On this page we discuss variation in crime, which is a difficult task as there are many types of crime, many sources of crime data, and variation in both crime and victimization. We then shift to consequences of crime, with a special a focus on white-collar crime and violence against women, which deserve more attention in public discourse. We then turn to a discussion on immigration, focusing largely on misconceptions and stereotypes about immigrant criminal activity.
Variation in Crime
While people from all walks of life commit street crime, some people are still more likely than others to break the law because of their social backgrounds including gender, age, social class, urban/rural residence, and race and ethnicity.
Social Class
Findings on social class differences in crime are less clear than they are for gender or age differences. Arrests statistics and much research indicate that poor people are much more likely than wealthier people to commit street crime. However, some scholars attribute the greater arrests of poor people to social class bias against them. Despite this possibility, most criminologists would probably agree that social class differences in criminal offending are “unmistakable” (Harris & Shaw 2000: 138). Reflecting this conclusion, one sociologist has even noted, with tongue only partly in cheek, that social scientists know they should not “stroll the streets at night in certain parts of town or even to park there” and that areas of cities that frighten them are “not upper-income neighborhoods” (Stark 1987: 894). Thus social class does seem to be associated with street crime, with poor individuals doing more than their fair share.
Explanations of this relationship center on the effects of poverty, which, as the next section will discuss further, is said to produce anger, frustration, and economic need and to be associated with a need for respect and with poor parenting skills and other problems that make children more likely to commit antisocial behavior when they reach adolescence and beyond. These effects combine to lead poor people to be more likely than wealthier people to commit street crime, even if it is true that most poor people do not commit street crime at all.
Although the poor are more likely than the wealthy to commit street crime, it is also true that the wealthy are much more likely than the poor to commit white-collar crime, which, as argued earlier, can be much more harmful than street crime. If we consider both street crime and white-collar crime, then there does not appear to be a social class-crime relationship, since the poor have higher rates of the former and the wealthy have higher rates of the latter.
This student-created ancillary involves an interview with a formerly incarcerated person to explore what being incarcerated was like for them and their family. The students also question how poverty affected their behavior, and how being incarcerated effected their life after being released.
In the United States, poverty and incarceration are closely intertwined, forming a persistent cycle that many people struggle to break. Low-income communities encounter this problem the most, because of inadequate educational resources, limited access to stable employment, and other factors, which increase the chances of someone becoming involved with the criminal justice system; even after incarceration the obstacles continue (Borrelli 2023). Incarceration leads to higher rates of poverty by reducing income on the individual and family levels, as an incarcerated person is unable to meaningfully contribute to family income. A previously incarcerated person's earnings may also be reduced, as it is more difficult for people with felonies to find employment, and even if they do get a job, they earn lower wages. This keeps many individuals stuck between financial hardships and lasting consequences of a conviction (Gottlieb 2017).
Brorrelli, Brianna. 2003. “The Interplay of Mass Incarceration and Poverty.” Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy X(2): 287-313.
Gottlieb, Aaron. 2017. “Incarceration and Relative Poverty in Cross-National Perspective: The Moderating Roles of Female Employment and the Welfare State.” Social Service Review 91(2): 293–318.
Poverty in Relation to Incarceration by Veronica Gibbs, Kayne Guiles, and classmates is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Race
In discussing who commits crime, any discussion of race must be careful because of the possibility of racial stereotyping. Keeping this in mind, race does seem to be related to criminal offending; however, sociologists trace the causes to structural conditions and the overlap between race and social class rather than to race itself.
In particular, research finds that Black and Latinx people have higher rates of street crime than white people. For example, although Black people comprised about 13% of the US population in 2019, they accounted for 33% of nonfatal violent crime arrests that year (Beck 2021). Latino people also have higher crime rates than non-Latino white people, but lower rates than those for Black people.
Why do these differences exist? Today, scholars attribute racial differences in offending to several structural factors (Unnever & Gabbidon 2011). First, Black and Latinx people are more likely than white people on average to be in poverty, and poverty contributes to higher crime rates. Second, they are also more likely to live in urban areas, which also contributes to higher crime rates. Third, the systemic and ongoing racial discrimination they experience may lead to anger and frustration that in turn can promote deviant behavior. Although there is less research on the criminality of Native American people, they too appear to have higher crime rates than white people because of higher rates of poverty and experiences of racial discrimination (McCarthy & Hagan 2003).
In examining racial differences in street crime rates, it is important to keep in mind that affluent white people commit most white-collar crime, and especially corporate crime, as it is white people who typically lead and manage corporations. Just as social class affects the type of crime that people do, so does race. Wealthy white people commit much crime, but it is white-collar crime they tend to commit, which is glossed over by the news media and often by the criminal justice system.
Gender
Simply put, men commit much more crime than women. In 2019, 73% of all arrests were men, 88% of murder and non-negligent manslaughter arrests were men, and 97% of rape arrests were men (FBI n.d.). In the NCVS, victims report that men commit most of the violent crimes they experience, and self-report studies find that men far outpace women in the commission of serious street offenses.
The key question is why such a large gender difference exists. Some scholars may attribute this difference to biological differences between the sexes, but criminologists and social scientists attribute it to social factors. One of these is gender socialization: Despite greater recognition of gender roles, we continue to raise our boys to be assertive and aggressive, while we raise our girls to be gentle and nurturing (Lindsey 2011). Such gender socialization has many effects, and one of these is a large gender difference in criminal behavior. A second factor is opportunity. Studies find that parents watch their daughters more closely than they watch their sons, who are allowed to stay out later at night and thus have more opportunity to break the law.
Men generally have higher crime offender rates than women. A cause of this gender difference is gender socialization – that boys are socialized to be assertive and aggressive, while girls are socialized to be gentle and nurturing.
Philippe Put – Fight – CC BY 2.0
Age
Age also makes a difference in criminal behavior: Though most crimes are committed by adults, offending rates are highest in the late teens and early twenties and decline thereafter. Accordingly, people in the 15-24 age range account for about 40% of all arrests even though they comprise only about 14% of the population.
Several factors again seem to account for this pattern (Shoemaker 2010). First, peer relationships matter more during this time of one’s life than later, and peers are also more likely during this period than later to be offenders themselves. For both reasons, our peer relationships during our teens and early twenties are more likely than those in our later years to draw us into crime. Second, adolescents and young adults are more likely than older adults to lack full-time jobs; for this reason, they are more likely to need money and thus to commit offenses to obtain money and other possessions. Third, as we age out of our early twenties, our ties to conventional society increase: Many people marry, have children, and begin full-time employment, though not necessarily in that order. These events and bonds increase our stakes in conformity, to use some social science jargon, and thus reduce our desire to break the law (Laub, Sampson, & Sweeten 2006).
Urban and Rural Residence
Where we live also makes a difference for our likelihood of committing crime. We saw earlier that big cities have a much higher homicide rate than small towns. This trend exists for violent crime and property crime more generally. Urban areas have high crime rates in part because they are poor, but poverty by itself does not completely explain the urban-rural difference in crime, since many rural areas are poor as well.
A key factor that explains the higher crime rates of urban areas is their greater population density (Stark 1987). When many people live close together, they come into contact with one another more often. This fact means that teenagers and young adults have more peers to influence them to commit crime, and it also means that potential criminals have more targets (people and homes) for their criminal activity. Urban areas also have many bars, convenience stores, and other businesses that can become targets for potential criminals, and bars, taverns, and other settings for drinking can obviously become settings where tempers flare and violence ensues.
This student-created ancillary covers the topic of recidivism, including how it may vary based on age, race, and gender, as well as an example of lived experience relating to recidivism.
Recidivism by Kaylynn Barratt, Celia Kempema, Paola Hidalgo-Agustin, and Dinh Nguyen is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Consequences of Crime
Crime has a variety of consequences, including obvious consequences such as death in the case of homicide and less obvious consequences such as the financial loss to society or the impact on family members of incarcerated people. In this section, we discuss some of the general consequences of crime; however, we focus in on two areas that we feel deserve more attention in public discourse: White-collar crime and violence against women.
White-collar crime often goes unpunished, or the wealthy people who commit these crimes are able to buy their way out of harsh punishments such as incarceration as they have access to resources such as highly successful attorneys or the ability to pay fines. The inattention to this type of crime by the media means that the public is less aware of its extent and consequences, and white-collar crime, especially corporate crime, has enormous consequences.
Violence against women highlights how systemic inequalities, such as sexism and male power, connect to other social problems such as crime. Women are disproportionately victimized by the violence crimes of rape and sexual assault, and endure other forms of systemic violence such as femicide and genital mutilation. The lack of policy or legal attention to these violent crimes perpetuates and normalizes male power, sexism, and violence against women. For these reasons, we emphasize both of these forms of crime below.
General Consequences of Crime
Some consequences of crime are clear: Loss of property in property crime, injury in violent crime, and death in homicide. However, overall financial costs are considerable. Excluding white-collar crime, crime was estimated to cost more than $2.6 trillion in 2017, 3% of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, with violent crime accounting for the great majority of those costs (Miller et al. 2021). In 2019, property crime was estimated to result in $15.8 billion in losses (FBI n.d.).
In addition, there are health costs of crime. Being victimized by crime or living in a neighborhood with high crime can lead to mental health concerns such as anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as physical health concerns such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and even mortality. For instance, one study found that neighborhood violent crime was associated with levels of cardiovascular and coronary artery disease deaths (Eberly et al. 2022). More generally, victims of violent crime report being more likely to experience an array of health concerns than those not victimized by violent crime, including chronic illness, disability, and other concerns that impact mental health such as bankruptcy (Alliance for Safety and Justice 2024). Studies also suggest that crime victimization adversely impacts other outcomes such as unemployment, occupational functioning, intimate relationships, and parenting practices (Hanson et al. 2010).
Further, there are costs to the families of incarcerated people. Children of incarcerated parents or who have experienced parental incarceration have higher rates of adverse outcomes than those without incarcerated parents or who have not experienced parental incarceration, such as more aggression or other behavioral problems, a higher risk of dropping out of school, and physical and mental health complications (Economic Policy Institute 2016). Families may also experience the loss of household income when a member is incarcerated and often pay hefty fees or costs related to the incarceration such as court fees or visitation transportation costs.
White-collar and Corporate Crime
The toll of white-collar crime, both financial and violent, is difficult to estimate, but by all accounts it exceeds the economic loss and death and injury from all street crime combined. White-collar crime is thought to involve an annual economic loss of more than $700 billion annually from corporate fraud, professional fraud, employee theft, and tax evasion and an annual toll of at least 100,000 deaths from workplace-related illness or injury, unsafe products, and preventable environmental pollution. These figures compare to an economic loss of less than $20 billion from property crime and a death toll of about 17,000 from homicide (Barkan 2012).
In the study of professional fraud, health-care fraud stands out for its extent and cost (Rosoff, Pontell, & Tillman 2010). Health-care fraud is thought to amount to more than $100 billion per year, compared to less than $20 billion for all property crime combined, which is still a large figure. For example, some physicians bill Medicare and private insurance for services that patients do not really need and may never receive. Medical supply companies sometimes furnish substandard equipment. To compensate for the economic loss it incurs, health-care fraud drives up medical expenses and insurance costs. In this sense, it steals from the public even though no one ever breaks into your house or robs you.
Although health-care and other professional fraud are serious, corporate crime dwarfs all other forms of white-collar crime in the economic loss it incurs and in the death, injury, and illness it causes. Corporate financial crime involves such activities as fraud, price fixing, and false advertising. The Enron scandal in 2001 involved an energy corporation whose chief executives exaggerated profits. After their fraud and Enron’s more dire financial state were finally revealed, the company’s stock plummeted and it finally went bankrupt. Its thousands of workers lost their jobs and pensions, and investors in its stock lost billions of dollars. Several other major corporations engaged in (or strongly suspected of doing so) accounting fraud during the late 1990s and early 2000s, but Enron was merely the most notorious example of widespread scandal that marked this period.
While corporate financial crime and corruption have cost the nation untold billions of dollars in this and earlier decades, corporate violence – actions by corporations that kill or maim people or leave them ill – is even more scandalous. The victims of corporate violence include corporate employees, consumers of corporate goods, and the public as a whole. Annual deaths from corporate violence exceed the number of deaths from homicide, and illness and injury from corporate violence affect an untold number of people every year.
Employees of corporations suffer from unsafe workplaces in which workers are exposed to hazardous conditions and chemicals because their companies fail to take adequate measures to reduce or eliminate this exposure. Such exposure may result in illness, and exposure over many years can result in death. According to one estimate, more than 50,000 people die each year from workplace exposure (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations [AFL-CIO] 2010), a figure about three times greater than the number of annual homicides. About 1,500 coal miners die each year from black lung disease, which results from the breathing of coal dust. Many and perhaps most of these deaths would be preventable if coal mining companies took adequate safety measures (Harris 1998). In another example, the asbestos industry learned during the 1930s that exposure to asbestos could cause fatal lung disease and cancer. Despite this knowledge, asbestos companies hid evidence of this hazard for more than three decades: They allowed their workers to continue to work with asbestos and marketed asbestos as a fire retardant that was widely installed in schools and other buildings. More than 200,000 asbestos workers and members of the public either have already died or are expected to die from asbestos exposure. Most or all of these deaths could have been prevented if the asbestos industry had acted responsibly when it first discovered it was manufacturing a dangerous product (Lilienfeld 1991).
Unsafe products also kill or maim consumers. One of the most notorious examples of deaths from an unsafe product involved the Ford Pinto, a car first sold in the early 1970s that was vulnerable to fire and explosion when hit from behind in a minor rear-end collision (Cullen, Maakestad, & Cavender 2006). Ford knew before the Pinto went on the market that its gas tank was unusually vulnerable in a rear-end collision and determined it would take about $11 per car to fix the problem. It then did a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it would cost more to fix the problem or instead to settle lawsuits after Pinto drivers and passengers died or were burned and injured in rear-end collisions. This analysis indicated that Ford would save about $87 million if it did not fix the problem and instead paid out compensation after Pinto drivers and passengers died or got burned. Because Ford made this decision, about five hundred people eventually died in Pinto rear-end collisions and many others were burned.
Caution
We next discuss violence against women, including sexual assault.
Violence Against Women
As mentioned on the Overview page, women fear being victimized by crime more than men. This includes victimization for property crimes such as auto theft as well as violent crimes such as sexual assault. In this subsection we will focus on the experience of crimes directed at women, particularly sexual assault or rape and global concerns such as female genital mutilation and sexual slavery.
Susan Griffin began a classic essay on rape in the early 1970s with this startling statement: “I have never been free of the fear of rape. From a very early age I, like most women, have thought of rape as a part of my natural environment – something to be feared and prayed against like fire or lightning. I never asked why men raped; I simply thought it one of the many mysteries of human nature” (1971: 26).
When we consider interpersonal violence of all kinds – homicide, assault, robbery, and rape or sexual assault – men are generally more likely than women to be victims of violence. While true, this fact obscures another fact: Women are far more likely than men to be raped and sexually assaulted. They are also much more likely to be portrayed as victims of pornographic violence on social media or the Internet and in videos, magazines, and other media. Finally, women are more likely than men to be victims of domestic violence, or violence between partners in intimate relationships. These acts are thus an extreme manifestation of the gender inequality women face in other areas of life, and perpetuate that inequality as well.
It is estimated that one-third of women worldwide have been raped or sexually assaulted, beaten, or physically abused in some other way (Heise, Ellseberg, & Gottemoeller 1999). While it is tempting to conclude that such violence is much more common in poor nations than in a wealthy nation like the US, violence against women is common in the US as well. Like homicide, about three-fourths of all rapes and sexual assaults involve individuals who know each other, not strangers.
Because women often do not tell police they experienced sexual assault, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which involves survey interviews of thousands of people nationwide, may yield a better estimate of rape than other measures but is likely far from perfect. The NCVS found that there were 481,020 rapes reported in the 2023 survey (Tapp & Coen 2024). Other research indicates that up to one-third of US women will experience rape or sexual assault, including attempts, at least once in their lives (Barkan 2012). A study of a random sample of 420 Toronto women involving intensive interviews yielded an even higher figure: Two-thirds said they had experienced at least one rape or sexual assault (including attempts). The researchers, Melanie Randall and Lori Haskell, concluded that “it is more common than not for a woman to have an experience of sexual assault during their lifetime” (1995: 22).
Up to one-third of US women experience a rape or sexual assault, including attempts, at least once in their lives.
Wikimedia Commons – public domain
Studies of college students also find a high amount of rape and sexual assault. About 20-30% of women students in anonymous surveys report being raped or sexually assaulted (including attempts), usually by a male student they knew beforehand (Fisher, Cullen, & Turner 2000; Gross, Winslett, Roberts, & Gohm 2006). Thus at a university campus of 10,000 students, about 1,000-1,500 women will be raped or sexually assaulted over a period of four years, or about 10 per week in a four-year academic calendar.
The public image of rape in American culture is of a stranger attacking a woman in an alleyway. While such rapes do occur, most rapes actually happen between people who know each other. A wide body of research finds that 60-80% of all rapes and sexual assaults are committed by someone the woman knows, including partners or spouses (typically men), and only 20-35% by strangers (Barkan 2012). A woman is thus 2-4 times more likely to be raped by someone she knows than by a stranger.
About one-third of women worldwide have been raped or beaten, leading Amnesty International (2004) to call violence against women “the greatest human rights scandal of our times.” Although violence against women certainly occurs in wealthy nations, it is more common and extreme in poor and middle-income nations, and in nations where women’s inequality (as reflected by criteria such as their labor force participation and their educational attainment) is especially high (Kaya & Cook 2010). More than half of women in Uganda, for example, have been physically or sexually abused (Amnesty International 2010). Many young women in India who work outside the home have been raped by high-school dropout men who think these women lack virtue and should be punished with rape (Polgreen 2011).
In some cultures, young girls routinely have their genitals removed, often with no anesthesia, in what has been termed female genital mutilation. This practice is thought to affect more than 100 million girls and women across the earth and has been considered an act of torture (Kristoff 2011; Rogo, Subayi, & Toubia 2007). Sex trafficking is a form of psychological and physical violence that has been found to occur in higher numbers in countries like Cambodia, India, Nepal, and Thailand, where young girls are often stolen from their parents and forced to engage in sex work in what amounts to sexual slavery. The number of girls (and sometimes other children) under age 18 who work as 'sex slaves' is thought to reach into the millions and to be larger than the number of African enslaved people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Kristoff & WuDunn 2010). It is important to note, however, that sex trafficking occurs within the US as well.
In India and Pakistan, thousands of women are killed every year in dowry deaths, in which a new wife is murdered by her husband and/or his relatives if she does not pay the groom enough money or goods (Kethineni & Srinivasan 2009). This is one of several forms of gendercide, the deliberate destruction of a gender group. This term is a play on the word 'genocide,' the deliberate destruction of an ethnic group. This type of gendered violence universally takes the form of femicide, the systematic destruction of the gender group women or the sex female.
In India and Pakistan, thousands of new wives every year are murdered in dowry deaths because they have not provided their husbands a suitable amount of money and goods. Although femicide has been reported to decline in recent years, it does still occur.
Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0
In sum, women and girls around the world experience horrendous, systematic acts of violence that result in serious injury of the body or mind, bodily mutilation, forced sex work, or death – the most serious consequence of crime.
Immigration
Immigration continues to be a major concern for many Americans today, and there is an array of misconceptions and stereotypes about who immigrants are.
One stereotype about immigrants is that they are 'criminal' or have a high likelihood of being involved in gangs. In contrast, many studies find that immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, have lower crime rates than non-immigrants (Wadsworth 2010). These low rates are thought to stem from immigrants’ stable families, strong churches, and high numbers of small businesses that make for stable neighborhoods. Ironically, as immigrants stay longer in the US, the crime rates of their children, and then those of their children’s children, become higher. As immigrant families stay longer in the US, then, their crime rates tend to rise, in part because they become 'Americanized' (Sampson 2008).
In addition to the stereotype of criminality, immigrants have been accused of being 'lazy' or 'freeloaders.' However, research suggests that immigrants often have a strong work ethic and data reveal that there is a large number of working immigrants in the US who contribute to the economy and pay taxes. In fact, unauthorized immigrants compose more than five percent of the US labor force, a number equivalent to eight million workers. Households headed by unauthorized immigrants paid an estimated $11.2 billion in state and federal taxes in 2010. in 2012 the Immigration Policy Center estimated that if all unauthorized immigrants somehow left the United States, the US economy would suffer an annual loss of 2.8 million jobs, $552 billion in economic activity, and $245 billion in gross domestic product (GDP), and that's in 2012 dollars.
Research indicating that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than US-born individuals and contribute to society through paid work and a strong work ethic help to combat the false stereotypes described above. These stereotypes are often racialized, meaning that racial prejudice fuels these beliefs. For instance, scholars have argued that Americans' concern about immigrants centers mostly on Mexican immigrants even though they are less than a majority of all immigrants. According to political scientist Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto (2012), this focus stems from racial prejudice:
“Opposition to immigration is not a concern rooted in personal economic concerns. Neither is it a concern having to do with state’s rights. Anti-immigrant sentiment isn’t even about immigrants as a whole. As rigorous social scientific research shows, opposition to immigration is closely linked to the negative racial animus toward one very specific group, Latinos.”
Racial prejudice has fueled crime against immigrants for centuries. For instance, Chinese migrants who came to the United States in 1860s, primarily to build railroads, were stereotyped as dirty drug addicts and victims of mob violence at the hands of US-born individuals.
Another issue related to crime and immigration concerns immigrants who have been the victim of crime. Unauthorized, and even some authorized, immigrants face tough decisions about whether to report when they are victimized by crime due to fear of interactions with the police and criminal justice system. For instance, for immigrant women experiencing domestic violence, fear of deportation can be an abuser's weapon (Constable 2012). It is often difficult for individuals to leave an abusive partner for a variety of reasons, but abused immigrant women face a special problem in this regard. Because often they are allowed to live in the US only because their husbands are legal residents or citizens, they fear deportation if they go to the police and their husband is deported. Other unauthorized immigrants who have been victimized by crime similarly fear that they will be deported if they go to the police.
We will further discuss issues concerning the police in the following page on social control and the criminal justice system.
