ABSTRACT
The international criminology and social policy literature have long explored possible connections between social welfare and crime. However, existing studies tend towards high‐level comparisons of crime versus total aggregate welfare spend, overlooking sub‐national contextual differences between and within countries. There are also few studies that deeply explore this link in the Antipodes, including in Australia: a settler colony and (neo)liberal welfare state with a recent strong coupling of punitive social and penal policies that disproportionately impact Indigenous populations. This paper attends to these gaps by examining the welfare‐crime link in remote Indigenous Queensland (Australia). We use crime‐report data and an interrupted time series design to explore the effects of dynamic social welfare policies during 2020–2021: a period that saw a temporary shift away from a strict neoliberal welfare model (i.e., heavy conditionality, low benefit rates) to more supportive and decommodifying social welfare in response to the COVID‐19 induced economic recession. Our findings align with previous studies that suggest more supportive and decommodifying policies are associated with lower crime. We also bring greater nuance to how the crime‐welfare link is understood within the ‘structural complexity of [Australian] settler colonialism’ (Wolfe. Journal of Genocide Research. 2006;8:392), by illuminating how a politics of race animates social policies that can either produce or reduce criminogenic strains and, thus, socially construct crime in the image of the Indigenous ‘Other’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Social Policy & Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
ABSTRACT
The stay-at-home restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 led to unparalleled sudden change in daily life, but it is unclear how they affected urban crime globally. We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to assess the impact of stay-at-home restrictions on different types of crime in each city. Our findings show that the stay-at-home policies were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime, but with substantial variation across cities and types of crime. Meta-regression results showed that more stringent restrictions over movement in public space were predictive of larger declines in crime.