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Current trends in crime in the Czech Republic
BLÁHOVÁ, Radka
After 1989, our society as a whole underwent many changes: our proprietary relati-ons as well as our value system changed, a new social phenomenon unemployment emerged, and the crime rate in the Czech Republic went up rapidly. The aim of this un-dergraduate thesis is to map current trends in the development of crime in the Czech Republic. I have therefore focused on studying the effects of unemployment on the dy-namics of crime in selected regions of the Czech Republic. The main objective of my thesis is to test the causality between unemployment and crime, as well as as a partial goal to verify the impact of long-term unemployment on the crime rate in general. The thesis is divided into a theoretical part and empiric part. In the theoretical part, I concentrated on defining the concept of criminality as such, and on examining the etio-logy of crime and its structure. The empiric part focuses on the testing of hypotheses. The basic hypothesis presumes that employment has a direct effect on crime rate, main-taining as a working hypothesis that the dynamics of general crime rate correspond to the development of long-term unemployment. During my work on the thesis, I used the quantitative research strategy, the statistical method, and secondary analysis of do-cuments as the data collection technique. I collected the relevant data from two basic sources, namely: data on labor and social trends from the Statistical Yearbooks that the Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs published in the years of 2005 to 2014 and data from the public database of the Czech Statistical Office, where the CSO publishes data on all crimes recorded and identified. My choice of data was purposeful in that I divided the data into four basic sets, namely: annual reviews of the average number of job applicants; the number of job applicants unemployed longer than 12 months (status as of December 31 of the given calendar year); total crime rate and general crime rate from 2005 to 2014 in all the regions of the Czech Republic and Prague; and then the same for all districts in the Vysočina Region, South Bohemian Region, South Moravian Region during the years of 2005 - 2014. The results of my research did not prove a direct linear relation between crime dy-namics and total unemployment, hence my basic hypothesis has not been confirmed. The second area of my research did confirm that long-term unemployment impacts on the general crime rate in the given regions. Thus, the results of my work proved the existence of a link between long-term unemployment and crime rate. The study could therefore be used as support material when devising crime prevention programs on local or regional level. Simultaneously, however, I maintain that delinquency cannot be unambiguously associated with pro-blems arising from low social status.
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