Criminology For Dummies. Steven Briggs
city, state, or country is a pretty simple task. But, in reality, it’s very challenging. For example, how do you gather statistics about illegal drug sales? Neither the seller nor the buyer is going to report a heroin deal. And wives who are beaten by their husbands don’t usually call the cops. In fact, only 41 percent of violent crimes were reported to the police in 2019.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has developed a system called the Uniform Crime Report for gathering basic statistics about nine serious felonies, known in the crime business as Part 1 crimes. Whenever one of the roughly 18,000 police agencies in the United States gets a report that one of these crimes has been committed, that agency passes the information on to the FBI. If the agency ends up making an arrest, it passes that information on, as well. The FBI incorporates this information in its annual crime report.
Recognizing the limits of crime reports and arrest statistics in measuring crime, the federal government created the National Crime Victimization Survey, which canvasses 95,000 households every year to ask whether members of those households have been victimized by crime. The idea is that this survey can gather information about crimes that aren’t reported to the police. This survey paints a pretty good picture of national crime trends, but the sampling just isn’t large enough to allow for an accurate assessment of crime trends at the state or local level. In Chapter 3, I get into the crime statistics business in much greater detail.
Recognizing the Various Costs of Crime
While criminologists try to gather accurate statistics about the amount of crime, economists focus on the financial costs of crime. And, of course, no one can forget the life-changing impact crime has on victims.
Noting the financial impact
The most obvious cost of crime to society is the money it takes to run the criminal justice system, including the following big-ticket items:
Police
Jails, prisons, and the staff to run them
Prosecutors
Judges and court staff
Defense attorneys to represent charged defendants at trial and on appeal
Probation officers
Juvenile justice counselors
Plus, in the United States, each of the three levels of government — local, state, and federal — may run its own justice system, which may include some or all of the preceding expenses.
In addition to governmental costs, society bears many other financial impacts of crime. For example, think of the lost productivity and lost tax revenue that occurs when a person decides to sell drugs rather than earn wages lawfully. Or think of the costs of providing medical care to victims of violence or the costs of developing cybersecurity for a corporation to protect its computer systems. The financial impact of crime is quite startling when you dive into it. In Chapter 3, I provide more details on the true cost of crime to all of society.
Respecting the price a victim pays
Crime doesn’t just carry an economic cost, however. Every day, thousands of lives are turned upside down by criminal violence and theft. Think of the impact on a senior citizen who’s defrauded out of her life savings or on a battered spouse who’s isolated from her friends and family and lives in constant fear of upsetting her husband. There’s simply no way to quantify the human toll of crime.
In the old days, crime victims were pretty much left to fend for themselves. But in the early 1980s, a movement began that brought help to victims. Today, in every state, a victim of violent crime can get financial help with medical bills, grief counseling, lost wages, and other economic losses. Victims can also get help understanding the criminal justice system.
Significantly, within the last ten years, a movement to grant rights to victims has gathered tremendous momentum. In most states today, victims have at least the following rights:
The right to be notified of all important hearings
The right to speak at release hearings where criminal defendants seek to be released from jail
The right to obtain a “no contact” order, which prohibits the defendant from contacting the victim
The right to prevent the defendant from getting the victim’s address
The right to demand a blood test of the defendant if there’s a possibility that a disease, such as HIV or hepatitis, was transferred to the victim during the crime
The right to receive restitution for financial impact from a crime
The right to give a statement to the judge explaining the impact of the crime on the victim at the time of sentencing the defendant
For much more information about what the criminal justice system does to protect victims, see Chapter 4.
Considering Categories of Crime
Law enforcement professionals often group crimes into the following two categories:
Violent crimes (also called person crimes)
Property crimes
But a careful study of crime reveals that organized crime, in which groups engage in a business of crime, is a whole different animal worthy of separate analysis.
Studying individual crimes
When police respond to a 9-1-1 call, they’re almost always responding to an individual crime. Someone was assaulted or burglarized, for example. Typically, police treat violent crimes much more seriously than they do property crimes. For example, although a murder investigation may have ten or more cops assigned to it, police may not even respond in person to investigate a burglary at a home. Obviously, this discrepancy occurs because protecting personal safety is the number one job of people in law enforcement; plus, police resources are finite.
Here are the crimes you most likely think of when you consider individual crimes:
| Violent Crimes | Property Crimes |
|---|---|
| Murder and manslaughter | Theft (including shoplifting, embezzlement, Internet fraud, identity theft, and car theft) |
| Assault and battery (including domestic abuse, child abuse, and vehicular assault) | Burglary |
| Sexual crimes (rape, sodomy, and child molestation) | Arson |
| Robbery |
Obviously, the punishment for violent crime is much more severe than it is for property crime. A person who shoplifts from a convenience store (a property crime) will get a much lighter sentence than someone who sticks a gun in the store clerk’s face and demands cash (the violent crime of robbery).
Among different violent offenses, the punishment can vary depending on whether a weapon was used, how much harm was caused, and whether the “bad guy” intended to cause harm. For example, a drunk driver who crashes and kills his passenger will receive a much shorter prison sentence than a woman who knowingly poisons her mother-in-law. The drunk driver didn’t intend to kill anyone, but the evil daughter-in-law surely