Is there evidence for this though? The great crime decline in cities like NYC were due to increased policing and the “broken window” policy, along with stop & frisk.
And that's putting aside the question of whether it's right to deny people their rights in order to deter crime.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
I've never heard of anyone arguing that policing did not increase nationwide in the 90s. All of the data we have suggests otherwise, and pushing back on that is basically the entire point of the recent BLM protests.
One simple way we know crime was more aggressively enforced in EVERY city beginning in the early 90s is because so many more people were locked up during that time period (just review the incarceration rates).
My priors say Middlesex wouldn't show increased rates of incarceration regardless of the amount of policing, the passage of three-strikes laws, the passage of the Clinton crime bill, etc. due to the demographics of the area. What do your prior's say?
Universality (to me) means "more criminals were incarcerated everywhere we expected them to be (based on demographics) and regardless of changes in local policies or funding, because there was a nationwide push to increase incarceration rates in the 90s." Do you mean something else by "universality"? Maybe we just disagree over definitions or something.
Take the big CSV from the github I posted, combine it with the FBI UCR data, and try to find a correlation between incarceration rate and crime rate.
I'm not suggesting that there aren't other ways to decrease crime besides incarceration, there are many possibilities. But I don't think there's any data showing that incarcerating criminals doesn't reduce (violent) crime.
So I'll just assume we agree in general, and that our definitions are different somehow, since we seem to be looking at the same datasets.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-poli...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#Murders...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-c...
“In the 1970s and early ’80s, we built 70 percent of our subsidized units in the wealthiest white districts,” Myron Orfield said. “The metro’s affordable-housing plan was one of the best in the country.”
"Only three large metros where at least half the homes are within reach for young middle-class families also finish in the top 10 in the Harvard-Berkeley mobility study: Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis–St. Paul. The last is particularly remarkable. The Minneapolis–St. Paul metro area is richer by median household income than Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City (or New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles). Among residents under 35, the Twin Cities place in the top 10 for highest college-graduation rate, highest median earnings, and lowest poverty rate, according to the most recent census figures. And yet, according to the Center for Housing Policy, low-income families can rent a home and commute to work more affordably in Minneapolis–St. Paul than in all but one other major metro area (Washington, D.C.). Perhaps most impressive, the Twin Cities have the highest employment rate for 18-to-34-year-olds in the country."
"In 2008, Seoul imported a version of Minneapolis’s tax-sharing scheme. Since then, the gap in funding for social services among the city’s districts has narrowed. According to a 2012 analysis by Sun Ki Kwon, then a graduate student at the University of Kentucky, this has helped Seoul’s poorest communities grow their tax bases while only minimally affecting the city’s richest districts."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-mir...
Is it perfect? No. Does low income housing alone prevent police from fracturing families and communities by enforcing drug law? No.
And standards of living going backward are (rightfully) a great way to piss people off and make them willing to riot at the drop of a hat.