The Great Black Hope

The decline in crime between 1994 and 2000 may have been the greatest in American history. Not only was the drop pronounced, it was nationwide and embraced all serious crime categories. Between 1990 and 2000, the nationwide murder rate—one of the most accurate crime indicators—fell 41%. And the federal government's crime victim survey revealed over the same decade a 38% drop in nonfatal violent crime.

Simply put, the decline in crime, especially in violent crime, was and is being driven by major reductions in offenses by African-American males. Black violent crime, which had been persistently high for over three decades (indeed, for a long time before that), began unexpectedly to nosedive in the mid-1990s. Since 2000 it has plateaued, but there are reasons to be optimistic about further declines.

Consider first our most accurate data: murder victims. Between 1990 and 2000, when the nationwide homicide rate dropped 41%, black homicide victimization fell 45%. Since crime is overwhelmingly intraracial—that is, blacks usually kill blacks and whites kill whites—the decline in murders of African-Americans is a good indicator of a falloff in murder by African-Americans. This is confirmed by a 45% drop in black homicide offending between 1990 and 2000. (Perpetrator data are less reliable than, but are corroborated by, victim data.) For whites, whose rates were seven to ten times lower to begin with, the decline (37.5%) was less dramatic, as Chart A shows.

Simply put, the decline in crime, especially in violent crime, was and is being driven by major reductions in offenses by African-American males....
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Wonderful...but the idiots never say why. During the late 80’s and early 90’s most states had agressive prison building expansion. In Texas so many prisons were built and funded that we were able to send felons to prison to serve longer sentances. If you keep the thugs off the streets crime goes down. Now that we have filled our new facilities its time to spend some of that so-called stimulus cash on more cribs for criminals.

I know I’m a kill joy...

From the link, a Message of Hope:

This black lower-class culture of violence remains the best explanation for black crime, and in large measure, for America’s crime story since World War II. Fortunately, and contrary to racist dogmas, culture is not immutable. It responds to social experiences. It changes over time and across generations. And it is the change in the black subculture—a change that developed in the sons and daughters of the black baby boomers and continues today—that best explains the great crime decline.

A New Generation

Aside from the crime drop itself, there is perhaps no better indicator of this transformation of generations than the change in illicit drug use. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, the ingestion of hard drugs, primarily heroin and cocaine, had become the scourge of American cities. Drug use was not only a mark of social decay; it was itself a major cause of crime. It is estimated that in the late ‘60s, for example, about one quarter of heroin users committed robbery on a regular basis, primarily to support their habits.

The abandonment of hard drugs by a new generation of African-Americans, a generation raised by drug abusers and exposed to the worst of urban slum life, is itself a remarkable story. A multi-year study of over 13,000 arrested persons in New York City, overwhelmingly black and Puerto Rican, demonstrated the dramatic change in drug use. The Justice Department funded the interviewing and urine sampling of Manhattan arrestees from 1987-97. Researchers thus were able to determine the proportion of offenders who were using drugs, and as significantly, the types of drugs they used and the ages of the users. The heroin injectors, it turns out, were born between 1945 and 1954. Arrestees born between 1955 and 1969, had turned to a new and more dangerous narcotic—”crack” cocaine—which, when heated in vials, produces a rapid and intense euphoria. By the mid-’80s, crack was all the rage, wiping out the mini-crime drop at the onset of that decade. Crack users repeatedly robbed to support their cravings, which recurred many times each day, as the cocaine high was rapidly and continually followed by a severe dysphoria. The most violent crimes—murder and aggravated assaults—were committed by the crack dealers and their enforcers. Crack helped drive to new heights murder and mayhem in our cities.

Then something quite surprising occurred. Among arrestees born in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, crack cocaine use fell off dramatically. Nearly half of those arrestees who had been born in 1969 had used crack; that figure plummeted to 20% for those born in 1972. What’s more, the rejection of crack “stuck” with subsequent cohorts of adolescents. The primary reason, researchers found, was

the negative role models in their lives. They clearly do not want to emulate their parents, older siblings, close relatives, or acquaintances who were ensnared by crack or heroin.... [I]t is the ravages that befell the HeroinGen and CrackGen that led them to avoid hard drugs. Those ravages include both deteriorating health as well as increased encounters with police and long prison terms. Thus, stepped up policing efforts may have hastened the transformation of the inner-city subcultures of drug use.

This new generation of African-Americans, fearing imprisonment, addiction, illness, and death, repudiated the worst of the drug menace. It was fear, the essence of deterrence, that changed the culture. And it was the same fear-borne intergenerational cultural change that would drive down crime.

Consider these changes in black youth during the 1990s, the period of the big crime drop:

Regular church attendance by black 12th graders rose 22%.
Pregnancy rates for black teens fell by nearly one-third.
The number of black high school students who reported carrying weapons fell 52%.
By 2003, more than three times as many white as black 12th graders reported using hard drugs.
Between 1991 and 2000, the number of 12th graders reporting use of alcohol, cigarettes, or illicit drugs in the previous 30 days fell by 19% for blacks, 20% for whites.
From 1997 to 2003, the rate of placement of male juveniles in residences, overwhelmingly because of juvenile delinquency, fell 24% for blacks, 5% for whites.

This account is not without its anomalies. The anti-crack generation didn’t all join the church choir; recall that this same cohort was responsible for the crime spike of the early ‘90s. Nor did they entirely abandon drugs; many turned instead to the “softer” hallucinogen, marijuana. Clearly, however, they abandoned crime at an earlier age than the previous generation. And it is this change in black lower class culture, a nationwide and seemingly sudden development in the mid-1990s, that offers the best explanation for America’s great crime decline.

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