Unemployment And Crime Case Study

Unemployment. The association between unemployment and crime remains controversial in the field of criminology (Aaltonen, MacDonald, Martikainen & Kivivuori, 2013; Ajaegbu, 2012). It is not clear whether unemployment induces crime or crime further reduces one’s employment opportunities. With reference to Statistics Canada (2011c), unemployed refers to persons who were “without paid work or without self-employment work and were available for work and either (a) had actively looked for paid work in the past four weeks; or (b) were on temporary lay-off and expected to return to their job; or (c) had definite arrangements to start a new job in four weeks or less” (p.88). Thus, the state of being unemployed is where an individual seeking employment but he/she is not given an opportunity. Philips and Land (2012) pinpointed that unemployed individuals have

However, the violent crime-unemployment relationship could be biased by neglecting factors such as declining income during recession, reverse causation between crime and unemployment, and the degree of interpersonal exposure of possible victims to potential offenders, etc. Interestingly, the quantity of interpersonal interactions is a more robust factor contributed to the “negative correlation between female unemployment and rape” (Raphael & Winter-Ebmer, 2001, p.262). Therefore, we should take into account of these statistically veiled factors while performing an empirical test on violent crime-unemployment