Crime victimization of persons with severe mental illness in Taiwan.

OBJECTIVE: Research in the West has shown that persons with severe mental illness are easy targets of criminals. The aim of the present study was to investigate the types, incidence, and prevalence of crime victimization and its demographic and clinical correlates among persons with severe mental illness in Taiwan. METHODS: Participants diagnosed with schizophrenia or major affective disorders were selected from the psychiatric service of a general hospital. They were asked about any crime perpetrated against them within the preceding year. Only crimes occurring after a psychiatric diagnosis had been made were included. The results of this survey were compared with crimes among the general population in 2000 as reported by the Taiwan Crime Victimization Survey of the Ministry of Justice. RESULTS: The 1 year prevalence of victimization in the study population was 16.8%, compared with 11.3% in the general population. After controlling for demographic and clinical variables it was found that those with affective disorders or a history of alcohol abuse were more likely to be victimized. CONCLUSION: In Taiwan, persons with severe mental illness are more vulnerable to crime victimization than the general population.

Does the Police-Monitored CCTV Scheme Really Matter on Crime Reduction? A Quasi-Experimental Test in Taiwan's Taipei City.

Although numerous public closed-circuit television (CCTV) initiatives have been implemented at varying levels in Taiwan's cities and counties, systematic evaluations of these crime reduction efforts have been largely overlooked. To address this void, a quasi-experimental evaluation research project was designed to assess the effect of police-monitored CCTV on crime reduction in Taipei City for a period of 54 months, including data for both before and after camera installation dates. A total of 40 viewsheds within a 100-m (328 feet) radius were selected as research sites to observe variations in four types of crime incidents that became known to police during the January 2008 to June 2012 period. While crime incidents occurring in both the target and control sites were reduced in frequency after CCTV installation, results derived from time-series analysis indicated that the monitoring had no significant effect on the reduction of property crime incidents with the sole exception of robbery. With respect to the effects of comparing target and control sites, the average Crime Reduction Quotient (CRQ) was 0.36, suggesting that CCTV has an overall marginal yet noteworthy influence. Viewed broadly, however, the police-installed CCTV system in Taipei City did not appear to be as efficient as one would expect. Conversely, cameras installed in some observation sites proved to be significantly more effective than cameras in other sites. As a recommendation, future researchers should identify how particular micro-level attributes may lead to CCTV cameras working more effectively, thereby optimizing location choices where monitoring will prove to be most productive.

The concentration of criminal victimization and patterns of routine activities.

Although many repeat victimization studies have focused on describing the prevalence of the phenomenon, this study attempted to explain variations in the concentration of victimization by applying routine activities as a theoretical model. A multivariate analysis of repeat victimization based on the 2005 Taiwan criminal victimization data supported the general applicability of the routine activity model developed in Western culture for predicting repeat victimization. Findings that diverged from Western patterns included family income to assault, gender to robbery, and marital status, family income, and major activity to larceny incidents. These disparities illustrated the importance of considering the broader sociocultural context in the association between risk predictors and the concentration of criminal victimization. The contradictory results and nonsignificant variance also reflected untapped information on respondents' biological features and psychological tendencies. Future victimization research would do well to integrate measurements that are sensitive to salient sociocultural elements of the society being studied and individuals' biological and psychological traits.

Jessor's problem behavior theory: Cross-national evidence from Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States.

Jessor (2008) has recently called attention to description versus explanation in cross-cultural and cross-national comparative scholarship on adolescent development, particularly, the etiology of adolescent problem behaviors. In the current study, we were interested in testing to what extent problem behavior theory replicated in samples of 10,310 adolescents from 8 distinct developmental contexts, including Asian, Eastern and Western European, North American, and Eurasian/Muslim cultures. Path analyses by country samples as well as follow-up multigroup analyses provided evidence of great similarities across cultures in the links among two protective factor domains (controls protection and support protection), three risk factor domains (models risk, opportunity risk, and vulnerability risk), and the problem behavior syndrome, operationalized by vandalism, general deviance, school misconduct, theft, and assault measures. This evidence adds to a growing body of scholarship that provides support for similarities in explanation, despite many observed differences in description.