Crime and Social Interactions

Social Disadvantage and Crime

In this article, we analyze the relationship between social disadvantage and crime, starting from the paradox that most persistent offenders come from disadvantaged backgrounds, but most people from disadvantaged backgrounds do not become persistent offenders. We argue that despite the fact that social disadvantage has been a key criminological topic for some time, the mechanisms which link it ...

Crime and Social Sanction

Social sanctions may be a strong deterrent of crime. This paper presents a formal model that relates crime and social sanction to social interaction density. We empirically test the theoretical predictions using a provincial level panel dataset on different crimes in Italy between 1996 and 2003. We exploit detailed demographic and geo-morphological information to develop exogenous measures of s...

Social Inequality , Crime , and Deviance

This chapter examines the role of social inequality in crime and deviance by specifying a social psychological theory of the causal mechanisms by which inequality is associated with crime. We begin by noting that the powerful have more input into the content of criminal law, a point illustrated by the relatively soft penalties for white collar and corporate crimes compared to the harsh penaltie...

Social Closure, Surnames and Crime

This paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion rates using disaggregated data for Italian municipalities. It measures the degree of social openness of a community by the diversity of its surname distribution, which reflects the history of migration and inbreeding. It shows that, all else equal, communities with a history of social closure have lower crime rates and hig...

Social Agencies and Crime Prevention