explaining U.S. crime

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Sep 7 06:41:44 PDT 1999


"Understanding the Time Path of Crime"

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.



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