoretical arguments justifying both its usage and empirical failure.

There is another equally important problem that is not only limited to the usage of unemployment, but is a quite extended characteristic of theories trying to explain crime through economic indicators: the psychological fallacy (Sampson, Wilson et al. 1995). This idea refers to the connection between some economic phenomena or processes that happen at

macro or meso levels of observation, and are linked, through a not very solid argument, with outputs at the individual level like motivation or sentiments of frustration. Although, this is a problem that needs to be more extensively treated because it concerns various explanations of crime, I will bring forward some key points in relation to the business cycle and unemployment to grasp an idea of its general characteristics.

The association between economic conditions and individual psychological states connecting to crime has been a common practice in criminological literature. For example, in the research literature of the 1980s, particularly in the American context, this type of association was very common when using psychological-theory-laden terms like social pathology: "The term social pathology encompasses a number of conditions that are harmful to individuals, societies, or both including psychological distress, more severe disturbances -such as psychoses, suicide, and alcoholism- and crimes against persons and property."

(Horwitz 1984:96) The focus was on the connection between some economic condition like economic status, economic decline, -measured using unemployment, or economic inequality as the causes of psychological states favourable to social pathologies or criminal conduct.

Complications appeared when these relationships were applied to empirical research, where the results showed a lack of consistency. If unemployment is inserted as an independent variable, the empirical results are not very homogeneous. When a correlation between unemployment and social pathology or criminal behaviour exists, it is quite small and with different effects according to factors like level of observation, research design and types of crime. These types of variation in the empirical research are a clear call to rethink the theoretical arguments behind the usage of economic indicators like unemployment, in order to obtain a more precise reassessment of the conceptualisation behind economy and crime. The following extract of a text by Horwitz exemplifies quite clearly this problem:

"Despite the knowledge provided by recent research, much remains unknown. We know little about the specific ways in which the economy produces pathology or about how individuals protect themselves against economic deprivation. Nor can we specify the comparative power of different types of deprivation--poverty, economic decline, unemployment, inflation-in producing pathology. An additional limitation is that most research to date centres around a particular outcome such as psychological distress, suicide, or crime. As a result, we do not know why different people develop different responses to economic distress--why some become distressed or commit suicide, while others develop physical illnesses or why some commit crimes, as others slip into apathy or revolt. […] What is needed in this entire field is overarching theory that would guide empirical inquiry beyond the present jumble of empirical findings." (Horwitz 1984:114)

Finally, the question of what kind of behavioural outcomes are correlated with economic conditions, -like unemployment, remains an open issue for the theoretical and empirical literature. Although, there is evidence for the existence of an economic dimension of crime, the extrapolation of economic variables to the emergence of psychological states, which turn out to be probabilistically associated with illegal or criminal conducts, is still contested.