Crime and Socio-Economic Context

Thinking in France on relations between crime rate trend and evolution of socio-economiccontext over time is underdeveloped. Recent studies in the United Kingdom suggestthat the business cycle influences fluctuations in both property offenses and violent crime.Whereas pre-1970 research in the United States only rarely pointed up a direct link betweencrime rate and unemployment, post-1970 American studies are dominated by demonstrationsof a direct correlation between the two. In this article, analysis of trends in unemployment,prices and wages, marriage among men, and schooling leads to an interpretation ofdelinquency and crime over the long term in which it is affirmed that an increase in opportunity,such as that attested to by increased consumer prices and wages over time, has a morepronounced role in the strong growth period of the cycle and influences property offensesmore than violent crime, and that unemployment among young people without educationaldegrees is a factor working in favor of both theft and violent crime. This phenomenon waspartially masked in periods where it was common to remain in the school system, such asearly in the last decade of the twentieth century in France. Lastly, the fact that starting in theearly 1980s fewer young people settled in couples and, more generally, the tension in relationsbetween the sexes may also have worked to favor delinquency