Dual Economic Deprivation and Homicide: A Typological Approach to the Contingencies of Economic Inequality and Poverty

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 7: Neighborhoods and Crime

Abstract

Purposes: This study revisits the contingent effects of economic inequality and poverty on homicide from 1990 to 2019. Extending contingent relative deprivation theory, which posits that the criminogenic effects of inequality are strongest under low poverty, it introduces a dual economic deprivation typology as an analytic alternative to address methodological limitations and to explore how broader configurations of contingent economic deprivation shape homicide.
Methods: By evaluating violations of key assumptions of continuous interaction models, specifically, linearity and common support, and misspecification arising from undifferentiated groupings, this study turns to contrasting configurations of contingent economic deprivation. Two-way fixed-effects Poisson models are used to estimate associations with homicide counts.
Results: Exploratory analyses indicate that an interlocking typology classifying continental counties into four categories—Least Deprived, Inequality Prevalence, Poverty Prevalence, and Compound Deprivation—offers an informative and robust point of departure. Counties classified as Inequality Prevalence (high inequality/low poverty) and Compound Deprivation (high inequality/high poverty) exhibit markedly higher homicide counts than Least Deprived counties.
Conclusions: The typology provides a methodologically and theoretically grounded alternative for empirically modeling contingent effects. Findings highlight the co-occurring and multidimensional nature of economic disadvantage and its potential to integrate anomie/strain and social disorganization theories in advancing macro-criminological inquiry.

Author

• Chin-Han Chan, University at Albany, SUNY