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incidents of a specific type, the third column reports the rate per 100,000 residents, and the final column indicates the change in the rate over a ten year period. In 1997, for example, 1,634,770 violent crimes were known to the police. The rate of violent crimes was 610.8 per 100,000 persons, which represents a decrease in the rate of violent crimes from 1988 to 1997 of 4.1 percent. Officially reported crime rates fell in all Part I categories from 1988 to 1997.

Crimes reported or discovered by the police and found through investigation to have occurred are labeled ‘‘crimes known to the police.’’ A crime found not to have occurred is ‘‘unfounded,’’ and does not appear as a crime known to the police. Although occasionally police discover a crime being committed (e.g., they happen upon a burglary in progress, or they arrest someone for resisting a police officer) they are highly dependent on citizen reports of criminal incidents.

The UCR also provides data on arrests for Part I and Part II crimes, and reports these crimes on the basis of the geographical divisions described above. Since these data are for arrests, the rates calculated from them should be labeled ‘‘arrest rates.’’ Part II crimes include: other assaults (not including aggravated assaults), forgery and counterfeiting, fraud, embezzlement, stolen property (buying, receiving, and possessing), vandalism, weapons (carrying, possessing, etc.), prostitution and commercialized vice, sex offenses (except forcible rape and prostitution), drug abuse violations, gambling, offenses against family and children, driving under the influence, liquor law violations, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, curfew and loitering law violations, and runaways.

National Crime and Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS data come from large surveys using probability samples of respondents. Since 1973 a national-level program has surveyed a probability sample of U.S. households. The U.S. Census

Bureau conducts the survey, and during the 1990s the sample contained some 60,000 households and approximately 100,000 respondents. The results of this survey have been published annually since 1973 by The U.S. Department of Justice in

Criminal Victimization in the United States.

The NCVS collects data on a much smaller number of crimes than the UCR. Since it is a

survey of the victims of crime, it does not record homicides, but it does record forcible rapes and sexual assaults, robberies, aggravated assaults, simple assaults, burglaries, larceny-thefts, and motorvehicle thefts. It also provides details about the victims of crime not available in the UCR. These include the household income of the victim, any injuries sustained by the victim, insurance coverage, length of any hospitalization due to injuries, what protective measures the victim employed, and so on.

Careful field-testing preceded the initiation of data collection for NCVS in 1973 and before any changes made to its design since that time. An early decision involved the length of the reference period (the period the interviewers referred to when they asked whether victimizations occurred during the past period). Researchers chose a sixmonth reference period on the basis of the costs of doing more frequent surveys and studies that showed the effect of memory decay on remembering whether an event occurred. Respondents tend to telescope events into the reference period, and this can cause substantial increases in the number of victimizations reported during the past six months. To overcome this problem, each respondent remains in the sample for three years with interviews repeated every six months. Victimizations reported to the interviewer the first time a respondent is interviewed do not contribute to estimates of the crime rates. That first interview and subsequent interviews provide bounds for the six-month reference period. The interviewer asks about victimizations occurring since the last interview and has a list of incidents reported in the last interview to make sure that those incidents are not telescoped into the reference period.

To estimate rates for the entire nation from the NCVS data, researchers use the samples to estimate the number of victimizations occurring in the entire nation. They then use these estimates to calculate victimization rates. The derived estimates often contain large sampling errors, since they are based on only a ‘‘small’’ sample of the total population of the United States. These large sampling errors are greatest for the crimes least frequently reported by the respondents, for example, victimization rates for rapes involve more sampling error than rates for aggravated assault (O’Brien 1986).

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Self-Reports. Unlike the UCR and NCVS, selfreport studies refer to a collection of studies conducted by different researchers using a variety of methodologies. The basic methodology, however, involves sampling respondents and questioning them about criminal or delinquent acts. Although some isolated self-report studies occurred in the 1940s, the technique gained popularity with the work of Short and Nye (1957, 1958).

Perhaps the most ambitious self-report study is the National Youth Survey, or NYS (Elliott et al. 1983). This survey involves a national panel sample. When first instituted in 1976, the panel members were aged eleven to seventeen. Estimates of national-level crime rates for the age groups covered in this survey can be computed because the sample of respondents is a national one. These rates, unlike UCRand NCVS-based rates, result from respondents answering questions about their offenses.

The NYS, and other self-report surveys, calculate two types of crime rates: ‘‘prevalence rates’’ and ‘‘incidence rates.’’ To calculate these crime rates, the NYS uses the general formula represented in Equation (1). The prevalence rate uses the number of respondents who claimed they committed an offense for the numerator, the number of respondents for the relevant population size, and (we choose) 100 for the base. This yields the percentage of respondents who have committed a particular act. In the NYS in 1980, when the respondents were fifteen to twenty-one years old, the prevalence rate for robbery was 2. The incidence rate uses the number of times individuals claimed they committed a particular act as the numerator, the number of respondents as the relevant population size, and typically uses 100,

1000, or 10,000 for the base. We again use 100 for the base and find that in the 1980 NYS the incident rate for robbery was 10. Thus, there was an average of ten robberies per 100 respondents in this age group in 1980, with only two out of 100 respondents claiming involvement in a robbery.

As with the NCVS, self-report studies depend upon the accuracy of respondent reports. Therefore, issues such as telescoping, recall, and embarrassment are consequential for self-reports of criminal activities. In comparison to the UCR and NCVS, many of the crimes reported in self-report surveys are trivial crimes or not crimes at all (e.g., lying to

parents or cheating on a test). The sample sizes, even in the largest of such surveys, are not nearly as large as sample sizes in the NCVS. Therefore, given the relative infrequency of serious crimes, the rates for serious crimes are not very precisely measured by self-report surveys; that is, the estimates have large standard errors. Nonetheless, crime rates derived from self-report studies provide much of the data used to investigate the determinants of individual criminal offending.

SOME PROBLEMS WITH UCR, NCVS, AND

SELF-REPORT DATA

Using information from official data (UCR), victimization surveys (NCVS), and self-report surveys helps us to gauge the accuracy of crime rates. Crime rates vary depending upon whether they derive from UCR, NCVS, or self-report data. To understand why crime-rate estimates vary depending upon their source, we briefly outline some problematic aspects of these three data sources.

UCR Data. The most obvious problem with UCR data involves underreporting of crimes to the police. The NCVS interviewers ask respondents whether they reported a particular incident to the police. In 1994, 78 percent of the respondents who reported a motor vehicle theft to the interviewer said they reported that crime to the police, 50 percent of the burglaries were reported, 50 percent of the robberies, and only 32 percent of rapes and sexual assaults (U.S. Department of Justice 1997).

Once an incident comes to the attention of the police a number of factors influence whether the incident is recorded as a crime or whether an arrest is made. There may be organizational pressures to raise or lower the crime rate (e.g., Bell

1960; Chambliss 1984; DeFleur 1975; McCleary et al. 1982; Selke and Pepinsky 1982; Sheley and Hanlon 1978; Wheeler 1967). The professional styles of particular police departments may affect the recorded crime rates (Beattie 1960; Skogan 1976; Wilson 1967, 1978). The interactions between officers and offenders also help determine the classification of an incident as a crime and whether an arrest is made (Black 1970; Smith and Visher 1981; Visher 1983). Given these and other problems, it is not surprising that crime rates recorded by the UCR are known to contain substantial errors.

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NCVS Data. The NCVS may well provide a more accurate picture of crime rate trends and comparative crime rates than the UCR. As Sellin’s

(1931, p. 346) dictum suggests, ‘‘the value of a crime for index purposes decreases as the distance from the crime itself in terms of procedure increases.’’ Further, the NCVS standardizes the procedures it uses in compiling crime incidents. When the NCVS changes its procedures, careful methodological studies evaluate the changes.

Although the incidents reported to NCVS interviewers need not depend upon a respondent contacting the police, the police responding to the contact, and eventually police recording of the incident as founded, respondents do need to respond appropriately in an interview situation in order for an incident to be recorded as a victimization in the NCVS. In this context, note that the interview situation is a social interaction. The interviewers have little to offer respondentd for their time. Respondents may be reluctant to share embarrassing information with the interviewer, such as a fight at a bar, an assault by a relative, or a sexual assault. As noted earlier, sometimes respondents may forget about incidents or telescope the incidents into or out of the reference period.

Turner (1972) used ‘‘reverse record’’ checks to investigate 206 cases of robbery, assault, and rape found in police records. Interviewers interviewed these ‘‘known victims’’ using an NCVS-like technique. Only 63.1 percent of these ‘‘known incidents’’ were reported to interviewers. The percentage reporting these incidents to the interviewer was strongly related to the relationship of the offender to the victim. Respondents reported 76.3 percent of the incidents involving a stranger; 56.9 percent of the incidents involving known offenders; and only 22.2 percent of the incidents involving a relative.

Not all of this underreporting of incidents to the interviewers is attributable to embarrassment. Turner (1972) found a strong relationship between the number of months between the interview and the incident and the respondents’ reporting of the incident to the interviewer. Respondents recalled 69 percent of the incidents occurring one to three months before the interview, 50 percent of those occurring four to six months before, 46 percent of those occurring six to nine months

before, and only 30 percent of those occurring ten to twelve months before.

Self-Report Data. Like UCR and NCVS data, self-report data contain their own weaknesses. As with the NCVS data, the survey research situation raises questions of honesty, forgetting, bounding the reference period, and so on. Some problems are more severe than those encountered by the

NCVS. One of these problems is sample size; even the best-financed surveys—like the National Youth Survey (Elliot et al. 1983)—have samples of less than 2,000. Such small samples almost guarantee large sampling errors associated with the resulting crime rates (especially for serious crimes). Small sample size further limits the usefulness of these data for conducting regional analyses (e.g., estimating the crime rates for states or cities). Similarly, it limits the accuracy of these estimates for comparing the crime rates for groups such as Hispanics or Asian females. Unlike the NCVS, many self-report surveys do not involve panels in which respondents are reinterviewed over an extended period of time (the NYS is an exception) so that the interviews cannot be bounded. Often the response rates are quite low. In the NYS (Elliot et al. 1983), a sample of 2,360 eligible youth originally were selected and of these 73 percent agreed to participate in the first wave of data collection in 1976. By 1980 the sample size dropped to 1,494 or 63 percent of the original sample. This contrasts with initial response rates well in excess of 90 percent for the NCVS.

Two other issues need mention. First, selfreport studies concentrate on relatively trivial behaviors, such as lying to parents, defying authority, or cheating on tests. One reason for concentrating on such behaviors is that they are more commonly reported. Given the small sample sizes typical of self-report studies, these behaviors may be more reliably measured. Second, some studies do not accurately gauge the frequency of ‘‘delinquent behaviors.’’ They use response sets such as ‘‘no,’’ ‘‘once or twice,’’ or ‘‘several times.’’ Experienced researchers now ask about a wide range of behaviors and more specifically ask about the frequency of these behaviors. In the NYS, Elliot et al. (1983) ask about ‘‘arson,’’ ‘‘prostitution,’’ and ‘‘physical threat for sex’’ as well as ‘‘skipped class’’ and ‘‘didn’t return change.’’ They use response categories such as ‘‘2–3 times a day,’’ ‘‘once a day,’’ ‘‘2–3 time a week,’’ ‘‘once a week,’’ ‘‘once every 2–3

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weeks,’’ and ‘‘once a month,’’ as well as asking the exact number of times respondents offended during the past year.

COMPARISONS OF CRIME RATES GENERATED FROM UCR, NCVS, AND SELFREPORTS

Fortunately, the problems outlined above do not mean that crime rates based on UCR, NCVS, and self-reports are not useful. Homicide rates, for example, are probably reasonably accurate in terms of absolute rates and in terms of homicide trends over the past sixty-five years. They also are appropriate for comparisons of homicide rates across large cities. When we judge the usefulness and accuracy of crime rates, the type of crime considered is important (e.g., homicide or rape). Further, even if a crime rate is inaccurate in terms of the absolute amount of crime it represents, it may be an accurate measure of the relative amount of that crime in different areas or across time. This would be the case if exactly half or some other proportion of the aggravated assaults were reported in different jurisdictions (or across time). Then we could perfectly compare the relative amount of crime across jurisdictions (or crime trends over time). If only approximately the same proportion of cases were reported across jurisdictions, then comparisons of the relative amount of crime would only be approximate.

Measuring Absolute Crime Rates. The most accurately measured UCR Part I crime almost certainly is homicide. The reasons for this include the seriousness of the crime and the physical evidence it produces (e.g., a body, weapon, or missing person), which make it unlikely that once detected this crime will be ignored. Cantor and Cohen (1980) compared homicide rates based on the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Annual Vital Health Statistics Report with those from the UCR for the years 1935–1975 and found a very close correspondence. Using a different approach, O’Brien (1996) found evidence that fluctuations in the homicide rate closely paralleled fluctuations in the rate of other violent crimes from 1973 to 1992.

Motor vehicle theft is the other Part I crime that appears to be well estimated in terms of

absolute rates. In 1994, for example, the NCVS estimated 1,764,000 motor vehicle thefts based on respondents’ answers, while the UCR reported 1,539,100 motor vehicle thefts known to the police. Thus the NCVS estimate exceeded the UCR estimate by only 28 percent. When NCVS respondents report a motor vehicle theft they are asked if they reported the theft to the police. Based on their responses one would calculate that the police receive reports of only 1,379,448 motor vehicle thefts, which is fewer motor vehicle thefts than appear in the UCR records. This probably occurs because motor vehicle thefts from private citizens constitute only 80 to 85 percent of the total number of such thefts known to the police (Biderman and Lynch 1991). For the remaining Part I crimes covered by both the UCR and NCVS (personal robbery, aggravated assault, residential burglary, and rape), the NCVS and UCR data show greater differences in absolute rates. The smallest ratio of NCVS incidents to UCR incidents is 1.62 for rape and the largest 3.01 for residential burglary.

Difficulties arise when comparing the selfreport rates to UCR and NCVS rates, because selfreport studies typically only involve a sample of young people. The estimated crime rates for these young people, however, are so high that we may conclude that the rates generated by self-reports are far greater than those generated by either the NCVS or the UCR. The 1976 NYS produced an estimated incident rate for eleven to seventeen year-olds for aggravated assault of 170 per 1000 and for robbery a rate of 290 per 1000. This compares with rates for those twelve year-olds and over of 7.90 and 6.48 based on the NCVS and rates for all ages of 2.29 and 1.96 based on the UCR. Some part of this discrepancy results from differences in the age groups compared, but not all of it. In 1976 eleven to seventeen year-olds comprised 13.38 percent of the population. Thus, even if it were assumed that no assaults or robberies were committed by other age groups, the aggravated assault rate based on the NYS would be [.1338 × 170 =] 22.75 and the rate for robbery would be [.1338 × 290 =] 38.80.

Measuring Relative Crime Rates. If absolute rates are well measured, then relative rates of crimes across cities or other units probably are well measured. This means that both homicide rates and motor vehicle theft rates should be good

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measures of the relative rate of crime. In the mid1970s the NCVS conducted victimization studies with reasonably large size samples; 10,000 or more households containing some 22,000 respondents, in each of twenty-six large U.S. cities. The same cities, of course, reported UCR crime rates for Part I crimes. This provided the opportunity to compare the consistency of these estimates in terms of the relative crime rates measured by the NCVS and the UCR by correlating the two crimerate measures across the twenty-six cities. The closer these correlations are to 1.00, the greater the degree to which cities with relatively high rates (low rates) on one of the measures have relatively high rates (low rates) on the other. Across these cities, the correlation of UCR and NCVS motor vehicle theft rates was .90 or higher (Nelson 1978, 1979; O’Brien, Shichor, and Decker 1980). The correlations were close to zero for rape, negative for aggravated assault, and positive and moderately strong for burglary and robbery. This indicates that for burglary and robbery the relative rates of crime in these cities are similar whether the UCR or NCVS measures are used, but they are not similar for rape and aggravated assault.

Overall, the use of homicide rates and motor vehicle theft rates to measure the relative amount of these crimes across cities is supported by the above findings. The use of burglary and robbery rates receives weaker support, and the use of rape and aggravated assault rates to compare the relative amount of these crimes across cities does not receive support.

Gender and Race Composition of Offenders.

Hindelang (1978, 1979) addressed the issue of whether the UCR and victim reports (NCVS) produce similar percentages of offenders identified as

African American or white or as male or female. O’Brien (1995, 2000) replicated these finding using more recent data. These comparisons indicate that for those crimes in which the victim and offender come into contact (which enables the victim to identify the race and sex of the offender), the percentages based on the UCR and NCVS are fairly similar. For example, O’Brien (2000) aggregates data for the years 1992 to 1994 and finds that the percentages of males involved in these crimes, according to the UCR and NCVS, never differ by more than 3 percent. For race of the offender, rape produces the largest difference with victims

stating that 33.2 percent of the offenders are African American and the UCR arrest data indicating that 42.7 percent of those arrested are African

American. For robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault the differences do not exceed 5 percent.

Self-report data at one time were considered to be inconsistent with UCR data, which indicated that males committed crimes at a much higher rate than females and that African Americans also committed crimes at a much higher rate than whites. These large differences between males and females and African Americans and whites, however, are not found when self-report studies ask about more serious crimes and ask more carefully about the frequency of offending (Elliot and Ageton 1980; Hindelang, Hirschi, and Weis 1979).

These comparisons only touch on the issue of the appropriate uses of UCR, NCVS, and selfreport data. The appropriate uses depend upon the type of crime and the type of comparison. (For helpful information on which to judge the appropriate uses of these data see Biderman and Lynch

1991; Gove Hughes and Geerken 1985; O’Brien 1985, 2000).

INTERNATIONAL DATA

Many nations collect data from law enforcement agencies, survey victims, and conduct self-report surveys. Difficulties arise, however, when comparing these data, since the definitions of crimes and the counting rules differ from nation to nation. In this section we note some of these problems and cautiously present crime-rate data for two nations. In addition, for a larger number of nations, we present homicide rates.

Perhaps the most comparable large national victimization surveys are the NCVS (conducted in the United States) and the British Crime Survey (conducted in England and Wales). But even in this case, there are important differences—the

British Crime Survey (BCS) uses a twelve-month reference period and unbounded interviews, while the NCVS uses a six-month reference period and bounded interviews. The former difference should decrease the estimated victimization rates in the

BCS due to ‘‘memory decay,’’ but the latter should increase these rates due to ‘‘telescoping.’’ The BCS does not ask about crimes involving victims

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under the age of sixteen, while the NCVS does not ask about crimes involving victims under age twelve.

Further problems arise with the definitions of offenses. In the United States, for example, aggravated assaults include attempted murders and almost any assault in which a weapon is used or assaults for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated injury. In England attempted murders receive separate treatment while the assaults most similar to Part I aggravated assaults are ‘‘woundings.’’ Woundings require some kind of cut or wound where the skin or a bone is broken, or medical attention is needed, whereas common assault occurs if the victim is punched, kicked or jostled, with negligible or no injury.

Since 1981 definitions of rape have changed substantially in England. Until 1981, to be classi-

fied as a rape an incident required a male offender and female victim and the penetration of the vagina by the penis. Husbands could not be convicted of raping their wives, and males under age fourteen could be convicted of a rape. By 1996 rapes could involve offenders as young as ten, spousal victims, male victims, and anal intercourse. In the United States, the UCR definition of rape includes male victims, male or female offenders, spousal victims, anal intercourse, and other sexual acts. With these nontrivial problems in mind, we compare crime rates (based both on surveys and police records) in England and the United States.

Table 3 presents victimization rates for robbery, assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft in the United States and England (based on the

NCVS and the BCS) for the years 1981 and 1995 (Langan and Farrington 1998). Perhaps the most surprising result is that the estimated victimization rates in England are higher than in the United States for these crimes in 1995. The surveys also indicate substantial increases in robbery, assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft from 1981 to 1995 in England and decreases for all but motor vehicle theft in the United States. The cross-coun- try comparisons of these absolute rates may be more problematic than over-time comparisons within the countries—given that the victimization survey methods and the definitions of these four crimes changed little in these countries over this period.

Table 4 presents crime rates based on police records (Langan and Farrington 1998). In this

Victim Survey Crime Rates per 1,000 in the United States and England:

1981 and 1995

	1981		1995
	U.S.	England	U.S.	England
Robbery	7.4	4.2	5.3	7.6
Assault	12.0	13.1	8.8	20.0
Burglary	105.9	40.9	47.5	82.9
Motor Vehicle	10.6	15.6	10.8	23.6
Theft

Table 3

SOURCE: Langan and Farrington 1998.

table, we report rates per 100,000 residents because of the relatively low rates for homicide and rape. The rates in Table 4 reinforce the patterns reported in Table 3, which showed a substantial increase in crime rates from 1981 to the mid-1990s in England for robbery, assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft. Table 4 also shows higher rates for these crimes (except for robbery) in

England than in the United States in 1996. Two new crimes appear in this table: Homicide, for which the rate in the United States is several times higher than in England, for both 1981 and 1996

(most criminologists agree that homicide rates in the United States are very high by international standards) and rape, which shows a dramatic increase from 4.19 to 21.77 per 100,00 in England

(this results, at least in part, from changes in the legal definition of rape that occurred in England between 1981 and 1996).

Although we could attempt other comparisons, most such comparisons involve even greater difficulties than those between the United States and England. Some countries do not differentiate between simple and aggravated assaults; others do not record any but the most severe assaults when the assault occurs within the family. As noted, legal definitions of rape may differ widely (even over time within the same country), reports of burglaries may require breaking and entering into a business or residence, only entering, or even breaking into an outbuilding.

Homicide represents the crime with the most consistent definition across countries: the intentional taking of another person’s life without legal justification. Even here some countries may not separate justifiable from unjustifiable homicides.

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Police Recorded Crime Rates per 100,000 in the United States and England: 1981 and 1996

	1981		1996
	U.S.	England	U.S.	England
Homicide	9.83	1.13	7.41	1.31
Rape	70.59	4.19	70.79	21.77
Robbery	258.75	40.86	202.44	142.35
Assault	289.73	197.49	388.19	439.60
Burglary	1649.47	1447.36	942.95	2239.15
Motor Vehicle	474.72	670.09	525.93	948.83
Theft

Table 4

SOURCE: Langan and Farrington 1998.

The legal justifications for killing a spouse or even a person committing a crime may vary from country to country, as may the reporting and recording of homicides. Still, the data for this crime rate almost certainly are more accurate for international comparisons than those for rape, robbery, burglary, assault, theft, or arson.

Table 5 presents data for 1990 from the United Nations (United Nations Crime and Justice Network 1998) on intentional homicide rates per

100,000 for a selected set of countries. The rate for the United States was taken from the UCR (FBI 1991). Note the wide range of homicide rates, with

Barbados and the United States with relatively high rates and Austria, Botswana, Denmark, Japan, Norway, and Spain with relatively low rates.

There probably are real differences between these two sets of countries in terms of homicide rates. It is less clear that smaller differences across countries with rather different legal systems, levels of development, and cultural histories, represent differences in the unjustifiable intentional taking of another person’s life. To reiterate the difficulty in making cross-national comparisons, we note that

INTERPOL’s international crime statistics come with the warning: ‘‘the information given is in no way intended for use as a basis for comparisons between different countries.’’

CONCLUSIONS

At the beginning of this article we noted that the computation of a crime rate might seem straightforward, but designating the most appropriate term for each component in equation (1) often is

Intentional Homicide Rates per 100,000 in Selected Nations in 1990

Austria	.52	Italy	3.11
Barbados	11.76	Japan	.50
Botswana	.46	Madagascar	1.31
Bulgaria	2.52	Norway	.99
Canada	2.22	Spain	.71
Denmark	.80	Sri Lanka	2.17
Egypt	1.07	Sweden	1.41
Fed. Rep. of Germany	2.13	Switzerland	1.64
India	4.24	Turkey	1.64
Israel	2.30	United States	9.4

Table 5

SOURCE: United Nations Crime and Justice Information Network 1998. http://www.ifs.unvie.ac.at/ uncjin/mosaic/at.inthom/ txt.

difficult. Designating the base represents the easiest decision. This choice does not greatly change the interpretation of the rate, although it may make the interpretation more or less intuitive for the reader. Choice of the appropriate relevant population size is more difficult; for example, basing rape rates on the number of females rather than the number of people or the motor vehicle theft rate on the number of registered motor vehicles rather than the number of people. Determining the number of incidents constitutes the most problematic component of calculating crime rates. Here, the differing definitions of crimes, varying counting rules, response rates, rates of reporting incidents to the police or interviewers, response categories, bounding of interviews, memory decay, police discretion in recording crimes, and so on, can greatly affect the estimated crime rate. These factors differentially affect estimates of the number of incidents based on self-reports,

UCR, and NCVS data. Even so, within the United States for certain crimes and comparisons, data from these different sources lead to similar conclusions. Comparisons of crime rates across nations, with the possible exception of homicide, is extremely risky.

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——— 1958 ‘‘Extent of Unrecorded Juvenile Delinquency: Tentative Conclusions.’’ Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 49:296–302.

Skogan, Wesley G. 1976 ‘‘Crime and Crime Rates.’’ In Wesley G. Skogan, ed., Sample Surveys of the Victims of Crime. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger.

Smith, Douglas A., and Christy A. Visher 1981 ‘‘Street Level Justice: Situational Determinants of Police Arrest Decisions.’’ Social Problems 29:167–177.

Turner, Anthony G. 1972 The San Jose Methods Test of Known Crime Victims. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. National Criminal Justice Information and Statistics Service, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.

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United Nations Crime and Justice Information Network 1998 http://www.ifs.unvie.ac.at/ uncjin/mosaic/ at.inthom/txt.

U.S. Department of Justice 1997 Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1994. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Visher, Christy A. 1983 ‘‘Gender, Police, Arrest Decisions, and Notions of Chivalry.’’ Criminology 21:5–28.

Wheeler, Stanton 1967 ‘‘Criminal Statistics: A Reformulation of the Problem.’’ Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 58:317–324.

Wilson, James Q. 1967 ‘‘The Police and Delinquents in Two Cities.’’ In Stanton Wheeler and H. M. Hughes, eds., Controlling Delinquents. New York: John Wiley.

——— 1978 Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

ROBERT M. O’BRIEN

CRIME, THEORIES OF

Most accounts of the rise of criminological inquiry indicate that it had its beginnings in mid-nine- teenth-century developments in Europe, including the work of Cesare Lombroso, an Italian prison physician, who argued that many criminals are atavists, that is, biological throwbacks to a human type, homo delinquens, that allegedly existed prior to the appearance of homo sapiens. Since the time of Lombroso and other early figures in criminology, the field has grown markedly, both in terms of the variety of scholars who have tried to uncover the causes of crime and also in terms of the diverse theories that have been produced by these persons

(Gibbons 1994). Currently legal theorists, psychologists, economists, geographers, and representatives of other scholarly fields engage in criminological theorizing and research. There has also been renewed interest in sociobiological theorizing and investigation regarding criminality. Even so, the largest share of work has been and continues to be carried on by sociologists. Thus, criminology is frequently identified as a subfield of sociology (Gibbons 1979, 1994).

Although a few scholars have argued that crime should be defined as consisting of violations of basic human rights or for some other ‘‘social’’ conception, most criminologists opt for the legalistic view that crime and criminal behavior are

identified by the criminal laws of nations, states, and local jurisdictions. Acts that are not prohibited or required by the criminal law are not crimes, however much they may offend some members of the community. Also, the reach of the criminal law in modern societies is very broad, involving a wide range of behavioral acts that vary not only in form but in severity as well. The criminal laws of various states and nations prohibit morally repugnant acts such as murder or incest, but they also prohibit less serious offenses such as vandalism, petty theft, and myriad other acts. Parenthetically, there is considerable controversy in modern America, both among criminologists and among members of the general public, as to whether certain kinds of behavior, such as marijuana use, various consensual sex acts between adults, or abortion, ought to be expunged from or brought into the criminal codes.

Persons of all ages violate criminal laws, although a number of forms of criminality are most frequent among persons in their teens or early twenties. Except for ‘‘status offense’’ violations such as running away, truancy, and the like, which apply only to juveniles (usually defined as persons under eighteen years of age), juvenile delinquency and adult criminality are defined by the same body of criminal statutes. However, criminologists have often constructed theories about delinquency separate from explanations of adult criminality. Although many theories of delinquency closely resemble those dealing with adult crime, some of the former are not paralleled by theories of adult criminality. In the discussion to follow, most attention is upon explanatory arguments about adult lawbreaking, but some mention is also made of causal arguments about juvenile crime.

CRIMINOLOGICAL QUESTIONS AND

CAUSAL THEORIES

Given the broad compass of the criminal law, and given the variety of different perspectives from which the phenomenon of crime has been addressed, it is little wonder that there are many theories of crime. Most of these theories center on the explanation of crime patterns and crime rates, or what might be termed ‘‘crime in the aggregate,’’ or are pitched at the individual level and endeavor to identify factors that account for the involvement of specific individuals in lawbreaking conduct (Cressey 1951; Gibbons 1992, pp. 35–39)

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These are related but analytically separate questions about the causes of crime. As Donald Cressey (1951) argued many years ago, an adequate account of criminality should contain two distinct but consistent aspects: First, a statement that explains the statistical distribution of criminal behavior in time and space (epidemiology), and second, a statement that identifies the process or processes by which persons come to engage in criminal behavior.

Statistical distributions of criminal behavior in time and space are usually presented in the form of crime rates of one kind or another. One of the most familiar of these is the index crime rate reported annually for cities, states, and other jurisdictions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The index crime rate is comprised of the number of reported cases of murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson per jurisdiction, expressed as a rate per 100,000 persons in that jurisdiction’s population.

Many crime rate patterns are well known, including relatively high rates of violence in the

United States as compared to other nations, state- by-state variations in forcible rape rates, regional variations in homicide and other crimes within the

United States, and so forth. However, criminological scholars continue to be hampered in their efforts to account for variations in crime across various nations in the world by the lack of detailed data about lawbreaking in nations and regions other than the United States (although see van Dijk, Mayhew, and Killias 1990).

Criminologists have developed a number of theories or explanations for many crime rate variations. One case in point is Larry Baron and Murray Straus’s (1987) investigation of rape rates for the fifty American states, in which they hypothesized that state-to-state variations in gender inequality, social disorganization (high divorce rates, low church attendance, and the like), pornography readership, and ‘‘cultural spillover’’ (authorized paddling of school children, etc.) are major influences on forcible rape. Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld’s (1994) institutional anomie theory is another example of theorizing that focuses on crime rate variations. They argued that in presentday America, cultural pressures to accumulate money and other forms of wealth are joined to

weak social controls arising from noneconomic elements of the social structure, principally the political system, along with religion, education, and family patterns. According to Messner and

Rosenfeld, this pronounced emphasis on the accumulation of wealth and weak social restraints promotes high rates of instrumental criminal activity such as robbery, burglary, larceny, and auto theft.

Crime rates are important social indicators that reflect the quality of life in different regions, states, or areas. Additionally, theories that link various social factors to those rates provide considerable insight into the causes of lawbreaking. But, it is well to keep in mind that crime rates are the summary expression of illegal acts of individuals. Much of the time, the precise number of offenders who have carried out the reported offenses is unknown because individual law violators engage in varying numbers of crimes per year. Even so, crime rates summarize the illegal actions of individuals. Accordingly, theories of crime must ultimately deal with the processes by which these specific persons come to exhibit criminal behavior.

In practice, criminological theories that focus on crime rates and patterns often have had relatively little to say about the causes of individual behavior. For example, variations in income inequality from one place to another have been identified by criminologists as being related to rates of predatory property crime such as burglary, automobile theft, and larceny. Many of the studies that have reported this finding have had little to say about how income inequality, defined as the unequal distribution of income among an entire population of an area or locale, affects individuals. In short, explanations of crime rate variations often have failed to indicate how the explanatory variables they identify ‘‘get inside the heads of offenders,’’ so to speak.

Although criminological theories about crime rates and crime patterns have often been developed independently of theories related to the processes by which specific persons come to exhibit criminal conduct, valid theories of these processes ought to have implications for the task of understanding the realities of individual criminal conduct. For example, if variations in gender inequality and levels of pornography are related to rates of forcible rape, it may be that males who carry out sexual assaults are also the individuals who most strongly

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