Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CIVICS (Criminality, Victimization and Social Interactions)
Teaser
A large social science literature tries to describe and understand the causes and consequences of crime, usually focusing on individuals’ criminal activity in isolation. The ambitious aim of this research project is to establish a broader perspective of economics of crime by...
Summary
A large social science literature tries to describe and understand the causes and consequences of crime, usually focusing on individuals’ criminal activity in isolation. The ambitious aim of this research project is to establish a broader perspective of economics of crime by taking into account the social context in which crime takes place. The findings will inform policymakers on how to better use funds both for crime prevention and rehabilitation of incarcerated criminals.
Criminal activity is often a group phenomenon, yet little is known about how criminal networks form and what can be done to break them up or prevent them from forming in the first place. Ignoring victims, and their relationships to criminals, also leads to an incomplete and distorted view of crime and its costs. While a better understanding of these social interactions is crucial for designing more effective anti-crime policy, existing research in criminology, sociology and economics has struggled to identify causal effects due to data limitations and difficult statistical identification issues.
This project will push the research frontier by combining register datasets that have never been linked before, and by using several state-of-the-art statistical methods to estimate causal effects related to criminal peer groups and their victims. Specifically, we aim to:
-Use recent advances in network modelling to describe the structure and density of various criminal networks and study network dynamics after the arrest/incarceration or death of a central player in the network.
-Obtain a more accurate measure of the societal costs of crime, including actual measures of lost earnings, physical and mental health problems, following victims and their offenders before and after a crime takes place.
- Conduct a randomized control trial within the prison system to better understand how current rehabilitation programs affect criminal and victim networks.
Work performed
During the first year all approvals for the data that will be used in the project were obtained, including new approvals for health data (GP visits and related diagnoses) that we had not had prior access to. This process was longer than initially expected due to the new guidelines that Statistics Norway has enforced for compliance with the GDPR regulations. However, this issue has not delayed the project as we access and permission to use most of the datasets from previous applications.
During this time, the PI, Katrine Løken, has started the work on all the main parts of the project and progress has been made on all of them. Preliminary analysis are currently being carried out and we expect to prepare the first manuscripts by the first half of 2020.
The PhD candidate Mirjam Wentzel has been hired on the project (start date xxx) and will work on a part of the victimization work package. She has already gathered some core results and we expect to start presenting this subproject in early 2020.
The postdoc Laura Khoury from Paris School of Economics, has been hired on the project for three years, with starting date September 1st 2019. She will focus her work on the on networks of crime workpackage, and the increased manpower allocated to the project is expected to positively contribute to the projects results.
The researcher, Julian Johnsen, hired on a 10 % position at the University of Bergen, is also working on a project in the first work package on criminal networks.
Finally, I collaborate with people, as described in the grant application, but not paid directly by the project. This includes Magne Mogstad at University of Chicago, Gordon Dahl at University of San Diego and Manudeep Bhuller at University of Oslo.
On my personal webpage I have included the sub projects that I am working on (https://sites.google.com/site/katrinecv/). In addition Julian Johnsen, the researcher employed through UiB, is working on a joint project on networks with Manudeep Bhuller.
WP1 on criminal networks: 1) Sanctioning, recidivism and spillovers (joint work with Manudeep Bhuller and Laura Khoury)
WP2 on victimization: 1) total costs of victimization (Bhuller, Dahl, Løken, Mogstad), 2) peer effects of victimizaton (Bhuller, Løken, Wentzel)
WP3 on field experiment in prison: we have run a pilot in Bergen Prison in the spring of 2019, and the last data from it were gathered at the end of august. The results from this pilot will guide the work and implementation of an RCT planned in the fall of 2020.
Since we do not have results of the project yet, there is no disseminations to report yet. But I have started a collaboration with the edma - european dissemination media agency. A first summary of the project based on previous research on effects of incarceration and the background of the CIVICS project was featured in the first edition of the Project Repository Journal (pg 8-9) in april 2019: http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=3fc3875c-b9c5-4de1-a66a-3f0981761e99
I have a contract on 3 more deliveries on the project when we have results ready to be dissiminated.
Final results
Results are still in progress. We are on track regarding expected results from the applicaton and our projects will move the state of the art on several dimensions including
-- providing the first comprehensive mapping of the total costs of victimizations
-- making a great leap forward on structures of criminal networks
-- running a unique field experiment in prison in collaboration with the Norwegian Correctional Services