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PubMed1999

Crimes of reason, crimes of passion: suicide and the adulterous woman in nineteenth-century France.

The anxieties that determined the nineteenth-century French obsession with female behavior found symbolic expression in the adulterous and suicidal woman. We see this clearly in novels where both adultery and suicide feature prominently, but the anxiety these themes provoked was not limited to works of fiction. A striking number of moral essays and medical studies were devoted to the subject of feminine nature during this period, and it is here especially that the dangerous tendencies of independent and sexually active women were revealed. By analyzing the literary representation of the suicidal and adulterous woman in the works of male and female writer alongside the theories of physicians, critics, and moral reformers, the author demonstrates how this image came to symbolize much more than the violation of ethical standards. In literature as in life, unconventional women needed to be severely punished lest their defiant attitudes inspire further acts of rebellion.

Crime↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Crime-related aspects in heroin addict patients: relationship between crime and delinquency].

BACKGROUND: Criminological studies have been specially influenced by those social factors relationated with drug dependence. Data from Criminology and Law insist on relationship between social factor and criminological events, but not defining the direction of this correlation. OBJECTS: We present data about criminological situation of an heroin addict patients sample evaluated by consultation-liasion psychiatry in Ramón y Cajal hospital in Madrid. We study legal, social and clinical variables and their relationship. METHOD: We use descriptive analysis and logistic regression to study social, legal and clinical variables of a 411 patients sample, using clinical report protocol. CONCLUSIONS: Those patients affected by HIV-1 have higher criminality index, with lower social, economic and educational level than those not affected. These results suggest an interdependence between delinquency and marginality with an early beginning of both.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Drug-related crime and sentencing policies from the perspective of the United Nations crime prevention and criminal justice programme.

Owing to the incompleteness of available data, there is no conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of sentencing policies in various countries. Insufficient data at both the regional and international levels also make it difficult to draw any firm conclusions on general trends in sentencing policies for offenders convicted of drug-related infractions. Regional, and particularly national, circumstances influence the pattern of penal measures against drug offences in any given country. Thus, drug legislation reflects the socio-cultural, religious and other values of a nation. There is a growing tendency to apply measures of treatment and social reintegration to drug-addicted persons who have committed minor offences rather than to impose prison sentences on them. Drug addiction is increasingly recognized as a disease, which should be cured in an appropriate treatment setting, but the data available indicate that the application of this measure to drug offenders is rather restricted. Another apparent tendency is the move to decriminalize the simple use of drugs and, at the same time, to provide more severe penalties for drug trafficking. In certain countries, however, there is a trend towards increased penalties for illicit drug use as well.

Crime↗
PubMed2006

Violent crime exposure classification and adverse birth outcomes: a geographically-defined cohort study.

BACKGROUND: Area-level socioeconomic disparities have long been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes. Crime is an important element of the neighborhood environment inadequately investigated in the reproductive and public health literature. When crime has been used in research, it has been variably defined, resulting in non-comparable associations across studies. METHODS: Using geocoded linked birth record, crime and census data in multilevel models, this paper explored the relevance of four spatial violent crime exposures: two proximal violent crime categorizations (count of violent crime within a one-half mile radius of maternal residence and distance from maternal residence to nearest violent crime) and two area-level crime categorizations (count of violent crimes within a block group and block group rate of violent crimes) for adverse birth events among women in living in the city of Raleigh NC crime report area in 1999-2001. Models were adjusted for maternal age and education and area-level deprivation. RESULTS: In black and white non-Hispanic race-stratified models, crime characterized as a proximal exposure was not able to distinguish between women experiencing adverse and women experiencing normal birth outcomes. Violent crime characterized as a neighborhood attribute was positively associated with preterm birth and low birth weight among non-Hispanic white and black women. No statistically significant interaction between area-deprivation and violent crime category was observed. CONCLUSION: Crime is variably categorized in the literature, with little rationale provided for crime type or categorization employed. This research represents the first time multiple crime categorizations have been directly compared in association with health outcomes. Finding an effect of area-level violent crime suggests crime may best be characterized as a neighborhood attribute with important implication for adverse birth outcomes.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2001

Drug Treatment as a Crime Fighting Tool.

BACKGROUND: The primary approach to reducing crime in the US has been through the criminal justice system. However, drug treatment may be an effective tool in reducing crime. In order to make better use of treatment as an alternative approach, one needs to know if reducing drug use through treatment results in decreased crime. AIMS OF THE STUDY: The objective of this paper is to model and empirically investigate the extent to which a change in drug use that results from treatment reduces crime and whether a change in drug use is causally related to change in crime. We focus on crime-for-profit. METHODS: We use a multi-site dataset of 3,502 inner-city drug users entering treatment. We analyze the change in drug use and crime pre and post treatment. We take first differences to address the omitted variable problem. RESULTS: We find that treatment reduces drug use and that, in turn, reduced drug use has a significant impact on crime. For our study population, reduced drug use seems to be causally related to reduced crime. This finding is robust to specification and subsamples. We estimate that reduced drug use due to treatment is associated with 54% fewer days of crime for profit, ceteris paribus. DISCUSSION: We use a longitudinal data set and a novel approach to analyze the relationship between crime and drugs. We analyze a low-income, inner-city, drug-addicted sample. We use self-reported crime. For our purposes, the use of individual data is an improvement over the use of aggregate level data that has been used in much of the related literature. Limitations of our paper include that we do not have a random sample and that our measure is self-reported in the previous 30 days. IMPLICATIONS FOR HEALTH POLICIES: Our findings suggest that drug treatment may be an effective crime-fighting tool. Treatment reduces not only the crime of drug possession, but also crime-for-profit. Current public policy emphasizes use of the criminal justice system, incarceration in particular, as a mechanism to combat crime. Given the huge and growing expense of the criminal justice system, drug treatment might be cost-effective relative to incarceration. California s so called Proposition 36 is based on this yet to be proven premise. Although additional research is required, our findings may help inform the debate on treatment versus criminal justice. We have provided empirically-based findings that reduced drug use due to treatment can result in important reductions in crime. Our findings can serve as a building block for policy development.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2006

Costs of alcohol and drug-involved crime.

A large proportion of violent and property crimes involve alcohol or other drugs (AOD). AOD use only causes some of these crimes. This paper estimates the costs of AOD-involved and AOD-attributable crimes. Crime counts are from government statistics adjusted for underreporting. The AOD-involved portion of crime costs is estimated from inmate surveys on alcohol and illicit drug use at the time of the crime. The costs and AOD-attributable portion of AOD-involved crimes come from published studies. They include tangible medical, mental health, property loss, future earnings, public services, adjudication, and sanctioning costs, as well as the value of pain and suffering. An estimated 5.4 million violent crimes and 8 million property crimes involved AOD use in 1999. Those AOD-involved crimes cost society over 6.5 billion dollars in medical and mental health care and almost 65 billion dollars in other tangible expenses (in 1999 dollars). If the value of pain, suffering, and lost quality of life is added, AOD-involved crime costs totaled 205 billion dollars. Violent crimes accounted for more than 85% of the costs. Roughly estimated, crimes attributable to alcohol cost 84 billion dollars, more than 2 times the 38 billion dollars attributable to drugs. Although American media--news and entertainment--dwell on the links between drugs and crime, alcohol-attributable crime costs are double drug-attributable ones. Effective efforts to reduce the abuse of alcohol and illicit drugs should reduce costs associated with crime.

Alcohol Drinking↗
PubMed1992

Estimating costs of traffic crashes and crime: tools for informed decision making.

Traffic crashes and crime both impose significant economic and social burdens through injury and loss of life, as well as property damage and loss. Efforts to reduce crashes and crime often result in competing demands on limited public resources. Comparable and up-to-date cost data on crashes and crime contribute to informed decisions about allocation of these resources in important ways. As a first step, cost data provide information about the magnitude of the problems of crashes and crime by allowing us to estimate associated dollar losses to society. More importantly, cost data on crashes and crime are essential to evaluating costs and benefits of various policy alternatives that compete for resources. This paper presents the first comparable comprehensive cost estimates for crashes and crime and applies them to crash and crime incidence data for Michigan to generate dollar losses for the state. An example illustrates how cost estimates can be used to evaluate costs and benefits of crash-reduction and crime-reduction policies in making resource allocation decisions. Traffic crash and selected index crime incidence data from the calendar year 1988 were obtained from the Michigan State Police. Costs for crashes and index crimes were generated and applied to incidence data to estimate dollar losses from crashes and index crimes for the state of Michigan. In 1988, index crimes in Michigan resulted in $0.8 billion in monetary costs and $2.4 billion in total monetary and nonmonetary quality-of-life costs (using the willingness-to-pay approach). Traffic crashes in Michigan resulted in $2.3 billion in monetary costs and $7.1 billion in total monetary and nonmonetary quality-of-life costs, nearly three times the costs of index crimes. Based on dollar losses to the state, the magnitude of the problem of traffic crashes clearly exceeded that of index crimes in Michigan in 1988. From a policy perspective, summing the total dollar losses from crashes or crime is of less importance than understanding the costs and benefits of various policy alternatives. This paper therefore concludes with an example of how our cost estimates can be used to compare the costs and benefits of competing policies.

Accidents, Traffic↗
PubMed1999

Crime: social disorganization and relative deprivation.

Crime is seldom considered as an outcome in public health research. Yet major theoretical and empirical developments in the field of criminology during the past 50 years suggest that the same social environmental factors which predict geographic variation in crime rates may also be relevant for explaining community variations in health and wellbeing. Understanding the causes of variability in crime across countries and across regions within a country will help us to solve one of the enduring puzzles in public health, viz. why some communities are healthier than others. The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for investigating the influence of the social context on community health, using crime as the indicator of collective wellbeing. We argue that two sets of societal characteristics influence the level of crime: the degree of relative deprivation in society (for instance, measured by the extent of income inequality), and the degree of cohesiveness in social relations among citizens (measured, for instance, by indicators of 'social capital' and 'collective efficacy'). We provided a test of our conceptual framework using state-level ecologic data on violent crimes and property crimes within the USA. Violent crimes (homicide, assault, robbery) were consistently associated with relative deprivation (income inequality) and indicators of low social capital. Among property crimes, burglary was also associated with deprivation and low social capital. Areas with high crime rates tend also to exhibit higher mortality rates from all causes, suggesting that crime and population health share the same social origins. Crime is thus a mirror of the quality of the social environment.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

The relationship between crime and opioid use.

Accepting that opioid use and crime are associated and develop together, amongst opioid-using criminals the need for opioids may cause crime on a day-to-day basis or both may tend to be determined by some other set of factors. Previous studies have either failed to allow for such other factors, or have failed to compare opioid users to adequate control groups. From interviews with 151 Scottish prisoners and non-prisoners, divided into five drug-using groups: (1) alcohol only; (2) cannabis and alcohol; (3) other drugs but not opioids; (4) moderate opioids; (5) heavy opioids, data were obtained on drug use frequency, crime frequency and a variety of other variables. It was found that: (1) there were no differences between incarcerated and non-incarcerated opioid users, in fact incarceration had no substantial effects on other variables; (2) heavy opioid users committed crimes significantly more frequently than did moderate opioid users, non-opioid polydrug users, cannabis users or alcohol users. But, moderate opioid users did not commit crimes significantly more frequently than did the other groups; (3) other drugs were related to crime. Polydrug use (including cannabis use) was more related to theft and delinquency than was opioid use. Alcohol use was related to fraud; (4) there were larger explanations of crime than opioid use--criminal experience and polydrug use--and crime was a better explanation of opioid use variance than opioid use was of crime. It is concluded that need for opioids did not simply cause crime. Rather, crime and opioid use tended to influence each other. However, this relationship was not special to opioids but, depending on historical circumstances, could--and to some extent does--apply to any drug. In consequence, society's treatment of drug-using criminals needs to deal with drug use and crime together.

Adult↗