Close quarters linked to crime Study by UM sociology professor

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ORONO – “Give me some space.”

Those four little words can be a loaded statement, coming from a teen-ager signaling the need to get away from a tension-filled house, a newly published study suggests.

Steven Barkan, a University of Maine sociology professor, said crowding is an often-overlooked contributor to high crime rates.

And while crowding affects all age groups, adolescents are apt to be most directly affected, Barkan said.

“If you have a lot of people crowded together in the same household … they literally feel the need for privacy, for personal space,” he said. “For adolescents, it also means they just leave the premises.”

Setting aside the dry statistics he analyzed and tables he formulated in his study, Barkan drew on personal experience to illustrate his point.

“When I was growing up, until I was 12 I shared a bedroom with my brother and we fought all the time,” said Barkan. “He was younger than I am and there was nowhere to go. So you go outside.”

All too often, that’s where the trouble starts.

Youths starved for personal space leave the house and mingle with their friends. It is in those settings where illegal or anti-social activities are most apt to take place, Barkan reasoned.

As a criminologist, Barkan is interested in crime rates. And as a sociologist, he looks for aspects in communities that can influence crime rates.

“Household crowding is just something that struck my fancy as something that should be looked at,” he said. “There are very few studies like this.”

Barkan analyzed census data and FBI crime data from all 3,000-plus counties in the United States as well as from roughly 260 metropolitan areas.

He then looked for a correlation between crime rates and households that fitted the technical definition of crowded: more than one person per room in a dwelling unit. The study took into account influences such as poverty and single-parent households.

Barkan’s paper, published in the Journal of Crime and Justice, outlined “significant relationships between crowded households in an area and crime rates,” Barkan said.

In homes that exceed census standards for being crowded, there tend to be more conflicts, physical and verbal.

Some literature also suggests that parents in crowded households punish their children more, and that spanking children more can make them misbehave more. They become more violent as a result, said Barkan.

There’s more stress in those households, and that leads to more anti-social behavior outside the home, he said.

And then there is what Barkan’s study refers to as increased “moral cynicism,” an erosion of moral standards as family members find it more difficult to hide their own anti-social acts.

During his 36 years of police work in Philadelphia and Maine’s largest city, Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood said he’s encountered numerous cases that back up Barkan’s claim.

Chitwood said children from crowded homes often lack proper nutrition, hygiene, supervision and role models. Even when police intervene with social-service agencies when they spot such cases, children living in crowded conditions wind up in trouble all too often, he said.

“A lot of these kids don’t have a chance,” Chitwood said. “The success stories are in a minority when you look at kids from these environments.”

A former prosecutor who now heads a criminal justice think tank in Kansas also said Barkan’s study makes sense. While the Koch Crime Institute has not done any independent study on crowding and the crime rate, other studies and practical experience would tend to back up Barkan’s thesis.

“I think the logic’s with him,” said Jerry Wells, the institute’s executive director. While some studies have drawn correlations between the density of homes or people in larger areas to criminal activity, Barkan’s is unique in that he makes the link between space within homes and crime.

It’s not about “cabin fever,” the buildup of stress as a person is shut inside for weeks during the winter. Barkan said his study focuses on space within the home, not when or how long someone is shut in.

“There is a connection with cabin fever, but only in the sense that people feel a need to leave the premises and not relating it to whether it’s winter or not,” he said.

Studies that go back to the 1960s and ’70s indicate crowding is bad not just for teen-agers but for all members of the household, including adults and younger children, said Barkan.

While he didn’t contrast urban and rural areas, Barkan suspects adolescents who live in more densely populated areas have more opportunities to get into trouble because there’s so much more going on.

“It’s easy to walk outside and find friends to hang out with and get into trouble,” said Barkan, of UMaine’s Orono campus.

“In Maine if you walk outside, depending on where you are, you might just find a deer or moose or two, and it’s hard to get into trouble with them.”