Volume 2.1 - Crime and Punishment- Fall 1997

Title: Employment and Crime Prevention: An Economic Perspective

Author: Shawn D. Bushway

Abstract: The role of employment in crime has traditionally been approached from a utilitarian perspective that is quite narrow in its conception of rational choice. Public policies based on the narrow framework have failed in many ways, notably crime reduction. Yet the hypothesis that reduced unemployment might reduce crime could still survive empirical testing if the policies were designed to accommodate the insights of broader criminal theory and research that suggest the need for a neighborhood-level focus. Despite millions spent evaluating job training programs, not one study has ever tested the effects of raising neighborhood employment levels on neighborhood crime rates. Until that hypothesis is tested, public policies for crime prevention will miss a major opportunity in a small number of inner-city neighborhoods where work has disappeared and homicide rates are more than 20 times the national average (Wilson 1996).

About the Author: Shawn Bushway received his Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis and Political Economy in 1996 from the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow for the National Consortium on Violence Research working at the University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

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