Marcus Felson

Human ecology and crime: A routine activity approach

Prior explanations of the distributions of crime have tended to emphasize the criminal intentions of people without considering adequately the circumstances in which criminal acts occur. This paper examines how community structure generates these circumstances and applies Amos Hawleys human ecological theory in treating criminal acts as routine activities which feed upon other routine activities. For example, we consider how married women in the labor force, persons living alone, and lightweight durable goods provide offenders with circumstances favorable for carrying out certain illegal acts. We examine in particular how directcontact predatory violations require the convergence in space and time of offenders, suitable targets,and the absence of effective guardians.Various trends in the social structure can alter crime rates by affecting the likelihood of this convergence, without necessarily requiring changes in the criminal inclinations of individuals.

Property Crime Rates in the United States: A Macrodynamic Analysis, 1947-1977; With Ex Ante Forecasts for the Mid-1980s

This paper presents several macrodynamic social indicator models of post-World War II trends in robbery, burglary, and automobile theft rates for the United States. A theory of the ways in wich changes in criminal opportunity affect these Index Crime property crime rates is deveoped. Definitions and postulates are presented from which we derive a main theorem which states that, other things being equal, a decrease in the density of the population in physical locations that are normally sites of primary groups should lead to an increase in criminal opportunities and hence in property crime rates. Corollaries to the main theorem are presented and tested after operationalization of relevant independent and control variables such as the residential population density ratio, the unemployment rate, age structure, total consumer expenditures, and automobiles per capita. Stochastic difference equations, used to evaluate the theory,indicate that the models implied by the theory exhibit good statistical fit to the recorded property crime rates in question over the 26-year estimation period, 1947-72. In addition, these models provide reasonably accurate expost forecasts of observed annual property crime rates over the five-year forecast period, 1973 through 1977. The paper concludes with a discussion of ex ante forecasted equilibrium levels of the three property crime rates for the mid-1980s implied by the estimated models. The forecasts indicate that the robbery and automobile theft rates should drop00 substantially in the 1980s from their recent levels, whereas the burglary rate may continue to grow or at least drop less.

A General Framework for Building Dynamic Macro Social Indicator Models: Including an Analysis of Changes in Crime Rates and Police Expenditures

It is generally agreed that social indicators are measures of social conditions. Accordinlgy, recent interest in measuring social conditions and in building models of how various social forces determine changes in social conditions was predated by work of William F. Ogburn and his collaborators over 50 years ago. In this paper, we argue for a revival of analyses of social change based upon time series of indices of social conditions. To provide a general paradigm for this type of analysis, we describe (1) an opportunity-structures theoretical framework for generating specifications of equations of dynamic macro social indicator models, (2) a demographic accounting framework for grounding such equations in population stocks and flows, and (3) a structural equation strategy for estimating and evaluating the resulting models. To illustrate this paradigm, we present analyses of three equation determining changes in the national reported property crime rate, the reported violent crime rate, and the rate of public police expenditures. The equations fit annual 1947-72 time-series data well, yield theoretically meaningful coefficients, and lack demonstrable autocorrelation of disturbances. Moreover, the conditional forecasts of the 1973 values of the reported crime rates fall well within bounds set by the standard errors of the equations.

Simple indicators of crime by time of day

Abstract Crime varies greatly by hour of day—more than by any other variable. Yet numbers of cases declines greatly when fragmented into hourly counts. Summary indicators are needed to conserve degrees of freedom, while making hourly information available for description and analysis. This paper describes some new indicators that summarize hour-of-day variations. A basic decision is to pick the first hour of the day, after which summary indicators are easily defined. These include the median hour of crime, crime quartile minutes, crimes daily timespan, and the 5-to-5 share of criminal activity; namely, that occurring between 5:00 AM and 4:59 PM. Each summary indicator conserves cases while offering something suitable to forecast.

Social Indicators of Adolescent Activities Near Peers and Parents.

This paper reconstructs social indicators of activity patterns at age 17. Respondents were asked to recall various features of daily life at that age. The results indicate a secular decline in the time adolescents spend in family and household settings and with parents nearby.

Social status and the married woman

The dependence of married women upon men for their achievement of social status is examined. A status-borrowing model is contrasted to an independent-status model. Data from a 1972 national survey indicate that the former model fits better than the latter. Both husbands and wives appear to pay rather little attention to the attainments of wives when evaluating their own social status. However, a statussharing model is not totally ruled out.

The Fertility-Inhibiting Effect of Crowded Apartment Living in a Tight Housing Market

After reviewing the literature relating density to fertility, the authors consider how housing configurations might influence fortility. They suggest that persons living in crowded apartments with little option of moving elsewhere will tend to reduce fertility. Quasi-experimental data from a Colombian public housing project indicate that apartment living significantly reduced fertility among lower-middle- and upper-working-class persons living in a tight housing market. These findings are potentially important in evaluating long-run consequences of housing policies on population growth.

Co-Offending and the Diversification of Crime Types

There is theoretical and empirical support for co-offending being important not only for understanding current offending but also subsequent offending. The fundamental question is—why? In this article, an aggregate analysis is performed that begins to answer this question. Disaggregating solo- and co-offending by single year of age (12-29 years) and crime type in a largely metropolitan data set from British Columbia, Canada, 2002 to 2006, it is shown that the distribution of co-offences is significantly more varied than the distribution of solo offences. This more varied distribution of co-offences favors property crimes during youth but fades as offenders age.

A dynamic macro social indicator model of changes in marriage, family, and population in the United States: 1947-1974

This paper presents an integrated 21-equation model of how marriage, family, and population conditions, as indexed by macro social indicators, affect each other and are affected by other social, demographic, and economic forces. An opportunity structures theoretical paradigm is applied to the specification of dynamic structural equations for determining changes (both trends and cyclical fluctuations) in marriage formation and dissolution, family and household composition, fertility, mortality, population growth, and population distribution. The equations are estimated on annual national data for the United States during the post-World War II years 1947 to 1972, and then they are used to make conditional forecasts of the values of some of the endogenous variables for 1973 and 1974. It is found that the equations fit the observed data well, lack demonstrable autocorrelation of disturbances, and forecast the 1973 and 1974 values usually with less than 2% error. Strategies are sketched for further refining some of the equations, and it is suggested that this model should be integrated into a larger societal model in order to estimate some of the effects of changes in demographic phenomena on other social conditions.

Age and the distance to crime

The journey-to-crime literature consistently shows that the distance to crime is short, particularly for violent crimes. Recent research has revealed methodological concerns regarding various (improper) groupings of data (nesting effects). In this article we investigate one such nesting effect: the relationship between age and the distance to crime. Contrary to much of the research that investigates this phenomenon, using a large incident-based data set of more than 100,000 crime trips, we find that the relationship between age and the distance to crime is best described as quadratic but this quadratic relationship is not universal across all crime classifications.