Combating Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean: What Public Policies Do Citizens Want?

Crime is a major problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. With 9 percent of the world's population, the region accounts for 33 percent of global homicides. Using new, extensive survey data, we endeavor to identify what anti-crime policies citizens in the region demand from their governments. We also analyze who is demanding what and why. We find that harsher penalties appear to be the preferred weapon in the anti-crime arsenal but people are willing to spend public moneys not only for punishment, but also for anti-poverty and detection policies. Citizens recognize that allocating resources to the police is better than subsidizing private security for citizens. Nevertheless, most oppose raising taxes to fund the police, a reluctance that might stem from mistrust in governments' ability to manage these resources. Mistrust, misinformation, and impatience combine to create flawed anti-crime policy. Educating citizens both about crime and about the fiscal consequences of their policy preferences may help move the region's public opinion toward a better policy equilibrium. Governments should also invest in their capability to design and deliver evidence-based solutions for fighting crime, and work to increase trust levels among citizens.

Research Insights: Does the Framing of Information on Crime Rates Affect Citizens' Preferences for Anti-Crime Policies?

Anti-crime policy preferences can be swayed by the framing of crime rate information. Both framing information as an upward trend in crime or a downward trend in crime increased demands for punitive policies as opposed to social policies, when compared to a control group that received no information. Individuals with no previous information about crime rates were more affected by the treatments than those who were familiar with crime rates in the country.

How American Institutions Encourage and Sustain High Rates of Imprisonment

This chapter explores a series of long-standing features of American government that exaggerated the scale of the penal expansion that started in the 1970s. A large list of features of government and social structure in the United States magnified the level of penal expansion, including the federal system, the public wealth of the late twentieth century, and the politics of crime policy.

Hate Crime Policy in the United States

Hate crime policy has developed from the early legislation of the 1968 Civil Rights Act to the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, to be increasingly inclusive in terms of identity and comprehensive in terms of ramifications. Hence a body of scholarship around the trajectory and implications of hate crime laws has developed, as has a robust discourse on the definitions of hate crime itself and theories on who perpetrates bias-motivated violence and why it occurs. Between definitions of hate crime, a tension exists between legal definitions and those of theorists who are attempting incorporate understanding of context into the definition. Similarly, the theories on who perpetrates hate crimes and why they occur exhibit tensions between strain-based theories. While some scholars have deployed Merton’s (1938) strain theory associated with societal anomie, others point to changing norms. As hate crime laws have become more inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression, avenues of research into the disparities in experience of bias-motivated crimes between enumerated categories has increased. Persistent in the research on hate crime is the deficiency of data on victimization and ramifications beyond direct victims. While data on the scope of the policies is clear, inconsistencies in data collection around victimization render available resources insufficient. Most recently, research on hate crime policy has intersected with queer theory to question whether hate crime laws are positive for the LGBTQ community or society at large. Organizations such as the Silvia Rivera Law Project, for example, have pushed back on calls for inclusive hate crime laws via challenging the propensity to provide additional resources to the prison-industrial complex. Furthermore, queer scholars of history find a disconnect between the origins of the LGBTI movement in resisting police powers to be antithetical to promoting increased police powers in the form of hate crime legislation.

Regulating Crime and the International Crime Drop

Michael Quinn’s article reveals that Jeremy Bentham strongly endorsed the suggestions of Patrick Colquhoun, a London magistrate, for reducing the myriad of tempting opportunities for crime in large cities like London. However, it was Colquhoun’s other, positivist ideas about training the poor to resist these temptations that helped determine crime policy for the next 150 years. This positivist agenda has recently been criticized by environmental criminologists and crime scientists, who have revived Colquhoun’s ideas about reducing opportunities for crime and who have advanced the security hypothesis as the explanation for the international drop in crime.