Barry Latzer on Why Crime Rises and Falls - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Barry Latzer: The optimistic view is that the late ‘60s crime tsunami, which ended in the mid-1990s, was sui generis, and we are now in a period of "permanent peace," with low crime for the foreseeable future
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Pessimists rely on the late Eric Monkkonen's cyclical theory of crime, which suggests that the successive weakening and strengthening of social controls on violence lead to a crime roller coaster. The current zeitgeist favors a weakening of social controls, including reductions in incarcerative sentences and restrictions on police, on the grounds that the criminal-justice system is too racist, unfair, and expensive. If Monkkonen were correct, we will get a crime rise before long.
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the most provocative feature of your book: your belief that different cultural groups show different propensities for crime, enduring over time, and that these groups carry these propensities with them when they migrate from place to place.
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this idea and its implications stir more controversy among criminologists than any other. Would you state your position as precisely as possible in this brief space?
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Latzer: First of all, culture and race, in the biological or genetic sense, are very different. Were it not for the racism of the 18th and 19th centuries, we might not have had a marked cultural difference between blacks and whites in the U.S. But history cannot be altered, only studied and sometimes deplored. 28 28
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Different groups of people, insofar as they consider themselves separate from others, share various cultural characteristics: dietary, religious, linguistic, artistic, etc. They also share common beliefs and values. There is nothing terribly controversial about this. If it is mistaken then the entire fields of sociology and anthropology are built on mistaken premises.
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With respect to violent crime, scholars are most interested in a group's preference for violence as a way of resolving interpersonal conflict. Some groups, traditionally rural, developed cultures of “honor”—strong sensitivities to personal insult. We see this among white and black southerners in the 19th century, and among southern Italian and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. in the early 20th century. These groups engaged in high levels of assaultive crimes in response to perceived slights, mainly victimizing their own kind.
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This honor culture explains the high rates of violent crime among African Americans who, living amidst southern whites for over a century, incorporated those values. When blacks migrated north in the 20th century, they transported these rates of violence. Elijah Anderson's book, The Code of the Streets, describes the phenomenon, and Thomas Sowell, in Black Liberals and White Rednecks, helps explain it. 28 28
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Theories of crime that point to poverty and racism have the advantage of explaining why low-income groups predominate when it comes to violent crime. What they really explain, though, is why more affluent groups refrain from such crime. And the answer is that middle-class people (regardless of race) stand to lose a great deal from such behavior.
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Likewise, the lead removal theory. The same "lead-free" generation that engaged in less crime from 1993 on committed high rates of violent crime between 1987 and 1992.
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Frum: Let’s flash forward to the present day. You make short work of most of the theories explaining the crime drop-off since the mid-1990s: the Freakonomics theory that attributes the crime decline to easier access to abortion after 1970; the theory that credits reductions in lead poisoning; and the theory that credits the mid-1990s economic spurt. Why are these ideas wrong? And what would you put in their place? 28 28
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both the abortion and leaded-gasoline theories are mistaken because of a failure to explain the crime spike that immediately preceded the great downturn. Abortions became freely available starting in the 1970s, which is also when lead was removed from gasoline. Fast-forward 15 to 20 years to the period in which unwanted babies had been removed from the population and were not part of the late adolescent, early adult, cohort. This cohort was responsible for the huge spike in crime in the late 1980s, early 1990s, the crack cocaine crime rise. Why didn't the winnowing through abortion of this population reduce crime?
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The cultural explanation for violence is superior to explanations that rest of poverty or racism, however, because it can account for the differentials in the violent-crime rates of groups with comparable adversities
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As for economic booms, it is tempting to argue that they reduce crime on the theory that people who have jobs and higher incomes have less incentive to rob and steal. This is true. But violent crimes, such as murder and manslaughter, assault, and rape, are not motivated by pecuniary interests. They are motivated by arguments, often of a seemingly petty nature, desires for sexual conquest by violence in the case of rape, or domestic conflicts, none of which are related to general economic conditions
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Rises in violent crime have much more to do with migrations of high-crime cultures, especially to locations in which governments, particularly crime-control agents, are weak.
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Declines are more likely when crime controls are strong, and there are no migrations or demographic changes associated with crime rises
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In short, the aging of the violent boomer generation followed by the sudden rise and demise of the crack epidemic best explains the crime trough that began in the mid-1990s and seems to be continuing even today.
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Contrary to leftist claims, strengthened law enforcement played a major role in the crime decline. The strengthening was the result of criminal-justice policy changes demanded by the public, black and white, and was necessitated by the weakness of the criminal justice system in the late ‘60s
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On the other hand, conservatives tend to rely too much on the strength of the criminal-justice system in explaining crime oscillations, which, as I said, have a great to do with migrations and demographics
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The contemporary challenge is to keep law enforcement strong without alienating African Americans, an especially difficult proposition given the outsized violent-crime rates in low-income black communities.
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Frum: The sad exception to the downward trend in crime since 1990 is the apparent increase in mass shootings
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Should such attacks be included in our thinking about crime? If so, how should we think about them? 28 28
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If we separate out the ideologically motivated mass killings, such as Orlando (apparently) and San Bernardino, then we have a different problem. Surveilling potential killers who share a violent ideology will be extremely difficult but worthwhile. Limiting the availability of rapid-fire weapons with high-capacity ammunition clips is also worth doing, but politically divisive.
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of course, developments abroad will affect the number of incidents, as will the copycat effect in the immediate aftermath of an incident. This is a complex problem, different from ordinary killings, which, by the way, take many more lives.