MENU TITLE: Labor Markets, Employment, and Crime.
Series: NIJ Research Preview
Published: July 1997
5 pages
9,370 bytes

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Research Preview
Jeremy Travis, Director
July 1997

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Labor Markets, Employment, and Crime
Summary of a Presentation by Robert Crutchfield,
Ph.D., University of Washington

Social scientists generally agree that
unemployment, especially persistent unemployment,
leads to individual poverty and that residential
concentrations of poverty lead to higher crime.
However, studies about the relationship between
unemployment and crime have produced inconsistent
results. This led Dr. Robert Crutchfield and his
colleagues to believe that other economic factors
must affect the crime rate in poverty-stricken
neighborhoods. They began with the notion that a
person's occupation conditions his or her routine
daily activities. The routine-activities
perspective claims that crime is more likely with
the confluence of motivated actors, potential
victims, and an absence of guardians. 

Dr. Crutchfield turned to the dual labor market
theory, which distinguishes between good and bad
jobs. Good jobs, known as primary-sector jobs, pay
reasonably well, have good benefits such as paid
vacation, and, most important to the study, offer
future economic advantages. Bad jobs, or
secondary-sector jobs, on the other hand, are low
paying, have few benefits and rarely paid vacation,
and, most important again, offer little or no
future. Applying control theory and bonding theory,
the researchers expected that the primary-sector
jobs would be more likely to build attachments and
commitments to the job and secondary-sector jobs
would be less likely. The good job would offer a
"stake in conformity" because it has a future and
the employee would feel that there is something to
lose. 

The following scenario illustrates this hypothesis:
Two 18-year-old African-American males with similar
educations are neighbors. One has a good job
working at the Boeing Company; his neighbor works
at McDonald's. Friends ask them to go out drinking
one night, and they have opposite reactions to the
offer. The one with the good job wants to keep it
because good jobs are hard to get. He has a stake
in conformity, and he turns down his friends
because he must work the next morning. The neighbor
figures that if he's late or has a hangover the
next day, he can just get another job at another
fast-food place. He has no stake in conformity. He
and the others gather behind the local convenience
store to hang out and drink. The circumstances now
include the three factors that make crime more
likely: motivated actors (intoxicated 18-year-olds
with bad jobs or no jobs), potential victims (store
customers or each other), and an absence of
guardians (no family members, adults, or police
nearby).

Labor market instability predicts crime in Seattle

The research team next analyzed violent crime rates
in 121 census tracts in Seattle, Washington, to
test these theories. The variables they considered
included the poverty rate, income inequality,
percentage of the population represented by young
males, percentage who were African American, and
the rate of labor market instability (a combination
of the unemployment rate and percentage of the
workforce in service-sector jobs). The analysis
revealed the following:

o Neighborhoods with high levels of labor market
instability had significantly higher rates of
violent crime, property crime, poverty, and income
inequality.

o High rates of poverty or income inequality alone
could not predict violent crime and property crime.
Unemployment and marginal employment (expressed as
labor market instability) appeared to have direct
effects of their own.

Long-term data on 18- to 24-year-old youths

The researchers also analyzed data from the
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which
was designed to study the work experiences of young
adults ages 14 to 24. Analysis of the NLSY crime
data on 18- to 24-year-olds from 1979 and 1980 (the
only years for which crime variables were
collected) revealed the following findings:

o People employed in secondary-sector jobs spent
more time out of the labor market than those
employed in primary-sector jobs.

o Time out of the labor force and expected job
duration were modest but significant predictors of
criminal involvement.

o Young people in this age group who were currently
students were significantly less likely to be
involved in crime.

o Members of the military were no less likely and,
under some circumstances, somewhat more likely to
engage in crime.

o A tendency toward criminal activity could be
predicted by an individual's time in the labor
force when coupled with the percentage of the adult
population in the person's home county who were
outside of the labor force. The relationship
between an individual's work situation and that of
persons living nearby held, however, only in
counties with higher unemployment rates. This
finding showed that it is not necessarily the work
circumstances of the individual that matter, but
rather the individual's work circumstances in the
context of the work circumstances of those who live
around him.

Long-term data on 14- to 17-year-old youths

Because youths under 18 may have different
attitudes about attachment to work than those over
18, a separate analysis was conducted. Tentative
findings in regard to NLSY youths ages 14 to 17
included the following:

o A good predictor of juvenile crime was school
performance, reflected by measurements such as
grade point average.

o Youths who worked while in school were more
likely to commit crimes than those who did not.
(Some researchers theorize that work pulls them
away from school.)

o Youths who neither attended school nor worked
were the most likely to commit crimes. 

o Educational and occupational experience of
parents was a significant predictor of children's
school performance. When a parent was out of work,
a child did not do as well in school. 

o A "county effect" existed with the younger age
group as well; children had higher rates of crime
in counties with substantial unemployment levels.

Violent crime in three cities affected by school
dropout rates

Crutchfield's theory of labor market instability
and its relationship to criminality was next
applied to an analysis of census tract data on
education, employment, and crime in Seattle,
Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. This study found
the following:

o In the initial analysis without the education
variable, the results were mixed. In Seattle, the
average violent crime rate was 7.04 per 1,000
population in census tracts with stable employment
and 35.8 in census tracts with unstable employment;
in Cleveland, 15.86 and 32.25, respectively; and in
Washington, D.C., 39.45 and 53.57, respectively.
The theory appeared to work well in Seattle,
marginally in Cleveland, and not at all in
Washington, D.C.

o When adding the factor of education into the
analysis, specifically school dropout rates, the
analysis showed a clearer pattern and the theory
again appeared to work in Seattle and Cleveland. In
Washington, D.C., however, the analysis showed a
pattern with two extremes: Some neighborhoods had
very low dropout rates, while many had very high
dropout rates.

The researchers speculate that the Washington,
D.C., data may not have fit the pattern because of
the city's extremes in income and education levels,
with a disproportionately large number of residents
falling in the low ranges. Joblessness, marginal
employment, and poor educational systems have
characterized many neighborhoods for so long that
that negative pattern may have stressed those
communities in many ways, including causing
increased rates of crime.

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This document is based on Robert Crutchfield's
presentation to an audience of researchers and
criminal justice practitioners as part of NIJ's
Research in Progress Seminar Series. Dr.
Crutchfield is a professor in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Washington. A
60-minute VHS videotape of the seminar Labor
Markets, Employment, and Crime is available for $19
($24 in Canada and other countries). Please ask for
NCJ 161259. 

Use the order form on the next page to obtain this
videotape and any of the other tapes now available
in the series.

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Points of view in this document do not necessarily
reflect the official position of the U. S.
Department of Justice. 

FS 000166

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