BY: JOHN J. DONOHUE
Stanford Law School
Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=168614
Paper ID: Stanford Law School, John M. Olin Program in Law and
Economics, Working Paper No. 158
Date: April 1998
Contact: JOHN J. DONOHUE
Email: Mailto:jjd at stanford.edu
Postal: Stanford Law School
Alvarado Row & Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610 USA
Phone: (650)723-0290
Fax: (650)725-0253
Note: A revised version of this working paper has been published
in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 88,
pp. 1423-1451, Summer 1998.
ABSTRACT:
This paper examines the recent drop in crime and the reasons
given therefore, and concludes that to properly evaluate this
phenomenon one must sort out the longterm trends in crime over
the last 50 years from the shortterm fluctuations around those
trends. There have been two clear longrun trends in crime over
the last half century: one involving sharply rising crime until
the late 1970s, followed by a period of slow decline over the
next two decades. As one might expect, there have been
considerable shortterm fluctuations around the two longrun
trends, and indeed, the later period has experienced greater
variability in crime around the longterm declining trend than
had been the case during the initial period of the rising
secular trend in crime.
Section I of the paper documents these broad patterns --
murder rates rose by roughly 4.4 percent per year from the
mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, and have fallen by roughly
six-tenths of 1 percent since then -- and discusses how they
illuminate the issues of why crime has fallen and where it is
likely to be headed in the future. Section II builds upon this
discussion to show that increased levels of incarceration and
favorable demographic shifts contributed to the slow decline in
crime over the last two decades, but cannot explain the sudden
drop in crime in the mid-1990s after the abrupt increases in
crime of the late 1980s. Section III concludes by noting that
the growing cost of incarceration suggests that at some point,
the public will call for an end to further increases in the
number of prison inmates. Since increasing incarceration, more
police, and favorable demographics have been modestly offsetting
the influences pushing towards higher crime, when the increases
stop and the demographic trends turn unfriendly (as they now
have), crime will begin a slow secular rise for the first time
in two decades, unless some other force (better policing
strategies, effective social programs) controls crime or the
unknown longterm criminogenic forces in society (the breakdown
in the family, pernicious media influences, declining schools,
growing drug use and drug markets?) abate.