Crime and the Foreign Born in Australia (From The Australian Criminal Justice System: The Mid 1980s, P 132-149, 1986, Duncan Chappell and Paul Wilson, eds. -- See NCJ-110891)

• NCJ Number: 110898
• Author(s): R D Francis
• Date Published: 1986
• Length: 18 pages
• Sale Source: Butterworth-Heinemann
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This paper reviews the extent of crime and criminal victimization among foreign-born persons in Australia as well as the physical, psychological, and social theories relevant to the explanation of deviance among foreign-born immigrants.

Abstract

The available evidence suggests that the foreign-born are not disproportionately involved in crime nor in victimization in Australia. There are reports that both foreign terrorist organizations and crime sydnicates use Australia as one of their bases, but there is no public evidence of this. There are some immigrant groups, however, disproportionately represented in crime statistics. These are immigrants from New Zealand, Germany, and Yugoslavia. It is clear that the second generation of immigrant families have higher crime rates than the first generation. Various crime-cause theories help explain this phenomenon, including the delinquent-generations hypothesis, the frustration-aggression hypothesis, and the culture conflict hypothesis. Any view of immigrant criminality based on official statistics must be a tentative one because of methodological limitations in data acquisition and the tendency of many ethnic groups to handle their own deviancy problems rather than report them to the authorities. 39 footnotes.