Criminal Justice Reform
in Utah
This site examines crime rates in Utah and through the lens of the criminal Justice Reform Initiative (JRI) between 1990 and 2020. The user can navigate the site by using the Menu button located at the top.
The 2nd tab provides yearly trends in crime rates while the 3rd tab analyzes these trends through a statistical framework. Subsequent tabs offers a view at the relationship between income and crime, takeaways and specifics about the data.
A map of the United States showing justice reform implementation by year and by state (click to see state specific information and use the +/- sign to zoom in/out).
The difference-in-difference (DID) statistical framework compares the performance of a treatment and one or more control groups to estimate the effect of a program or policy of interest. We use the DID method to analyze the relationship between justice reform legislation and 3 types of crime rates: 1) property crime 2) violent crime and 3) homicide specific related crimes.
While we see an average reduced rate of 106 property crimes per 100,000 populations in a given year for states that have passed justice reform legislation, this is not statistically significant. Findings for violent and homicide crimes show a small increase for states that have passed justice reform, however lack statistical support as well.
Learn more about this methodology and study here.
- A correlation between two variables indicates the strength of their relationship. This relationship can be negative or positive. A negative correlation implies that as one variable decreases, the other one is expected to increase. The reverse is also true. A correlation of 1 and -1 equals two perfectly related variables while a correlation of 0 implies no relationship.
Household income (in real dollars) declined between 2019 and 2020. This was true for JRI, Non-JRI states and Utah.
A negative moderate relationship is shown between property crime and income. A negative but weaker relationship is shown between violent and homicide crimes, implying that as median household income increases, these crime rates are expected to decrease.
TakeAways
We find no statistical evidence that criminal justice reform legislation has caused increases in property, violent, or homicide crime rates when comparing states that have passed these reforms to those that have not. We further find a moderate and negative relationship between property crime rates and household income, and a weaker negative relationship between income, violent, and homicide crime rates. These findings should be interpreted with caution and should be seen as "insights" to the complex nature that make up crime rates.
About the Data
Crime rates have been shown to be affected by many factors, including trends in socioeconomic conditions, substance use, law enforcement activity and gun laws. This site uses data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report and the US Census Bureau to summarize trends in crime rates and household income in Utah and through the lens of Criminal Justice Reform. The user can view trends in these data between 1990 and 2020 by justice reform participation and by Utah alone.
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