California Counts Crime , Corrections , and California 3

Few issues are as contentious as immigration and crime. Concern over the effects of immigration on crime is longstanding, and bans against criminal aliens constituted some of the earliest restrictions on immigration to the United States (Kanstroom, 2007). More recently, policies adopted in the mid-1990s greatly expanded the scope of acts for which noncitizens may be expelled from the United States. Even so, many calls to curtail immigration, particularly illegal immigration, appeal to public fears about immigrants' involvement in criminal activities. Are such fears justified? On the one hand, immigration policy screens the foreign-born for criminal history and assigns extra penalties to noncitizens who commit crimes, suggesting that the foreign-born would be less likely than the U.S.-born to be involved in criminal enterprises. On the other hand, in California, immigrants are more likely than the U.S.-born to be young and male; they are also more likely to have low levels of education. These characteristics are typically related to criminal activity, providing some basis for concern that immigrants may be more criminally active than the U.S.-born. In this issue of California Counts, we examine the effects of immigration on public safety in California. In our assessments, we use measures of incarceration and institutionalization as proxies for criminal involvement. We find that the foreign-born, who make up about 35 percent of the adult population in California, constitute only about 17 percent of the adult prison Summary Hans P. Johnson, editor