Sentidos y acepciones

One of the most abiding assumptions about the relationship between economy and crime can be labelled as the economic development hypothesis. Its core assumption is based on the idea that stable and long-term economic development produces conditions that, in the long term, generate material wealth and improved living conditions, which turn out to be associated with lower rates of criminality. This almost common sense association has roots not only in the classical schema of political economy but also in the modernist thought in sociology.

The label modernist depicts a group of explanations adopting a long-term view of social processes as phases of progressive social development. Inside the corpus of these theories it is common to find the usage of concepts like progress, development, modernization and urbanization. Their intellectual roots are located in the philosophical and social thought of the European Enlightenment, and their ideas are based on the prolific couple of providence and progress (Frankel 1948; Sampson 1956). The influence of the Enlightenment in the history of sociological theory is very wide and it can be found in different types of sociological explanations. However, concerning the relation between development (economic or social) and deviant behaviour, two important representatives of this idea are Emile Durkheim and Norbert Elias.

To talk about how the economic development-crime relationship has been influenced by Durkheim and Elias, it is necessary to identify three slightly different ideas on how social development influences the variation in deviant behaviour. In the case of Durkheim, two are the hypotheses that have guided the study of the effects of economic development on the variation of crime. First, there is a depiction of the increment of crime rates in periods of economic development and the rapid social changes brought by them. The causal argumentation is that acute modifications on the economic structure, like the ones provoked by the industrialization process, are accompanied by a breakdown in the axes of social regulation and social integration, which directly induces higher crime rates (Shaw and McKay 1942; Clinard 1964; Krohn 1978; Leavitt 1992; Ortega, Corzine et al. 1992). The second hypothesis derived from Durkheim sees economic development as a decisive factor for the

generation and increment of both moral individualism and organic solidarity, which in turn helps to increase the societal control of criminality (Messner 1982; De 1995; Huang 1995).

In the case of Norbert Elias the hypothesis applied to the analysis of crime has been extracted from his two principal works: The Civilization Process (1939) (Elias 1994) and The Court Society (1969) (Elias 1983). His idea of civilizing process was created to explore the links between long-term social processes and changes in psychological attributes and modes of behaviour. Elias produced two principal findings: first, through the centuries there has been a palpable change in the personality of individuals in the form of an increment of self-control;

and second, the emergence of external social control by the formation of national states and the monopolization of centralised power and violence in the hands of the state. The corollary of these long-term macro social processes in the psychological configuration of the individual is the gradual pacification of everyday interaction and the decline of violent behaviour. The work of Elias served as theoretical support for much of the forthcoming works trying to explain the historical variation of levels of aggression in Western societies, in other words, the long-term development of societal violence and its relationship with large-scale social processes.

One of the most important representatives of this line of investigation on the history of crime is Ted Robert Gurr. With his article on the Historical Trends on Violent Crime: a Critical Review of the Evidence (Gurr 1981) followed by the publication of Violence in America (Gurr 1989) Gurr made an appealing examination of the secular trends of lethal violence in the Western world from the 13^th century to the 20^th century. His main discovery was the existence of an S shaped curve depicting the development of lethal violence rates. His analysis was the empirical verification of the constant decline of levels of violence and aggression in Western societies: from estimated rates of 20 homicides per 100,000 persons in the high Middle Ages to approximately 1 per 100,000 persons in the 20^th century. Gurr, very close to the theory of Elias, explained this trend as the product of increasing sensitization of societies to violence and the corresponding increment of internal and external control of aggressiveness.

Economic development has been also used in non-historical research of crime and deviant behaviour. This application is closer to Durkheim’s perspective and is better known as the modernization or the social development explanation of crime. There is a small debate (Messner 1982; Dicristina 2004; DiCristina 2006) on whether Durkheim’s two hypotheses are based on developmental explanations, containing a progressive or evolutionary perspective of

society, or on the notions of differentiation, interdependency and complexity. Yet, the most common applications of Durkheim’s hypotheses are clearly based on a developmental conception of societies where growth, in terms of wealth and better living conditions, in Western societies should be accompanied with the homogenisation of lower crime rates.

The empirical research on this perspective has been focusing even more on economic measures as proxies or indicators of societal development, making use of various measures of material and economic context like: GNP/GDP; media communications; energy consumption;

distribution of employment; infant mortality; and unemployment. There are several works using this type of economic characteristics as aspects of social development and modernization¹⁸ where the latter is understood as: "…the modernization of nations should be positively associated with property crime and negatively associated with violent crime. In the modernization perspective, all nations go through the same developmental stages and the same changes in crime patterns. The changes that have occurred in developed nations are proposed as a model for the relationship between development and crime for all nations. The forces of modernization such as industrialization and urbanization are proposed to explain more about crime than the unique features of individual nations."¹⁹ (Neapolitan 2003:78)

The usage of economic development as an indicator of modernization and societal development is plagued with some critical points, showing that economic development implies a reduced and limited depiction of the economic dimension of crime. The first remark is that economic development has been more frequently used as an economic characteristic per se, in the sense that the traditional link with the theories born from Elias and Durkheim has been constantly loosening, making of economic development a kind of economic indicator and not a component of a sociological or criminological theory.

18 For extensive reviews of this perspective see Shelley, L. I. (1981). Crime and modernization : the impact of industrialization and urbanization on crime. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, LaFree, G. and E.

Kick (1986). "Cross-national effects of developmental, distributional, and demographic variables on crime: A review and analysis." International Annals of Criminology 24: 269-295, Messner, S. F. (2003). Understanding Cross-National Variation in Criminal Violence. International Handbook of Violence Research

W. Heitmeyer and J. Hagan. Dordrecht ; Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers: 701-716.

19 Some good examples of this idea are Shelley, L. I. (1981). Crime and modernization : the impact of industrialization and urbanization on crime. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, LaFree, G. and E.

Kick (1986). "Cross-national effects of developmental, distributional, and demographic variables on crime: A review and analysis." International Annals of Criminology 24: 269-295, Heiland, H. and L. Shelley (1992 ).

Civilization, modernization and the development of crime control Crime and control in comparative perspectives. H. Heiland, L. Shelley and H. Katoh. New York Walter de Gruyter: 1-19, De, L. (1995).

"Economic Development, Social Control, and Murder Rates: A Cross-National Approach." Cross-Cultural Research 29(4): 361-382, Neapolitan, J. L. (1997). Cross-national crime : a research review and sourcebook.

Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, Moniruzzaman, S. and R. Andersson (2005). "Age- and sex-specific analysis of homicide mortality as a function of economic development: A cross-national comparison."

Scandinavian Journal of Public Health 33(6): 464 - 471.

Most of the works using economic development have difficulties in finding homogeneous empirical results. The relationships between the indicators used to measure economic development and property and violent crime rates are very heterogeneous in the empirical literature, making it difficult to identify generalities in the relationship. Good examples are the works using measures of material wealth to catch modifications in economic development (De 1995). There the relationship with the variation of crime rates is very flexible according to the intervention of different kinds of mediation factors like the economic status of particular ethnic groups. For the theory behind economic development, irregularities and unexpected connections like these are particularly difficult to integrate in its schema.

This heterogeneity introduces an important difficulty grade in making generalizations.

For example, there are countries where, according to one measure of economic development, higher levels of wealth are accompanied with lower rates of crime. However, there is also evidence of the inverse relationship, meaning higher levels of development with high rates of criminal violence. That is the case of some highly developed nations, depending on how economic development is measured, like the USA. Or in the European context where traditionally strong economies with higher levels of economic development are also showing high rates of violent crime for the European standard such as can be seen in the case of Finland.

In the comparative perspective (Neuman and Berger 1988; Neapolitan 2003) the panorama is even more complicated. Simple or traditional concepts and measures of economic development have numerous problems to grasp the economic and social intricacies of contemporary Western and non-Western- societies, where the intertwining of different relevant factors is so intense that the use of a one-dimensional and straight-forward concept of economic development based on material wealth will not get us further with the explanation of crime:

"Ted Gurr and his associates (1977) have conducted ambitious comparative and historical studies of economic cycles and crime rates in nineteenth and twentieth century London, Stockholm, Sydney, and Calcutta, adding historical specificity to studies of crime rates trends. Their findings suggest that economic conditions in all three Western cities were inversely related to crime rates in the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as in the early decades of the twentieth. Since about 1920, however, the increase in total wealth in each of these three cities has been directly related to rising crime rates.

In the earlier period, absolute economic deprivation is the major generator of crime, while in the latter, it is increasing prosperity. The data cannot indicate, however, whether the increases in the latter period are due, to a greater opportunity to commit crimes or to growing levels of relative deprivation among lower-status persons. There were no similarities between crime rates in Calcutta and those in the three Western cities." (Horwitz 1984:106)