THE EXTENT AND PATTERNS OF COMPLIANCE WITH THE CRIME AWARENESS AND CAMPUS SECURITY ACT OF 1990 AMONG POST-SECONDARY INSTITUTIONS: A NATIONAL STUDY
Chunmeng Lu, Ph.D.
Katherine Pridemore
Bonnie Fisher
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
University of
Cincinnati
Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0375
Bonnie.Fisher@uc.edu
Compliance with the Security Act does not appear universal among post-secondary
schools. Many schools did not respond to our request for their security
report, and noncompliance with the subsections was characteristic of the
schools. Multivariate models revealed somewhat of a pattern of compliance
among public schools, among schools located in states where campus crime
reporting laws are present, and with schools that had a small percent of
minority students. However, no strong systematic patterns of compliance
were found among the other variables in the models.
What accounts for this lack of consistent predictive ability of control
and subculture variables, economic variables and organizational characteristics?
Several explanations can be offered. First, enforcement or lack of enforcement
of the Security Act by the Department of Education is one explanations,
as is the lack of harsh penalties for noncompliance. It could be the case
that program reviewers of institutions are not requesting the security reports
on a regular basis, so there are few benefits for schools to take the time
and money (especially since the Security Act is an unfunded mandate) to
develop a security report. Second, it could be the case that program reviewers
do not examine a security report to see if thee is compliance with all the
subsections, and since schools know this, there is little incentive to comply
with all the subsections. It could also be the case that when program reviewers
find noncompliance with the Security Act, the penalty is not harsh enough
to create an incentive for other schools to comply. That is, the benefits
of noncompliance with the Security Act are still greater than the costs
of compliance. Third, schools may be uncertain as the extent of their liability
if they comply with the Security Act. The courts have ruled that schools
are liable for on-campus victimizations when they are foreseeable (see Smith
and Fossey, 1995), but the courts have yet to address liability and the
Security Act. Schools do not know whether complying with the Security Act
increases their exposure to liability by creating a standard of care, breach
of which would form the basis for liability (Smith and Fossey, 1995:222).
The Department of Education is required to present Congress with a report
about the Security Act in 1995. Our findings suggests that if this law is
meant to be more than a paper tiger, its mandates must be made clear to
schools and their enforcement must be ensured. This may require the Department
of Education to set up a systematic process by which compliance is determined,
and known penalties for noncompliance that are strict and that severely
outweigh the costs of complying. To date, this process does not exist or
if it does, it is not enforced in such a way as to deter noncompliance with
the Security Act.
More research still needs to be done if we are to better understand compliance
and develop a framework for compliance within criminological theory. The
work presented here is one step in the direction of Sutherland's call for
lawbreaking by institutions to fall within the scope of criminological theory.