IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp17697.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Crime Prevention Programs Improve Citizen's Mental Health: Evidence from Peru

Author

Listed:
  • Amaya, Elard

    (University of Turin)

  • Aparicio Fenoll, Ainoa

    (University of Turin)

  • Mendolia, Silvia

    (University of Turin)

Abstract

Among Latin American countries, Peru has one of the highest crime rates, with 9 out of 10 Peruvians reporting feeling unsafe walking the streets at night. This rooted-in-reality feeling of insecurity may harm citizens' mental health. We study the consequences of the Peruvian Safe Neighborhood program, which increased police patrolling in selected neighborhoods, on the mental health of residents. We exploit the program's staggered implementation and use data from the Demographic and Health Survey to precisely geolocate the respondents' residencies. Our results show that enhanced crime prevention reduced the incidence of mental health problems by 6 percentage points. In particular, the program reduced depression, tiredness, concentration problems, suicide intentions, and sense of failure by 3–4 percentage points. The evidence suggests that improvements in mental health are driven by tangible changes in health-related behaviors. Following the implementation of Safe Neighborhood, there is an increase in healthcare utilization.

Suggested Citation

  • Amaya, Elard & Aparicio Fenoll, Ainoa & Mendolia, Silvia, 2025. "Crime Prevention Programs Improve Citizen's Mental Health: Evidence from Peru," IZA Discussion Papers 17697, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17697
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp17697.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    crime prevention; mental health;

    JEL classification:

    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law
    • I15 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Economic Development
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17697. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.