The Nexus of Crime, Health, and Communities

Thumbnail source: True crime illustration

Introduction

Past literature and research have explored and proposed solutions to address health and crime in communities in siloes. But over time, more recent studies have identified the cross-disciplinary benefits of combining public health and criminological discussions to better identify root causes and design welfare solutions that uplift communities in better ways. 

The intersection of these studies can be found in the linkage of neighborhoods, the criminal legal system, and health care systems. In this article, we will dive into how these components are intertwined and contribute to an individual’s well-being on a socio-economic level. 

Communities and Crime

Crime and place research demonstrate how a neighborhood’s built environment can create criminogenic conditions. For example, the location and positioning of bus stops, liquor stores, parks, and sidewalks within a given neighborhood can create a conducive environment for criminal behavior. The figure below illustrates built environment features geographically (see figure note for each panel difference). The research findings tell a different story about the meaning of ‘place,’ which has been historically understood under a community framework through a public health lens.

Source: Spatial distribution of built environment features. Note: PD = urban patch fragmentation, FRAC_MN = urban patch complexity, PLADJ = urban patch connectivity, RD = total length of roads / area of county 

Many neighborhoods that contain built environments that are conducive to criminal behavior arose out of exclusionary housing policies, facilitated by the state, real estate brokers, housing agencies, and community organizations. For example, redlining policies have manufactured segregated communities that are marked by significantly lower income households, lack of resources to quality education and social mobility, and marginalized, racial groups. 

A 2024 paper from the Journal of Urban Management further explores the relationship between urban form and crime. City development alters “the spatial distribution and path movements within the city, which influences the occurrence and distribution of urban criminal activity.” This paper offers important implications for designing effective crime prevention policies in collaboration with urban planning and policy, both working together to build safer and more sustainable cities. 

Zooming in on the neighborhood, certain characteristics of a neighborhood beyond the built environment also contribute to higher crime propensity. The Neighborhood Effects in Crime Theory proposes that socioeconomic and demographic attributes of a neighborhood can largely determine crime rates. For example, socioeconomic factors like poverty, unemployment, and household income disparities may all contribute to social unrest and increase the likelihood of criminal activity. 

Moreover, community dynamics play an important role in crime prevalence. Neighborhoods with community programs like after-school activities, crime watch schemes, and community policing initiatives are more likely to have lower rates of crime due to a shared sense of social cooperation. The image below summarizes how the discussed neighborhood attributes affect crime. 

Source: Visualizing Neighborhood Effects 

Crime and Health 

Next, crime and health. The connection between the two features a unique, bidirectional relationship. To start with the direction from crime to health, a 2025 article on the Intersection of Crime and Health found that “violent crime functions as a unique environmental stressor contributing to health disparities through mechanisms such as chronic stress, social disorganization, and reduced access to health-protective resources.” More specifically, the authors discuss the strong association between high crime neighborhoods and higher cardiometabolic disease prevalence. This is one example of how an individual’s social and physical environment can affect one’s own physiological body. 

Furthermore, literature has proven that contact with law enforcement and the incarceration system is tied to the “prevalence of chronic conditions, infectious diseases, and untreated mental health conditions.” Police stops and arrests have negative effects on an individual’s health, especially through stress processes and weathering. The weathering hypothesis is coined by psychologists and public health professionals and explains the effects of long-term exposure to stress on an individual’s health over time. 

A recent 2026 study, Breaking Bad: How Health Shocks Prompt Crime, sheds light on the reverse direction of health influencing criminal behavior. The paper finds a 14% increase in probability of committing a crime following a cancer diagnosis, on average. The authors point out two main economic motives to explain this 14% increase: (1) in compensation for loss of income due to illness and (2) lower expected cost of punishment due to lower survival probability of the patient/perpetrator.

Source: Effect of Cancer On Different Types of Crime

In the figure above, Panel A displays a notable increase of crime propensity for economic crimes post cancer diagnosis. Panel B conveys the largest increase in crime propensity for property crime post cancer diagnosis. Both panels express how health shocks like a cancer diagnosis can increase the probability of a patient’s criminal behavior for illegal gain of economic assets. This 2026 paper is novel in its consideration of health events within crime economics literature, and can inform the creation of more robust social welfare policies that target place-based harm reduction. 

Health and Communities 

An integral part of the public health mission is to deliver quality and affordable care to the communities that need it the most. Whether they are rural communities, marginalized communities, un/underinsured communities, or all of the above, building access to care and resources that improve social determinants of health is on the agenda of many stakeholders across public health, health care, politics, crime prevention, education, the environment, and non-government organizations. 

Currently, there is great momentum among innovative leaders across these mentioned sectors to restructure how we finance community health and align incentives across different stakeholders. For instance, this past February, three organizations– Health Begins, Common Health Coalition, and UC Berkeley School of Public Health– hosted a conference that brought together various leaders in public health and health care to address how we can better orient capital and resource flows to support health equity in underserved communities. These kinds of conversations emphasize the need for cross-sector and interdisciplinary collaboration to understand how to move the needle on bigger picture schemes, like connecting crime, health, and communities. 

A common theme in social welfare studies is the emphasis of upstream, preventative solutions that can improve community health. More specifically, providing social welfare services at the early stages of human life generates the largest health, economic, and social returns. A 2020 paper on Quantifying the Life-Cycle Benefits of an Influential Early-Childhood Program found that crime reduction contributes the largest net benefit value from providing an early-childhood program. The figure below demonstrates the net present value composition from pooled estimates of male and female participants in the study that attended the program and were followed-up throughout their life cycle. Crime reduction makes up 56.6% of overall value return. 

Source: Figure by Andie Yi based on Garcia et al. 2020, Appendix Figure F.1. As of Feb 18, 2026. 

Conclusion 

Upstream solutions like the early childhood program in this 2020 paper are central to the work of policy-makers and other stakeholders in the community health and criminology space. But, the most important takeaway is that this kind of upstream work cannot be done in siloes. Every welfare program to improve crime and health in communities requires an economist, a criminologist, a public health professional, an environmentalist, and a community organizer.

Truly there are many things in this life that shape our well-being, from the zip code we reside in to the health shocks we face. But in order to build human-centered solutions for our communities, we need every human perspective we can get. 

Call to Action

Bears that CARE at UC Berkeley is a great program initiative for violence intervention and prevention through community engagement. Request a Bears That CARE workshop for your club/organization/department/community to become part of the solution in making the Berkeley community safer and more inclusive for everyone.