Crime os о Social Cost of Poverty
and Inequality: A Review Focusing
on Developing Countries
F. Bourguignon
ofcrimes increased among поп-incarcerated criminals or that the number
of criminals increased in relation to the population. Transforming observed
crime rates into ‘propensities to commit crime’ by the non-inearcerated
population indeed leads to a series which increases quite substantially in
the 1980s, a few years after relative poverty and Inequalityofboth individual
earnings and household income started to rise30. There is little doubt that
this correction would significantly modify the results obtained in time
series regressions Ofcriminalityon inequality. However, the fact that there
practieallywas a single big change in the distribution of earnings over the
last 30 years would probably make these results statistically inconclusive
even though it clearly preceded an increase in the propensity to commit
crime. Combined with cross-sectional evidence it nevertheless gives support
to the hypothesis that criminality is positively and significantly associated
with the degree of inequality and relative poverty in the US.
The recent evolution of criminality in the US does not invalidate the preceding
argument. The crime rate has declined there every year since 1992. This
evolution was so dramatic that public attention has been drawn to a few
police chiefs and criminologists who were thought to be responsible for it.
Instead of explaining it by new crime prevention and Iawr enforcement policy7
some obseners link that evolution to the end of the war for the control of
crack distribution. Others note that as in the 1980s, incarceration rates
have increased quite Substantiallyduring the recent years. Indeed, the total
number of persons in prisons rose from 1.1 million in 1990 to 1.7 million in
1997, the same absolute increase as the one observed during the 1980s31.
Also, expenditures in crime prevention and law7 enforcement increased
substantially. That the ‘propensity7 to commit crime’ may have not changed
radically7 despite all this is a hypothesis that cannot be discarded.
It would be interesting to investigate systematically the evolution of crime
in all countries where important changes took place in the distribution of
income during the last ten or 20 y7ears and to see whether a simultaneous
increase occurred in crime rates. According to the UN statistics, there
was an increase in the robbery7 rate in the UK in the first half of the 1980s at
a time when inequality7 w7as increasing quite substantially. Unfortunately,
there is a break in the scries between 1985 and 1989. When it resumes, it is
30 See Juhn. Murphy and Pierce (1993) for the evolution of earning inequality in the US during the
19 SOs.
'1 ’ See Maaaing ( 1998).
84