Testing the Economic Production and Conflict Models of Crime Control

Abstract

Economists approach crime control as another economic activity, explaining it in terms of a production function model Conflict theorists examine crime control as an instrument of the powerful to control the actions and groups which threaten their interests. Our research examines the utility of production function and conflict models in explaining variation in certainty of arrests, an important dimension of crime control, for the seven index crimes across a sample of U.S. cities over 100,000 population. The analysis shows that both the conflict and production function variables directly affect the certainty of arrest and that the effect of the production function variables is significantly altered when the conflict variables are included in the estimating equation.