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发帖数: 29846 | 1 The economic downturn has not led to more crime—contrary to the experts'
predictions. So what explains the disconnect? Big changes in American
culture, says James Q. Wilson.
When the FBI announced last week that violent crime in the U.S. had reached
a 40-year low in 2010, many criminologists were perplexed. It had been a
dismal year economically, and the standard view in the field, echoed for
decades by the media, is that unemployment and poverty are strongly linked
to crime. The argument is straightforward: When less legal work is available
, more illegal "work" takes place.
The economist Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, a Nobel laureate,
gave the standard view its classic formulation in the 1960s. He argued that
crime is a rational act, committed when the criminal's "expected utility"
exceeds that of using his time and other resources in pursuit of alternative
activities, such as leisure or legitimate work. Observation may appear to
bear this theory out. After all, neighborhoods with elevated crime rates
tend to be those where poverty and unemployment are high as well.
But there have long been difficulties with the notion that unemployment
causes crime. For one thing, the 1960s, a period of rising crime, had
essentially the same unemployment rate as the late 1990s and early 2000s, a
period when crime fell. And during the Great Depression, when unemployment
hit 25%, the crime rate in many cities went down. Among the explanations
offered for this puzzle is that unemployment and poverty were so common
during the Great Depression that families became closer, devoted themselves
to mutual support, and kept young people, who might be more inclined to
criminal behavior, under constant adult supervision. These days, because
many families are weaker and children are more independent, we would not see
the same effect, so certain criminologists continue to suggest that a 1%
increase in the unemployment rate should produce as much as a 2% increase in
property-crime rates.
Yet when the recent recession struck, that didn't happen. As the national
unemployment rate doubled from around 5% to nearly 10%, the property-crime
rate, far from spiking, fell significantly. For 2009, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation reported an 8% drop in the nationwide robbery rate and a 17%
reduction in the auto-theft rate from the previous year. Big-city reports
show the same thing. Between 2008 and 2010, New York City experienced a 4%
decline in the robbery rate and a 10% fall in the burglary rate. Boston,
Chicago and Los Angeles witnessed similar declines.
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AN INMATE in his bunk in Santa Ana, Calif. Some researchers say that higher
rates of imprisonment can explain a quarter or more of the drop in crime.
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Some scholars argue that the unemployment rate is too crude a measure of
economic frustration to prove the connection between unemployment and crime,
since it estimates only the percentage of the labor force that is looking
for work and hasn't found it. But other economic indicators tell much the
same story. The labor-force participation rate lets us determine the
percentage of the labor force that is neither working nor looking for work—
individuals who are, in effect, detached from the labor force. These people
should be especially vulnerable to criminal inclinations, if the bad-economy
-leads-to-crime theory holds. In 2008, though, even as crime was falling,
only about half of men aged 16 to 24 (who are disproportionately likely to
commit crimes) were in the labor force, down from over two-thirds in 1988,
and a comparable decline took place among African-American men (who are also
disproportionately likely to commit crimes).
The University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index offers another way to
assess the link between the economy and crime. This measure rests on
thousands of interviews asking people how their financial situations have
changed over the last year, how they think the economy will do during the
next year, and about their plans for buying durable goods. The index
measures the way people feel, rather than the objective conditions they face
. It has proved to be a very good predictor of stock-market behavior and,
for a while, of the crime rate, which tended to climb when people lost
confidence. When the index collapsed in 2009 and 2010, the stock market
predictably went down with it—but this time, the crime rate went down, too.
So we have little reason to ascribe the recent crime decline to jobs, the
labor market or consumer sentiment. The question remains: Why is the crime
rate falling?
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One obvious answer is that many more people are in prison than in the past.
Experts differ on the size of the effect, but I think that William Spelman
and Steven Levitt have it about right in believing that greater
incarceration can explain about one-quarter or more of the crime decline.
Yes, many thoughtful observers think that we put too many offenders in
prison for too long. For some criminals, such as low-level drug dealers and
former inmates returned to prison for parole violations, that may be so. But
it's true nevertheless that when prisoners are kept off the street, they
can attack only one another, not you or your family.
Imprisonment's crime-reduction effect helps to explain why the burglary, car
-theft and robbery rates are lower in the U.S. than in England. The
difference results not from the willingness to send convicted offenders to
prison, which is about the same in both countries, but in how long America
keeps them behind bars. For the same offense, you will spend more time in
prison here than in England. Still, prison can't be the sole reason for the
recent crime drop in this country: Canada has seen roughly the same decline
in crime, but its imprisonment rate has been relatively flat for at least
two decades.
Another possible reason for reduced crime is that potential victims may have
become better at protecting themselves by equipping their homes with
burglar alarms, putting extra locks on their cars and moving into safer
buildings or even safer neighborhoods. We have only the faintest idea,
however, about how common these trends are or what effects on crime they may
have.
Policing has become more disciplined over the last two decades; these days,
it tends to be driven by the desire to reduce crime, rather than simply to
maximize arrests, and that shift has reduced crime rates. One of the most
important innovations is what has been called hot-spot policing. The great
majority of crimes tend to occur in the same places. Put active police
resources in those areas instead of telling officers to drive around waiting
for 911 calls, and you can bring down crime. The hot-spot idea helped to
increase the effectiveness of the New York Police Department's Compstat
program, which uses computerized maps to pinpoint where crime is taking
place and enables police chiefs to hold precinct captains responsible for
targeting those areas.
Researchers continue to test and refine hot-spot policing. After analyzing
data from over 7,000 police arrivals at various locations in Minneapolis,
the criminologists Lawrence Sherman and David Weisburd showed that for every
minute an officer spent at a spot, the length of time without a crime there
after the officer departed went up—until the officer had been gone for
more than 15 minutes. After that, the crime rate went up. The police can
make the best use of their time by staying at a hot spot for a while, moving
on, and returning after 15 minutes.
Some cities now use a computer-based system for mapping traffic accidents
and crime rates. They have noticed that the two measures tend to coincide:
Where there are more accidents, there is more crime. In Shawnee, Kan., the
police spent a lot more time in the 4% of the city where one-third of the
crime occurred: Burglaries fell there by 60% (even though in the city as a
whole they fell by only 8%), and traffic accidents went down by 17%.
There may also be a medical reason for the decline in crime. For decades,
doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much
more likely to be aggressive, violent and delinquent. In 1974, the
Environmental Protection Agency required oil companies to stop putting lead
in gasoline. At the same time, lead in paint was banned for any new home (
though old buildings still have lead paint, which children can absorb).
Tests have shown that the amount of lead in Americans' blood fell by four-
fifths between 1975 and 1991. A 2007 study by the economist Jessica Wolpaw
Reyes contended that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half
of the decline in violent crime during the 1990s in the U.S. and might bring
about greater declines in the future. Another economist, Rick Nevin, has
made the same argument for other nations.
Another shift that has probably helped to bring down crime is the decrease
in heavy cocaine use in many states. Measuring cocaine use is no easy matter
; one has to infer it from interviews or from hospital-admission rates.
Between 1992 and 2009, the number of admissions for cocaine or crack use
fell by nearly two-thirds. In 1999, 9.8% of 12th-grade students said that
they had tried cocaine; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 5.5%.
What we really need to know, though, is not how many people tried coke but
how many are heavy users. Casual users who regard coke as a party drug are
probably less likely to commit serious crimes than heavy users who may
resort to theft and violence to feed their craving. But a study by Jonathan
Caulkins at Carnegie Mellon University found that the total demand for
cocaine dropped between 1988 and 2010, with a sharp decline among both light
and heavy users.
Blacks still constitute the core of America's crime problem. But the African
-American crime rate, too, has been falling, probably because of the same
non-economic factors behind falling crime in general: imprisonment, policing
, environmental changes and less cocaine abuse.
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Knowing the exact crime rate of any ethnic or racial group isn't easy, since
most crimes don't result in arrest or conviction, and those that do may be
an unrepresentative fraction of all crimes. Nevertheless, we do know the
racial characteristics of those who have been arrested for crimes, and they
show that the number of blacks arrested has been falling. Barry Latzer of
the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has demonstrated that between 1980
and 2005, arrests of blacks for homicide and other violent crimes fell by
about half nationwide.
It's also suggestive that in the five New York City precincts where the
population is at least 80% black, the murder rate fell by 78% between 1990
and 2000. In the black neighborhoods of Chicago, burglary fell by 52%,
robbery by 62%, and homicide by 33% between 1991 and 2003. A skeptic might
retort that all these seeming gains were merely the result of police
officers' giving up and no longer recording crimes in black neighborhoods.
But opinion surveys in Chicago show that, among blacks, fear of crime was
cut in half during the same period.
One can cite further evidence of a turnaround in black crime. Researchers at
the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention found
that in 1980, arrests of young blacks outnumbered arrests of whites more
than six to one. By 2002, the gap had been closed to just under four to one.
Drug use among blacks has changed even more dramatically than it has among
the population as a whole. As Mr. Latzer points out—and his argument is
confirmed by a study by Bruce D. Johnson, Andrew Golub and Eloise Dunlap—
among 13,000 people arrested in Manhattan between 1987 and 1997, a
disproportionate number of whom were black, those born between 1948 and 1969
were heavily involved with crack cocaine, but those born after 1969 used
very little crack and instead smoked marijuana.
The reason was simple: The younger African-Americans had known many people
who used crack and other hard drugs and wound up in prisons, hospitals and
morgues. The risks of using marijuana were far less serious. This shift in
drug use, if the New York City experience is borne out in other locations,
can help to explain the fall in black inner-city crime rates after the early
1990s.
John Donohue and Steven Levitt have advanced an additional explanation for
the reduction in black crime: the legalization of abortion, which resulted
in black children's never being born into circumstances that would have made
them likelier to become criminals. I have ignored that explanation because
it remains a strongly contested finding, challenged by two economists at the
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and by various academics.
At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that
crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic
downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the
culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have
relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression's fall in
crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on
this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-
expression—at society's cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.
Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not
know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable
theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not of data-
driven social scientists. But we can take some comfort, perhaps, in
reflecting that identifying the likely causes of the crime decline is even
more important than precisely measuring it.
—Mr. Wilson is a senior fellow at the Clough Center at Boston College and
taught previously at Harvard, UCLA and Pepperdine. His many books include "
The Moral Sense," "Bureaucracy," and "Thinking About Crime." This essay is
adapted from the forthcoming issue of City Journal, published by the
Manhattan Institute. |
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