Copycat crime among non-incarcerated adults

ABSTRACT

With the emergence of copycat crime as a criminal justice concern, its prevalence is of current interest. This study estimates copycat crime’s prevalence among an adult non-incarcerated population. Face-to-face guided interviews were conducted with 601 respondents with measures of copycat crime consideration and attempts collected. Comparisons with prior copycat crime estimates and exploratory correlational and logistic regression analyses were conducted. The results show that the prevalence of copycat crime among non-incarcerated adults was significant but substantially lower than levels previously reported for incarcerated populations. About 1 in 10 non-incarcerated general population adults reported having considered committing a copycat crime and 1 in 20 reported having attempted one. Similar to prior research findings, females were significantly less likely than males to report copycat crime histories. Age was also predictive for copycat attempts, and prior victimisation and new media use were predictive for copycat crime consideration. Policy implications are discussed and the need for continued research into the dynamics of copycat crime across cultures and gender is indicated.

KEYWORDS:

• copycat crime
• crime prevalence
• imitative crime
• criminal justice policy
• media and crime

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ray Surette http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4469-8167

Derek Chadee http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6691-1868

Notes

1 Empirical evidence of an actual copycat effect from the Goethe novel has been questioned by Thorson and Öberg (2003).

2 See, for example, Freestone, Ullrich, and Coid (2017), Lauria, McEwan, Luebbers, Simmons, and Ogloff (2017), Jiang et al. (2016) and Rios (2015).

3 The single copycat who reported that they had been caught or punished was unique along a number of dimensions. The sanctioned copycat was a 20-year-old female who reported that she had attempted a violent copycat crime 3–5 times at age 16. She described her copycat crimes as group acts and spur-of-the-moment events and she credited music as her criminogenic source media. She further felt that the music was crucial and that without her exposure to the media she would not have attempted her copycat crimes.

4 Note that for Trinidadian youth, the crime risk level of a respondent’s institution (high, median or low reflecting incarceration in a YCC, high-risk school or low-risk school) was positively related to both copycat crime consideration and attempts (Chadee et al., 2017).

5 No Mahalanobis value was greater than the cut-off value of 26.125 for the models. All tolerance values were >.1, and no large residuals (>3) were observed. While income was significantly correlated with copycat crime consideration (see Table 1), 163 respondents (27%) declined to answer the income survey question. This low response rate reflects Trinidad and Tobago survey respondents’ historical reluctance to report income in surveys (Chadee et al., 2017). As an exploratory analysis, it was deemed more important to maximise the sample size and thereby the representativeness of the group in the analysis, and as education and income were significantly correlated (Spearman r = .260, sig. level < .001), a portion of the effect of income is reflected in the education measure. Regarding the media use variables, the number of Internet hours per day and social media days were dropped from the logistic regression model due to their intercorrelation with new media days per week. For similar reasons, a measure of ‘ever a crime victim’ was not included in the multi-variate models due to its strong correlation with number of times victimised.

6 See http://www.livescience.com/50999-hallucinations-delusions-common.html) and (https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions).