You might expect an increase in unemployment and poverty to lead to a rise in crime. But in America, it hasn’t. Simon Wilson reports.
What’s happened?
Last month, America’s crime agency, the FBI, issued new official data showing that violent crime in the US had reached a 40-year low, continuing a trend in place for two decades, and perplexing criminologists and media pundits. If unemployment and poverty are strongly linked to crime, as many studies have found, why have crime rates been falling during America’s ‘Great Recession’ – the worst downturn in living memory? In the year to 2009, murders fell by 7% to 15,000 – nearly 45% below the 1991 peak. Car theft was down 17.2%. Violent crime overall fell by 5.5% in the year to 2010. And robberies fell by 9.5%.
How are poverty and crime linked?
The mainstream economic view was formulated by Nobel laureate Gary Becker in the 1960s. He argued that crime is a rational act; that when less legal work is around in times of recession, more illegal ‘work’ takes its place. According to top US criminologist James Q Wilson, who addressed the subject at length in The Wall Street Journal, there is some empirical evidence for this view. For example, parts of cities most blighted by crime tend to be those where many people are poor and out of work.
But recent history also provides plenty of counter-examples. In America, both violent crimes and property crimes – the two rise and fall very closely together – rose strongly from 1960 to 1990, but since then have been steadily falling, with a short period of plateauing in the early 2000s, which some commentators ascribed to the weaker economy. But during the most recent recession, rather than crime rising, it actually fell at a more rapid rate. In other words, the link between recession and crime is far from clear. In the 1960s, the crime rate rose as the economy expanded. In the 1920s – the ‘Roaring Twenties’ of fast growth – crime went up, before falling during the Great Depression.
What impact does sentencing have?
One factor often cited is the exploding prison population and harsher sentences since the 1980s. America’s incarceration rate is four times the world’s average. The ‘prison works’ school of thought seems compelling: if someone is locked up, he can’t commit crimes against society at large. But there’s also lots of evidence to suggest little correlation. For example, the US states in which prison numbers grew most sharply in the 1990s lagged the rest of the country in cutting crime. In 2009, the boost to prison numbers slowed, yet crime fell anyway. Canada, whose imprisonment rate has been relatively flat for more than 20 years, has seen roughly the same drop in crime.
Has better policing helped?
Better, more disciplined, more targeted policing has definitely played a part. In New York, the ‘broken windows’ theory – suppressing serious crime at its roots by cracking down on minor offences – is credited with making the city safer. More generally, according to Wilson, police forces have become more motivated by a practical desire to cut crime, rather than maximise arrests, leading to more nuanced strategies that use information technology – in particular ‘hot spot policing’ – that have cut crime overall.
What else explains the drop?
Several contentious but intriguing theories have sought to explain it. A 2007 study by economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes argued that half the decline in violent crime in the 1990s can be attributed to the effect of banning lead from petrol and household paints in 1974. Children with lots of lead in their blood are more likely to be violent. Tests show the levels of lead in Americans’ blood fell by 80% between 1974 and 1991. Others have emphasised drugs: a big drop in cocaine use has been accompanied by falls in the crime rate in many states. Freakonomics author Stephen Levitt argues provocatively that the legalisation of abortion in 1973 has resulted in a missing generation of (mainly black) criminals born into troubled, poor homes. This remains a strongly contested idea, challenged by various academics.
What about the Obama effect?
This argument is, again, controversial. Historian Randolph Roth, who recently surveyed homicides in the US over several centuries, argues that “violence rises whenever citizens develop a strong distrust of the government and feel powerless over their own lives”. Some commentators have argued that poor black and Latino males (the section of society most likely to see themselves as alienated, powerless outsiders, and who commit a disproportionate number of crimes) feel more connected to America because it has a non-white president for the first time, and have been committing less crime as a result. Finally, some credit a fall in crime to the recession itself: “When the economy goes down, there’s less to steal, people are home more, and they get drunk in bars less,” says Texas State University’s Marcus Felson.
What has the recession done to UK crime?
The last British crime survey showed that 66% of people think crime is going up because of the downturn, and 90% think knife crime is on the rise. Both beliefs are false. Knife crime fell by 7% last year; the overall level of crime has been falling steadily since the mid-1990s; it has continued to fall during the recession, and it is now at its lowest rate since 1981. “In boom times there are more goods that are attractive to criminals,” criminologist Tim Bateman told The Sunday Times. In a downturn, fewer houses are empty during the day. Can it last? We’ll soon find out – the latest British crime survey is out next month.