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A Developmental Approach for Measuring the Severity of Crimes

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Abstract

There is widespread agreement in criminology that some crimes are more severe than others, but precise definitions of crime severity and straightforward methods for measuring it have been elusive. Public perceptions of crime severity and economic estimates of crime costs to society or willingness to pay offer a variety of metrics for the public’s perceptions of severity, but they may not accurately describe severity as reflected in offender preferences. The behavior of offenders is critical for understanding developmental progressions in criminal careers, as one may assume that typically more severe offenses are not undertaken until less severe crimes have been committed. In the present paper we propose an alternative metric of crime severity, drawing on findings from developmental criminology that indicate that more severe crimes occur after less severe crimes in the criminal life course, and a method for estimating crime severity that uses the generalized Bradley–Terry model of multiple paired comparisons. We demonstrate this approach on two samples of youthful offenders: the National Youth Survey and the RAND Adolescent Outcomes Project. The results suggest that sample-specific estimates of crime severity can be derived, that these estimates provide insight into the developmental progression of crime, and that they correspond well to crime severity rankings produced by the public.

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Notes

  1. We use the term “crime severity” though acknowledge that prior research has often used the term “crime seriousness” when referring to the same relative construct.

  2. Revealed preference theory in economics suggests that preferences of consumers can be revealed by purchasing habits (Samuelson 1938). This concept can be applied to the temporal order in offenses, from the perspective that the sequence of offenses individuals select to engage in reveals preferences that are tied to the escalation in crime severity.

  3. Half of the sample was asked to rank the categorical limits for the severity of the offense they were presented with values ranging from 1 ‘least serious to 11 ‘most serious.’ Sellin and Wolfgang (1964) found similarity in the rankings of offenses between both methods after adjusting for a number of covariates (race, rating group, age of offender, etc.). They chose to rely on the magnitude scores because of the larger range of values.

  4. Item Response Theory or Guttman scaling methods would be the most analogous approach to the Bradely–Terry model (see Raudenbush et al. 2003). Item Response Theory (IRT) and Guttman scaling approaches, however, would deem the severity of crimes by their endorsed prevalence, such that the average likelihood of committing any offense is highest for those who report committing the least prevalent offenses. The least prevalent offenses would be termed the most severe––analogous to item difficulty scores in an IRT model. The advantage of the Bradley–Terry approach used here is that the severity of crimes is estimated from the sequencing of offenses over time and there is no explicit assumption that the order of severity is related to prevalence.

  5. λi − λj is equivalent to the log of Eq. 2.

  6. The complete matrices for these estimates are presented in the Appendix Tables 5 and 6.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (grant R49CE000574) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) (grant R01DA16722). The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the official positions of the CDC, NIDA, the RAND Corporation, or any of its clients. The authors would like to thank David McDowall, Ray Paternoster, Greg Ridgeway, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. All errors and omissions remain those of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RAND Corporation, Arlington, VA, USA

    Rajeev Ramchand & Andrew R. Morral

  2. Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania/RAND Corporation, McNeil Building, Suite 483 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6286, USA

    John M. MacDonald

  3. RAND Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Amelia Haviland

Authors
  1. Rajeev Ramchand
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  2. John M. MacDonald
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  3. Amelia Haviland
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  4. Andrew R. Morral
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to John M. MacDonald.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 5 NYS crime severity scores relative to all other crimes
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Table 6 AOP crime severity scores relative to all other crimes
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Ramchand, R., MacDonald, J.M., Haviland, A. et al. A Developmental Approach for Measuring the Severity of Crimes. J Quant Criminol 25, 129–153 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-008-9061-7

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