Impacts of unemployment on crime today, we are faced with an alarming situation that tends to plaque us and have made it on many of our chief economist and researchers list. Evidence of this rests on the works of many econometric who tried to find the relationship between crime and how it affects the level of unemployment within a country. Siegel (2009) asserted that “crime is a violation of societal rules of behavior as interpreted and expressed by a criminal legal code created by people holding social and political power. Individuals who violate these rules are subject to sanctions by state authority, social stigma, and loss of status” (p. 18). On a more macromedia level, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines unemployment as people who do not have a job, have looked for work in the past four weeks, and are currently available for work. Also, people who were temporarily laid off from their jobs and are waiting to be called back to that job are counted as unemployed.
Numerous studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between unemployment and crime with the former bear strong influence on the latter. Economics of crime or illegal activities has grown into a new field, which requires an investigative review of its principal components; particularly this is because of the rapid increase in criminal activities “in various western and eastern countries of the world.” Ehrlich (1973) considers that unemployment has its effects on the crime rate. He outlines