Criminal Behavior and Rapid Community Growth: Examining the Evidence.

Sociologists have disagreed sharply over whether rapid, re- source-related community growth leads to disproportionate increases in criminal activities. Enough studies have now accumulated, however, to permit a more comprehensive assessment. The existing studies fall into three categories. The first two, which employ county-level data and victimization surveys, have encountered inconclusive and mixed results. By contrast, the 23 before-and-after comparisons in specific communities have been highly consistent: All but 2 of the 23 report greater increases in criminal activity than in population (p < .0001 by the sign test). The mean ratio of increased crime to increased population is over 4.4 to 1; regression analyses lead to more conservative ratios ranging as low as 3.2 to I and as high as 3.6 to I. Despite considerable variations in approaches, methods, and study communities, sufficiently consistent findings show that simple regression equations explain 85-98 percent of the variance. The weight of the accumulated evidence indicates that increases in criminal behaviors are significantly more than proportional to increases in populations in rapid-growth communities. Data from other studies would argue against a generic "social pathology" hypothesis; instead, the accumulated findings may best be explained by narrowly focusing on changes in community social structure that accompany rapid growth and result in impairment of informal social controls, particularly the declines in a community's density of acquaintanceship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]