6 ms·

Still lacking is consensus on why violent crime has declined. Depending on who you ask, reasons cited include: - Mass incarceration (usually credited with abou

by teuobk 12y ago

Still lacking is consensus on why violent crime has declined. Depending on who you ask, reasons cited include: - Mass incarceration (usually credited with about 25% of the crime decline) - More gun control (e.g., the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban) - Less gun control (e.g., the rise of "shall-issue" concealed carry permits) - Cultural change - Banning of lead in automotive fuel [Nevin 1999] Perhaps all of these mattered; perhaps none did. We don't really know.

spacehome 12y ago
Add legalization of abortion to that list.
- damon_c 12y ago
  Here is a citation to support this: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFooteGoetz2006.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFoot...
- vaadu 12y ago
  Is it just abortion or an increased use of conception prevention methods and morning after drugs?
- dfc 12y ago
  The abortion explanation has been repeated so frequently that many people have accepted this explanation without digging further into the details. This is one of many explanations that Steven Pinker discusses in his book "Better Angels of our Nature." I am not sure it is as clear cut as you imagine: (I apologize for the lengthy excerpt) When I told people I was writing a book on the historical decline of violence, I was repeatedly informed that the phenomenon had already been solved. Rates of violence have come down, they explained to me, because after abortion was legalized by the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision, the unwanted children who would ordinarily have grown up to be criminals were not born in the first place, because their begrudging or unfit mothers had had abortions instead. I first heard of this theory in 2001 when it was proposed by the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt, but it seemed too cute to be true.147 Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time. But Levitt, together with the journalist Stephen Dubner, popularized the theory in their bestseller Freakonomics , and now a large proportion of the public believes that crime went down in the 1990s because women aborted their crime-fated fetuses in the 1970s. To be fair, Levitt went on to argue that Roe v. Wade was just one of four causes of the crime decline, and he has presented sophisticated correlational statistics in support of the connection. For example, he showed that the handful of states that legalized abortion before 1973 were the first to see their crime rates go down.148 But these statistics compare the two ends of a long, hypothetical, and tenuous causal chain—the availability of legal abortion as the first link and the decline in crime two decades later as the last—and ignore all the links in between. The links include the assumptions that legal abortion causes fewer unwanted children, that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals, and that the first abortion-culled generation was the one spearheading the 1990s crime decline. But there are other explanations for the overall correlation (for example, that the large liberal states that first legalized abortion were also the first states to see the rise and fall of the crack epidemic), and the intermediate links have turned out to be fragile or nonexistent.149 To begin with, the freakonomics theory assumes that women were just as likely to have conceived unwanted children before and after 1973, and that the only difference was whether the children were born. But once abortion was legalized, couples may have treated it as a backup method of birth control and may have engaged in more unprotected sex. If the women conceived more unwanted children in the first place, the option of aborting more of them could leave the proportion of unwanted children the same. In fact, the proportion of unwanted children could even have increased if women were emboldened by the abortion option to have more unprotected sex in the heat of the moment, but then procrastinated or had second thoughts once they were pregnant. That may help explain why in the years since 1973 the proportion of children born to women in the most vulnerable categories—poor, single, teenage, and African American—did not decrease, as the freakonomics theory would predict. It increased, and by a lot.150 What about differences among individual women within a crime-prone population? Here the freakonomics theory would seem to get things backwards. Among women who are accidentally pregnant and unprepared to raise a child, the ones who terminate their pregnancies are likely to be forward-thinking, realistic, and disciplined, whereas the ones who carry the child to term are more likely to be fatalistic, disorganized, or immaturely focused on the thought of a cute baby rather than an unruly adolescent. Several studies have borne this out.151 Young pregnant women who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term. The availability of abortion thus may have led to a generation that is more prone to crime because it weeded out just the children who, whether through genes or environment, were most likely to exercise maturity and self-control. Also, the freakonomists’ theory about the psychological causes of crime comes right out of “Gee, Officer Krupke,” when a gang member says of his parents, “They didn’t wanna have me, but somehow I was had. Leapin’ lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!” And it is about as plausible. Though unwanted children may grow up to commit more crimes, it is more likely that women in crime-prone environments have more unwanted children than that unwantedness causes criminal behavior directly. In studies that pit the effects of parenting against the effects of the children’s peer environment, holding genes constant, the peer environment almost always wins.152 Finally, if easy abortion after 1973 sculpted a more crime-averse generation, the crime decline should have begun with the youngest group and then crept up the age brackets as they got older. The sixteen-year-olds of 1993, for example (who were born in 1977, when abortions were in full swing), should have committed fewer crimes than the sixteen-year-olds of 1983 (who were born in 1967, when abortion was illegal). By similar logic, the twenty-two-year-olds of 1993 should have remained violent, because they were born in pre-Roe 1971. Only in the late 1990s, when the first post-Roe generation reached their twenties, should the twenty-something age bracket have become less violent. In fact, the opposite happened. When the first post-Roe generation came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they did not tug the homicide statistics downward; they indulged in an unprecedented spree of mayhem. The crime decline began when the older cohorts, born well before Roe, laid down their guns and knives, and from them the lower homicide rates trickled down the age scale.153
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    The typesetting/justification of your text looks beautiful. I know it's been a solved problem for fixed-width fonts for roughly forty years, but what tool did you use to lay out the text like that? Some emacs magic or vim plugin? (I wish HN had a private messaging system for offtopic but harmless questions like this.)
    - dfc 12y ago
      No need to apologize, a private message would mean that others do not get to benefit from you asking a question;) I used `par` to typeset the text. It has not been updated in over a decade but I have never found a better tool for this. The documentation leaves a little to be desired but I think a lot of that is due to the flexibility of the program. For that specific quote I used `cat text | par 75j` with the man page recommended value in $PARINIT. http://www.nicemice.net/par/ http://www.nicemice.net/par/
    - teddyh 12y ago
      This is possible to do in Emacs by: 1. Going to the end of a line and pressing “Ctrl-x f” to run the set-fill-column command, to set the desired line width. (The default value is 70 characters.) 2. On each of the paragraphs, pressing “Ctrl-u Meta-q” to run the fill-paragraph command (with an argument to modify it to do justification as well as word wrapping).
  - smileysteve 12y ago
    You make great points with the increase in births and demonstrated forward-thinking population information. I do find these surprising as it's important to note that, while Abortion was illegal prior to Roe vs. Wade, there were certainly many performed. The legalization mostly made abortions available in a safer and more accessible manner, particularly to the poor or less forward-thinking.
chubot 12y ago
Throwing out guesses: - It's harder to avoid being caught now. Could a 70's style Mafia survive today? I doubt it. I think we can give some credit to better police techniques. Before DNA testing it was probably way easier to get away with murder (literally). - Absolute wealth has risen (although inequality has risen as well). The magnitude of crime you need to commit to survive without "real" income is lower than it used to be. - Probably something to do with wealthier people migrating towards cities again. Although that could be the effect of lower crime and not the cause. - Some crime has moved online, which can't be violent.
- applecore 12y ago
  Your first guess isn't far off. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/crooked-ladder http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/crooked-ladder
  - seestheday 12y ago
    That was a great article. Thanks for that.
- brownbat 12y ago
  > Could a 70's style Mafia survive today? I doubt it. RICO deserves a lot of the credit. Capone was booked on tax evasion instead of, say, all the murders. It took almost 40 years for an effective federal racketeering statute to be passed, and longer still for police and prosecutors to learn how to use it. RICO has its downsides, has been criticized for providing too much power to law enforcement. It's a pretty solid mob busting tool though. That said, two caveats. First, I'm not sure how much of crime is due to organized crime. I'm not sure that affects your bigger point though, that police techniques (as well as maybe legal tools) have improved. Secondly, note that organized crime does exist today. La Cosa Nostra is still around, as are various eastern European and Asian groups. Albanian groups are apparently one of the most formidable rising threats. Organized crime is probably harder, but it's also probably adapted to find ways to not get caught. Historical crime stats by category: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm CRS paper on organized crime in the US: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40525.pdf http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40525.pdf
rectangletangle 12y ago
Hell I remember reading an interesting study posted on here correlating leaded gas to crime rates. According to the study elevated ambient lead levels correlated with higher crime rates. Though in all likelihood there's probably a multitude of reasons.
msluyter 12y ago
Kevin Drum has been making the case for lead quite passionately. Some interesting articles: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li... http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/02/lead-and-crime-its-brain-thing http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/02/lead-and-crime...
Igglyboo 12y ago
Can you explain the lead in automotive fuel thing?
- Crito 12y ago
  Crudely put, the idea is that lead in gasoline meant lead in auto fumes, which mean lead in the air. Lead in the air meant lead entering the body through the lungs, which meant mass low-grade lead poisoning / developmental problems. Less crudely put: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Toxicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Toxicity
- analog31 12y ago
  The above links to Mother Jones do a pretty good job. To make a long story short, the lead in the fuel came down to earth in solid particulate form, and formed fairly high concentrations in the soil, where it was ingested by kids. Noting Crito's comment, I don't know if inhalation or ingestion was the primary vector.
  - Crito 12y ago
    I was under the impression that inhalation played a large role; suggested by elevated crime rates in urban areas where there was an abundance of car fumes but next to zero farming. I may be wrong about that; I'll have to read more about this topic.
    - analog31 12y ago
      What I remember reading is that kids ingest a finite amount of soil in the course of simply being outdoors. In fact lead forms some compounds that are actually tasty, and I think it was in the time of the ancient Romans that they boiled wine in lead pots to produce lead acetate, an artificial sweetener. But inhalation would make sense too.
omegaham 12y ago
1. Crime pays less than it used to. Back in the good old days, people carried more cash on them. Pickpocketing and mugging was reasonably profitable when everyone had money. These days, everyone has credit cards. I frequently carry less than forty dollars; I've gone weeks where I have zero cash in my wallet. 2. It's harder to avoid the fuzz. Police techniques have gotten dramatically better. Everything from witness protection programs (Now you can testify against the mob boss without worrying about feeding the fish) to analysis of crime patterns means that police are collecting more evidence than ever before. 3. Entire avenues of crime have disappeared due to 1 and 2. For example, auto theft has declined dramatically due to the institution of chipped keys, GPS tracking, and the easy apprehension of chop shops. 4. While violent crime has declined in profitability, white-collar crime has become much more lucrative. There's big money in identity theft, for example. This means that the ambitious criminals who would have previously been robbing banks and mugging people are now doing their crime online and over the phone. I don't think that these things are exclusively responsible; I'd just like to add them to the nice list that you have going.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > 4. While violent crime has declined in profitability, white-collar crime has become much more lucrative. There's big money in identity theft, for example. This means that the ambitious criminals who would have previously been robbing banks and mugging people are now doing their crime online and over the phone. Just want to add to this credit card theft (i.e. Target and Home Depot). The rewards are so much higher, and you never have to face someone in person to steal from them.
  - adventured 12y ago
    And you can do it from almost anywhere in the world, including countries that would be very hard to extradite you out of. Pre-modern Web it would have been far more difficult - nearly impossible - for someone from eastern Europe to steal money from me in any manner.
    - smcl 12y ago
bilbo0s 12y ago
Rise of marijuana as drug of choice as opposed to amphetamines like crack.
- dfc 12y ago
  Crack Cocaine is not in the amphetamine category of drugs. Moreover, this explanation totally ignores the plague that is methamphetamine.
- oofabz 12y ago
  There is not much correlation between the graph of crime rates in the article and this graph of marijuana usage: http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2k11Results/NSDUHresults2011.htm#Fig8-4 http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2k11Results/NSDUHresults201...
staunch 12y ago
- Gaming (1985 NES release)
redwood 12y ago
My favorite theory: Cellphones. Now black markets do not require real estate, which means no bloodbaths for prime territory. Cellphones turned the black market into a ubiquitous thing that's all about lead gen!
- brownbat 12y ago
  Nice. And now Instagram, haven for sales of prescription strength cough syrup: http://noisey.vice.com/blog/lean-on-me http://noisey.vice.com/blog/lean-on-me (Though I guess that article still has some threats as spillover, threats on the internet are pretty common, so maybe they're acted out less frequently?)
evli 12y ago
Another possibly is the increase in abortions, removing unwanted children that may have potentially become criminals. src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Also, the Superfreakonomics chapter on that: http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-4/ http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...
shakethemonkey 12y ago
#1 reason is probably aging population. Young people, in particular young men, commit more crimes. A nice animation (though this is England/Wales): http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18854073 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18854073
thelettere 12y ago
Rise of more sophisticated, engaging and cheap entertainment - especially movies, video games, and the internet. Can't believe no one mentioned this - and on a tech site no less. Why commit a murder and go to jail when you can get just as much sadistic pleasure with none of the consequences by doing it in a video game or vicariously through a movie character?
- vacri 12y ago
  I've thought about this vector as well, and it's not just about sating bloodlust - a lot of crime happens when people get bored. A greater variety of entertainment that is much easier to access keeps the boredom at bay. It's the 'circuses' part of 'bread and circuses'.
adventured 12y ago
Looking forward to adding the end of drug prohibition / war on drugs, to this list in the coming decade. In theory there should be another significant drop in crime, from the reduction in direct and indirect drug crime. In fact, I'd argue there are only two concentrated causes of crime left in America: prohibition, and black + immigrant poverty (with the war on drugs and the prison machine having a significant role to play in black poverty).
- collyw 12y ago
  Do white nationals in poverty not commit crime? My assumption would be that crime is poverty related (I think this has been shown in various studies) and nothing to do with immigrant / black part.
Retric 12y ago
Several people have mentioned gaming, but it's more than just an outlet. People spend a lot more time indoors due to video games and the internet. Fewer interactions mean less random third party crime. Also, credit cards credit / debit cards reduced the amount of cash people walk around with at the same time stuff became less valuable. So there is just less money to be made robbing people / houses.
PaulAJ 12y ago
The decline in violent crime only exists as long as you exclude all of the violent crime that happens in prisons.
- wanderingstan 12y ago
  I've seen this mentioned before but never any sources. Can you back this up? I'm no fan of the US's bloated prison system, but the numbers don't seem like they'd add up.
ddebernardy 12y ago
A possible reason you forget is abortion: http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-4/ http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...
jsmcgd 12y ago
Violent crime is decreasing across the western world which suggests that factors that are only relevant to one country/culture are unlikely to be the main driving force of this phenomenon.

by teuobk 12y ago

spacehome 12y ago

Add legalization of abortion to that list.

damon_c 12y ago
Here is a citation to support this: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFooteGoetz2006.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFoot...
vaadu 12y ago
Is it just abortion or an increased use of conception prevention methods and morning after drugs?
dfc 12y ago
The abortion explanation has been repeated so frequently that many people have accepted this explanation without digging further into the details. This is one of many explanations that Steven Pinker discusses in his book "Better Angels of our Nature." I am not sure it is as clear cut as you imagine: (I apologize for the lengthy excerpt) When I told people I was writing a book on the historical decline of violence, I was repeatedly informed that the phenomenon had already been solved. Rates of violence have come down, they explained to me, because after abortion was legalized by the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision, the unwanted children who would ordinarily have grown up to be criminals were not born in the first place, because their begrudging or unfit mothers had had abortions instead. I first heard of this theory in 2001 when it was proposed by the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt, but it seemed too cute to be true.147 Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time. But Levitt, together with the journalist Stephen Dubner, popularized the theory in their bestseller Freakonomics , and now a large proportion of the public believes that crime went down in the 1990s because women aborted their crime-fated fetuses in the 1970s. To be fair, Levitt went on to argue that Roe v. Wade was just one of four causes of the crime decline, and he has presented sophisticated correlational statistics in support of the connection. For example, he showed that the handful of states that legalized abortion before 1973 were the first to see their crime rates go down.148 But these statistics compare the two ends of a long, hypothetical, and tenuous causal chain—the availability of legal abortion as the first link and the decline in crime two decades later as the last—and ignore all the links in between. The links include the assumptions that legal abortion causes fewer unwanted children, that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals, and that the first abortion-culled generation was the one spearheading the 1990s crime decline. But there are other explanations for the overall correlation (for example, that the large liberal states that first legalized abortion were also the first states to see the rise and fall of the crack epidemic), and the intermediate links have turned out to be fragile or nonexistent.149 To begin with, the freakonomics theory assumes that women were just as likely to have conceived unwanted children before and after 1973, and that the only difference was whether the children were born. But once abortion was legalized, couples may have treated it as a backup method of birth control and may have engaged in more unprotected sex. If the women conceived more unwanted children in the first place, the option of aborting more of them could leave the proportion of unwanted children the same. In fact, the proportion of unwanted children could even have increased if women were emboldened by the abortion option to have more unprotected sex in the heat of the moment, but then procrastinated or had second thoughts once they were pregnant. That may help explain why in the years since 1973 the proportion of children born to women in the most vulnerable categories—poor, single, teenage, and African American—did not decrease, as the freakonomics theory would predict. It increased, and by a lot.150 What about differences among individual women within a crime-prone population? Here the freakonomics theory would seem to get things backwards. Among women who are accidentally pregnant and unprepared to raise a child, the ones who terminate their pregnancies are likely to be forward-thinking, realistic, and disciplined, whereas the ones who carry the child to term are more likely to be fatalistic, disorganized, or immaturely focused on the thought of a cute baby rather than an unruly adolescent. Several studies have borne this out.151 Young pregnant women who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term. The availability of abortion thus may have led to a generation that is more prone to crime because it weeded out just the children who, whether through genes or environment, were most likely to exercise maturity and self-control. Also, the freakonomists’ theory about the psychological causes of crime comes right out of “Gee, Officer Krupke,” when a gang member says of his parents, “They didn’t wanna have me, but somehow I was had. Leapin’ lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!” And it is about as plausible. Though unwanted children may grow up to commit more crimes, it is more likely that women in crime-prone environments have more unwanted children than that unwantedness causes criminal behavior directly. In studies that pit the effects of parenting against the effects of the children’s peer environment, holding genes constant, the peer environment almost always wins.152 Finally, if easy abortion after 1973 sculpted a more crime-averse generation, the crime decline should have begun with the youngest group and then crept up the age brackets as they got older. The sixteen-year-olds of 1993, for example (who were born in 1977, when abortions were in full swing), should have committed fewer crimes than the sixteen-year-olds of 1983 (who were born in 1967, when abortion was illegal). By similar logic, the twenty-two-year-olds of 1993 should have remained violent, because they were born in pre-Roe 1971. Only in the late 1990s, when the first post-Roe generation reached their twenties, should the twenty-something age bracket have become less violent. In fact, the opposite happened. When the first post-Roe generation came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they did not tug the homicide statistics downward; they indulged in an unprecedented spree of mayhem. The crime decline began when the older cohorts, born well before Roe, laid down their guns and knives, and from them the lower homicide rates trickled down the age scale.153
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  The typesetting/justification of your text looks beautiful. I know it's been a solved problem for fixed-width fonts for roughly forty years, but what tool did you use to lay out the text like that? Some emacs magic or vim plugin? (I wish HN had a private messaging system for offtopic but harmless questions like this.)
  - dfc 12y ago
    No need to apologize, a private message would mean that others do not get to benefit from you asking a question;) I used `par` to typeset the text. It has not been updated in over a decade but I have never found a better tool for this. The documentation leaves a little to be desired but I think a lot of that is due to the flexibility of the program. For that specific quote I used `cat text | par 75j` with the man page recommended value in $PARINIT. http://www.nicemice.net/par/ http://www.nicemice.net/par/
  - teddyh 12y ago
    This is possible to do in Emacs by: 1. Going to the end of a line and pressing “Ctrl-x f” to run the set-fill-column command, to set the desired line width. (The default value is 70 characters.) 2. On each of the paragraphs, pressing “Ctrl-u Meta-q” to run the fill-paragraph command (with an argument to modify it to do justification as well as word wrapping).
- smileysteve 12y ago
  You make great points with the increase in births and demonstrated forward-thinking population information. I do find these surprising as it's important to note that, while Abortion was illegal prior to Roe vs. Wade, there were certainly many performed. The legalization mostly made abortions available in a safer and more accessible manner, particularly to the poor or less forward-thinking.

chubot 12y ago

Throwing out guesses: - It's harder to avoid being caught now. Could a 70's style Mafia survive today? I doubt it. I think we can give some credit to better police techniques. Before DNA testing it was probably way easier to get away with murder (literally). - Absolute wealth has risen (although inequality has risen as well). The magnitude of crime you need to commit to survive without "real" income is lower than it used to be. - Probably something to do with wealthier people migrating towards cities again. Although that could be the effect of lower crime and not the cause. - Some crime has moved online, which can't be violent.

applecore 12y ago
Your first guess isn't far off. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/crooked-ladder http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/crooked-ladder
- seestheday 12y ago
  That was a great article. Thanks for that.
brownbat 12y ago
> Could a 70's style Mafia survive today? I doubt it. RICO deserves a lot of the credit. Capone was booked on tax evasion instead of, say, all the murders. It took almost 40 years for an effective federal racketeering statute to be passed, and longer still for police and prosecutors to learn how to use it. RICO has its downsides, has been criticized for providing too much power to law enforcement. It's a pretty solid mob busting tool though. That said, two caveats. First, I'm not sure how much of crime is due to organized crime. I'm not sure that affects your bigger point though, that police techniques (as well as maybe legal tools) have improved. Secondly, note that organized crime does exist today. La Cosa Nostra is still around, as are various eastern European and Asian groups. Albanian groups are apparently one of the most formidable rising threats. Organized crime is probably harder, but it's also probably adapted to find ways to not get caught. Historical crime stats by category: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm CRS paper on organized crime in the US: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40525.pdf http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40525.pdf

rectangletangle 12y ago

Hell I remember reading an interesting study posted on here correlating leaded gas to crime rates. According to the study elevated ambient lead levels correlated with higher crime rates. Though in all likelihood there's probably a multitude of reasons.

msluyter 12y ago

Kevin Drum has been making the case for lead quite passionately. Some interesting articles: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li... http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/02/lead-and-crime-its-brain-thing http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/02/lead-and-crime...

Igglyboo 12y ago

Can you explain the lead in automotive fuel thing?

Crito 12y ago
Crudely put, the idea is that lead in gasoline meant lead in auto fumes, which mean lead in the air. Lead in the air meant lead entering the body through the lungs, which meant mass low-grade lead poisoning / developmental problems. Less crudely put: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Toxicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Toxicity
analog31 12y ago
The above links to Mother Jones do a pretty good job. To make a long story short, the lead in the fuel came down to earth in solid particulate form, and formed fairly high concentrations in the soil, where it was ingested by kids. Noting Crito's comment, I don't know if inhalation or ingestion was the primary vector.
- Crito 12y ago
  I was under the impression that inhalation played a large role; suggested by elevated crime rates in urban areas where there was an abundance of car fumes but next to zero farming. I may be wrong about that; I'll have to read more about this topic.
  - analog31 12y ago
    What I remember reading is that kids ingest a finite amount of soil in the course of simply being outdoors. In fact lead forms some compounds that are actually tasty, and I think it was in the time of the ancient Romans that they boiled wine in lead pots to produce lead acetate, an artificial sweetener. But inhalation would make sense too.

omegaham 12y ago

1. Crime pays less than it used to. Back in the good old days, people carried more cash on them. Pickpocketing and mugging was reasonably profitable when everyone had money. These days, everyone has credit cards. I frequently carry less than forty dollars; I've gone weeks where I have zero cash in my wallet. 2. It's harder to avoid the fuzz. Police techniques have gotten dramatically better. Everything from witness protection programs (Now you can testify against the mob boss without worrying about feeding the fish) to analysis of crime patterns means that police are collecting more evidence than ever before. 3. Entire avenues of crime have disappeared due to 1 and 2. For example, auto theft has declined dramatically due to the institution of chipped keys, GPS tracking, and the easy apprehension of chop shops. 4. While violent crime has declined in profitability, white-collar crime has become much more lucrative. There's big money in identity theft, for example. This means that the ambitious criminals who would have previously been robbing banks and mugging people are now doing their crime online and over the phone. I don't think that these things are exclusively responsible; I'd just like to add them to the nice list that you have going.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> 4. While violent crime has declined in profitability, white-collar crime has become much more lucrative. There's big money in identity theft, for example. This means that the ambitious criminals who would have previously been robbing banks and mugging people are now doing their crime online and over the phone. Just want to add to this credit card theft (i.e. Target and Home Depot). The rewards are so much higher, and you never have to face someone in person to steal from them.
- adventured 12y ago
  And you can do it from almost anywhere in the world, including countries that would be very hard to extradite you out of. Pre-modern Web it would have been far more difficult - nearly impossible - for someone from eastern Europe to steal money from me in any manner.
  - smcl 12y ago

bilbo0s 12y ago

Rise of marijuana as drug of choice as opposed to amphetamines like crack.

dfc 12y ago
Crack Cocaine is not in the amphetamine category of drugs. Moreover, this explanation totally ignores the plague that is methamphetamine.
oofabz 12y ago
There is not much correlation between the graph of crime rates in the article and this graph of marijuana usage: http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2k11Results/NSDUHresults2011.htm#Fig8-4 http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2k11Results/NSDUHresults201...

staunch 12y ago

- Gaming (1985 NES release)

redwood 12y ago

My favorite theory: Cellphones. Now black markets do not require real estate, which means no bloodbaths for prime territory. Cellphones turned the black market into a ubiquitous thing that's all about lead gen!

brownbat 12y ago
Nice. And now Instagram, haven for sales of prescription strength cough syrup: http://noisey.vice.com/blog/lean-on-me http://noisey.vice.com/blog/lean-on-me (Though I guess that article still has some threats as spillover, threats on the internet are pretty common, so maybe they're acted out less frequently?)

evli 12y ago

Another possibly is the increase in abortions, removing unwanted children that may have potentially become criminals. src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...

toomuchtodo 12y ago
Also, the Superfreakonomics chapter on that: http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-4/ http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...

shakethemonkey 12y ago

#1 reason is probably aging population. Young people, in particular young men, commit more crimes. A nice animation (though this is England/Wales): http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18854073 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18854073

thelettere 12y ago

Rise of more sophisticated, engaging and cheap entertainment - especially movies, video games, and the internet. Can't believe no one mentioned this - and on a tech site no less. Why commit a murder and go to jail when you can get just as much sadistic pleasure with none of the consequences by doing it in a video game or vicariously through a movie character?

vacri 12y ago
I've thought about this vector as well, and it's not just about sating bloodlust - a lot of crime happens when people get bored. A greater variety of entertainment that is much easier to access keeps the boredom at bay. It's the 'circuses' part of 'bread and circuses'.

adventured 12y ago

Looking forward to adding the end of drug prohibition / war on drugs, to this list in the coming decade. In theory there should be another significant drop in crime, from the reduction in direct and indirect drug crime. In fact, I'd argue there are only two concentrated causes of crime left in America: prohibition, and black + immigrant poverty (with the war on drugs and the prison machine having a significant role to play in black poverty).

collyw 12y ago
Do white nationals in poverty not commit crime? My assumption would be that crime is poverty related (I think this has been shown in various studies) and nothing to do with immigrant / black part.

Retric 12y ago

Several people have mentioned gaming, but it's more than just an outlet. People spend a lot more time indoors due to video games and the internet. Fewer interactions mean less random third party crime. Also, credit cards credit / debit cards reduced the amount of cash people walk around with at the same time stuff became less valuable. So there is just less money to be made robbing people / houses.

PaulAJ 12y ago

The decline in violent crime only exists as long as you exclude all of the violent crime that happens in prisons.

wanderingstan 12y ago
I've seen this mentioned before but never any sources. Can you back this up? I'm no fan of the US's bloated prison system, but the numbers don't seem like they'd add up.

ddebernardy 12y ago

A possible reason you forget is abortion: http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-4/ http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...

jsmcgd 12y ago

Violent crime is decreasing across the western world which suggests that factors that are only relevant to one country/culture are unlikely to be the main driving force of this phenomenon.