- 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.
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.
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.
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.
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/73391/1/73391.pdf
"Phishing and related cybercrime is responsible for billions of dollars in losses annually. Gartner reported more than 5 million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in September 2008 (Gartner 2009). This paper asks whether the majority of organised phishing and related cybercrime originates in Eastern Europe rather than elsewhere such as China or the USA. The Russian “Mafiya” in particular has been popularised by the media and entertainment industries to the point where it can be hard to separate fact from fiction but we have endeavoured to look critically at the information available on this area to produce a survey. We take a particular focus on cybercrime from an Australian perspective, as Australia was one of the first places where Phishing attacks against Internet banks were seen. It is suspected these attacks came from Ukrainian spammers. The survey is built from case studies both where individuals from Eastern Europe have been charged with related crimes or unsolved cases where there is some nexus to Eastern Europe. It also uses some earlier work done looking at those early Phishing attacks, archival analysis of Phishing attacks in July 2006 and new work looking at correlation between the Corruption Perception Index, Internet penetration and tertiary education in Russia and the Ukraine. The value of this work is to inform and educate those charged with responding to cybercrime where a large part of the problem originates and try to understand why. "
Perhaps the person stealing the information is based anywhere, but the company commonly issuing the pre-auths is in Europe?
In what ways have witness protection programs improved? More money? I can't think of any technological changes that help here and although I have no knowledge of such a think I think social networking would make Witness Protection a lot harder(not just using your old name/putting up pictures/auto face tagging but possibly something invloving your social graph)
On the other hand, now everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. My friends and I entered Southeast Asia with four phones and left with one. None of our wallets were pickpocketed, but that may just be chance.
src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...
- 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.
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
CRS paper on organized crime in the US: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40525.pdf
(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?)
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/02/lead-and-crime...
http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...
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?
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.153I 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.
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).
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.
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFoot...
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.
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).
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.
I'm no fan of the US's bloated prison system, but the numbers don't seem like they'd add up.
A nice animation (though this is England/Wales):
Less crudely put: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Toxicity
Noting Crito's comment, I don't know if inhalation or ingestion was the primary vector.
I may be wrong about that; I'll have to read more about this topic.
But inhalation would make sense too.
http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2k11Results/NSDUHresults201...