crime quiz #2

With the article, "Race, economy and punishment: inequity and racial disparity in imprisonment, 1972-2002" it looked at the Rusche and Kirchheimer thesis that argued that increases in incarceration rates are independent of crime rate and instead are due to a potential threat to social order from the unemployed masses.  Going further off of that study, this study looked to explain why African Americans are so disproportionately represented in the U.S. prison population.  They pulled data from 2 different sources.  The first source was the National Institute of Justice's data resource program, they used this source so that they could evaluate data on a national level.  The other source was used from Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research.  They pulled data from this source because it included data on imprisonment from the 50 states.  The dependent variable was the prisoners per 100 thousand residents.  The independent variables were social threat such as violent crime rate, property crime rate, drug arrest rate, the unemployment rate, Gini income coefficient, percentage of population below poverty level, and percentage of population that's African American.  They found that on average the incarceration rate was 218/100,000.  The violent crime rate, on average, was 437/100,000.  The property crime rate was 4,153/100,000.  The drug crime rate, on average, was 367/100,000.  The Gini income coefficient, on average, was .4.  The unemployment rate, on average, was 6%.  The African American percentage, on average, was 9%.  What they also found which is most notable is that a better predictor of prison admission is income inequality.

With the article "ethnicity, information sources, and fear of crime" it used the data from a 1997 survey that was conducted about gang crime in Orange County.  They used a random digit dialer that contacted residents of Orange County where 50 percent contacted were males and the other 50 were females.  They then took a random sample of 100 from a list of Latino surnames to ensure that they would have a large enough subsample.  The sample was offered in 3 languages: English, Spanish and Vietnamese.  They had a response rate for the survey of 69% and their margin of error was +/- 3%.  Their sample size was 779 for the total sample, 555 for the while sample and 224 for the Latino sample.  Overall what they found was that indirect victimization does happen differently depending on the audience.  For most cases the effect on fear is indirect through perceived risk.  When discussing the total sample, if the newspaper was the primary source of crime information the individuals in the survey perceived less risk and therefore had less of a fear of crime.  But when the primary source changes to television the individuals perceived risk increases which leads to a higher fear of crime.  They also found that Latinos are more likely to use the television as their primary source and therefore have a higher perceived risk which leads to a higher fear of crime.  Whites tend to use the newspaper as their primary source of crime information and therefore have a less perceived risk which leads to less of a fear of crime.