| As incarcerations have risen, property crime and violent crime rates have declined over the past 3 decades and are still on the decline. This inverse relationship may be because incarcerated criminals are unable to perpetrate additional crimes, but advocates of social threat theory have proposed that political, economic, and racial threats may account for this relationship. The specific problem that prompted this research was that criminal justice and social policies continue to be made based on potentially erroneous explanations, as the extent of the inverse relationship between crimes, incarceration rates, and arrest rates, when controlling for political, economic, and racial threats is unknown. The purpose of this correlational, quantitative study was to determine the extent of the inverse relationships between crimes, incarceration rates, and arrest rates, when controlling for political, economic, and racial threats. The population of interest in this study consisted of the total number of years the data has been reported and made available to the public. Linear mixed modeling techniques were used to analyze the data in this study. Based on the analyses for the research questions it was concluded: (a) that the incarceration rate was not inversely related to the Index Crime Rate when controlling for the political threats (the percentage of Republicans among the Representatives and Senators sent to the U.S. Congress from each state), economic threats (household incomes and unemployment rates), and racial threats (the percentage of Hispanics and Blacks in the population); and (b) that although a significant positive relationship between arrest rates and Index Crime Rates was obtained, the finding was in the opposite direction as what was predicted (with more arrests associated with higher Index Crime Rates) when controlling for political, economic, and social threats. Other noteworthy findings showed that higher Index Crime Rates were found when unemployment rates were low, when median household incomes were low, and when the percentage of Hispanics in the population was high. It was recommended that criminal justice policies should be adjusted to reduce emphasis on the premise that more arrests and more incarcerations would decrease crime rates. In addition, three recommendations for future research were offered: use more comprehensive statistical models including additional variables, replicate the results in other countries, and employ mixed methods approaches. |
