THE ATLANTIC
After decades of soaring levels of homicides and drug violence, the country’s crime rate plunged dramatically over the last 25 years. What happened?
In the early 1990s, U.S. crime rates had been on a steep upward climb since the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency. The crack-cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s added fuel to the fire, and handgun-related homicides more than doubledbetween 1985 and 1990. That year, murders peaked in New York City with 2,245 killings. Politicians embraced tough-on-crime platforms and enacted harshly punitive policies. Experts warned the worst could be yet to come.
Then crime rates went down. And then they kept going down.
By decade’s end, the homicide rate plunged 42 percent nationwide. Violent crime decreased by one-third. What turned into a precipitous decline started later in some areas and took longer in others. But it happened everywhere: in each region of the country, in cities large and small, in rural and urban areas alike. In the Northeast, which reaped the largest benefits, the homicide rate was halved. Murders plummeted by 75 percent in New York City alone as the city entered the new millennium.
The trend kept ticking downward from there, more slowly and with some fluctuations, to the present day. By virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history.
But the forces that drove the Great American Crime Decline remain a mystery. Theories abound among sociologists, economists, and political scientists about the causes, with some hypotheses stronger than others. But there’s no real consensus among scholars about what caused one of the largest social shifts in modern American history.
So, what happened?
Below are some of the major causes cited for the decline. Read more at THE ATLANTIC to learn the shortcomings and strengths of each.
I remember the 1990s as a pretty good time for economic growth. Maybe that offered less incentive for crime.
Another national trend must have played a role, then. Maybe the decrease in alcohol consumption over the last few decades had an effect.
If we’re measuring against the rest of the world, then maybe mass incarceration played a role. The United States imprisons more people than anywhere else in the world, both in relative and total numbers. It seems logical that fewer criminals are on the streets as a result of tough-on-crime policies from that era.
I get where you’re coming from on mass incarceration’s sins. But surely law enforcement and better policing played some kind of role in the decline.
Economist Steven Levitt attributed New York City’s successes to the city’s higher rate of abortion, part of his broader argument linking Roe v. Wade to the crime decline. In the original paper outlining the theory, Levitt and fellow economist John Donohoe argued the 1973 ruling reduced the number of children born in unwanted circumstances, thereby reducing the number of children predisposed to violent crime later in life. Overall, they estimated this 20-year lag effect might account for as much as half of the crime decline in the ’90s.
Lead? The neurotoxic element stunts intellectual growth in children and causes behavioral problems when they become adults, but it wasn’t seen as a possible culprit for a nationwide crime wave until recently. In her 2007 paper on the relationship, economist Jessica Reyes attributed a 56 percent drop in violent crime in the 1990s to the removal of lead from gasoline after the Clean Air Act of 1970.
With children born after the early 1970s less affected by lead’s toxic effects, the logic goes, they would be less likely to commit crimes once they reached their 20s in the early 1990s. Mother Jones reporter Kevin Drum helped popularize the theory in his 2013 cover story. “In states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime declined slowly,” he wrote. “Where it declined quickly, crime declined quickly.” And, perhaps most intriguingly, the correlation held in other countries, too.
Demographics
Specifically, immigration.
"One of the biggest correlates for declining crime rates, not just in Los Angeles, is increases in immigration to large cities," said Kubrin, who's seen that connection emerge in her own research
What’s the correlation, for example, between economic inequality and crime? How does gentrification affect crime rates in major cities?
What other factors may have influenced the decline? Can it be attributed toantidepressants or the proliferation of cell phones? What about the aging of the baby boomer generation, or higher rates of gun ownership?
Why do so many Americans think crime hasn’t gone down at all?