Posted on 12/18/2002 4:27:15 AM PST by TroutStalker
Edited on 04/22/2004 11:47:44 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
LONDON -- Britain is now the world leader in very little, with the single possible exception of crime.
Recent figures published by the U.N. show that Britain is now among the most crime-ridden countries in the world: Its citizens are much more likely to be attacked or robbed on the street, or have their houses burgled, than their counterparts in, say, Russia or South Africa, let alone the U.S. Everyday experience in Britain is quite sufficient to establish that we now live in a deeply criminalized society.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
For instance, immigration is supposed to cause higher crime. Assume it is true and look at the time series of crime in the US, and the time series of immigrant population in the US. Whoops. Immigration did not cease before the early 90s, but crime rates have fallen dramatically since then. Crime rates start upward in the mid 60s and soar by 1980, while the portion of the population foreign born was lower in the early 1970s than at any other time in US history.
Or, high crime rates are supposed to be caused by absence of gun ownership, since a disarmed population is easy prey to malefactors. But Japan has practically no guns, and far lower crime rates than any other developed country. Similarly, some try to account for crime by urbanization (which tracks crime very well in some countries) - but Japan is one of the most urbanized societies on earth, with again very little crime.
Or, generous welfare states are supposed to cause crime by breeding underclass dependency. But the Scandanavian countries have long had the most generous welfare states - and have lower crime rates than the more laisse faire Anglo-Saxon countries.
A better stab at it is changes in family structure. They start to go south at the right time. But there isn't enough lag in the effect. You'd expect the problems to be worst after kids raised in broken families arrive, and to keep on getting worse as long as more and more kids from broken homes reach maturity. For part of the data, that seems plausible. But then starting in the early 1990s, crime rates plummet, while families do not show any such dramatic improvement. Moreover, since you'd expect a lag, you'd have to see improved family statistics a decade or so prior, and they aren't there.
Some international differences can be explained by different policies, certainly. If you look at the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and compare all of them to the US, you find the murder rate is only 1/3rd as high but the violent crime rate is 2.5 times as high, with property crime 50% higher. This seems to fit the gun thesis.
Except there is an obvious explanation that fits the facts much better - prison population. Those other Anglo-Saxon countries jail only 1/5th as many people per unit population as the US does. 1-2 violent and 3-4 property crimes per year per "extra" prisoner accounts for the whole violent and property crime difference. We lock up our offenders and they don't, or let them go very soon for the same category of crime. That is all.
Any explanation of crime rates must try to account for all of the following, not pick and choose 1-2 of them to hang a pet theory on -
Japan has the lowest crime rates, 1/10th the US rates of murder and violent crime, a bit under half the rate of property crime.
Ireland looks more like Japan than like the US, with 1/3rd the murder and violent crime rates of the US and again a bit under half the rate of property crime.
Canada's murder rate looks like Minnesota's, perhaps because the population of Canada looks like the population of Minnesota, its patterns of urbanization are similar, etc. On the other hand, property crime is much higher in Canada, per capita, than in the US as a whole, even including the much higher rates of crime is the largest US cities. If non-homogeneity of the population causes crime, Canada's property crime rates should be as low as Minnesota's - but they aren't.
More people are murdered every year in single large US cities than in entire foreign countries of similar population and culture. Murders per year in the UK run around 840, in Canada 570, in Australia 360, in New Zealand 120, in Ireland only 60. NYC, Chicago, LA, DC, and Miami combined have more murders than those countries combined. Those countries have around 115 million people between them.
Meanwhile, Ireland has 1/10th the rate of violent crime of the UK, right next door. Despite only half the portion of the population in prison and lower per capital wealth.
It seems to me quite likely that cultural factors have a dramatic impact on crime rates. Homogeneity of population may be one factor, but cannot explain things like declines in crime rates during periods of accelerating immigration. Gun culture cannot be a lone cause, because it cannot explain places like Japan where there are neither guns nor crime. Family structure or breakdown might explain a lot of the early increases, but recent declines in crime are hard to explain as families getting better, because they aren't.
Something definite and important happened to crime trends in the early 90s. It was either due to some factor that changed around the time the cold war ended, or some prior factor effecting children that changed around 1980 or so, but operated with a lag. Cultural and political factors cannot be ignored here.
There was a definite change in civilization wide politics and cultural norms in the 1960s, and a definite reaction in the 1980s and thereafter. All kinds of social indicators exploded into danger territory in the 1970s and recovered somewhat in the 1990s. Otherwise put, kids raised by 60s parents acted up; kids raised by 80s parents less so. Crime in Ireland and Japan today looks more like the US or other Anglo-Saxon countries in the 1950s. Cultural changes did not reach everyone equally.
Just some food for thought...
"Anomie indicates an anarchic state of crisis-prone uncertainty affecting a broad segment of the population. Cultural interpretative models lose their function. Social integration within a community ceases. Previously valid behavior norms as well as personal competence disintegrate. Goal-oriented action becomes more and more impossible for both the individual and the collective. Results include general lack of direction and un-certainty in behavior. The intensity of social or cultural conflict in-creases."
http://www.sad.ch/en/research/anomie.html
I remember reading reports from around the country that showed an increase in police not reporting a number of crimes during clinton, to keep stats low. They felt it would hurt tourism. Seemed pretty widespread.
Homogeneity may be able to explain some of the cross national variation. But it leaves puzzles, too, if taken too seriously. New Zealand has a far more homogeneous population than the US, but higher rates of violent crime besides murder, and of property crime. Ireland has a more homogeneous population, and lower crime rates. Sometimes, with other cultural or policy factors included, homogeneity may contribute to low crime rates, but there is nothing necessary about the effect. New Zealand, Ireland, and Minnesota have very different outcomes for about the same setting of the supposedly driving variable.
On arrest rates and jail time, it is striking that there are at least three types apparent in the data. There are places with low prison populations and also very low crime rates - the Irelands and Japans - where whatever the underlying problem is, hasn't occurred in the first place. Then there are places with low prison populations and high rates of property crime, and violent crimes less than murder - many of the more "liberal" English speaking countries are in this category. They've had a crime wave and done little or nothing about it. But they've never had the kind of murder rates seen in the US. Then there is the US, with an enourmous prison population compared to the others, and a lower rate of some crimes apparently because of it. Whatever the underlying driver was or is, has played out in spades. An enforcement reaction has also played out. Murder rates are on the ceiling compared to the other countries, but lesser forms of crime (the more common ones by orders of magnitude) are better controlled than in the second group.
The original driver is not non-homogeneity. If it were, then US crime would have been out of control from time out of mind, and it wasn't. It was something that showed up in the 1960s and got strongly worse in the 1970s, stabilized in the 1980s and turned around in the 1990s. And which never happened in the first place in Japan and Ireland. There was a revolution in sexual mores. There was a whole set of political movements valorizing "countercultures".
These are not the keys to history usually peddled by the demographics crowd. It is not gun rights either. Politics, culture, thought, morality - all fit the scale and direction of the changes, in time and cross nationally, far better. What a shocking thesis, to so many pseudo-scientist and their ideologies! Perhaps ideas have consequences, words mean things, and whether people break the law depends on what they and those around them think of the law and of themselves. It could have been guessed...
I've got no particular "pet cure" to peddle, but this seems right. I wonder what a plot of two particular variables (church attendance and drug use) would show?
The portion of youths from broken families that get into trouble with the law is routinely double that of youths from intact families. Both are minorities, of course - serious criminal activity is a rare behavior in all groups. So, from a large increase in the number of youths living in broken homes, you would expect a large increase in criminal activity. Something on the order of up a third to up by half, because the portion of youths coming from broken homes has gone from some low figure to something like that level.
The actual scale of the change seen from the mid 60s to around 1980 is bigger than that, however. Depending on which stat you look at (property crime always changes less than other, more serious types of crime, while also being more common overall), the crime rate went up 2-4 times. So there is a scale of effect problem. Though one might try to explain that with some sort of "broken windows", "system overload" explanation, I suppose.
A more basic problem is that broken home stats are not getting better, while the crime rate is. Also, broken home stats should have their impact on crime rates with a considerable lag - spread over a decade or two after the family structure series. Some of the deterioration starting in the 1960s is too rapid to be accounted for this way. And if it were the main thing going on, the crime wave would be huge now. It would have hit later, but would still be getting progressively worse.
You might try to explain the US data alone by combining the family structure explanation (boosted by some sort of "overload") with an imprisonment factor. Meaning, family breakdown increases crime, while an increasing prison population eventually reduces it again. Then the reason we don't see a continuing high rate of crime in the US today would be the high prison population.
But as soon as you try to take this explanation international, it breaks down again. Because most of the other English speaking countries - even those that have had serious crime waves - have not reacted to them with large increases in the portion of the population in prison. In the US, 6.5 in 1000 are in prison; in the UK, 1.3 in 1000. It is a factor of 5 difference, and roughly the same order of magnitude as the rate of violent crime.
So what is the problem, where is the breakdown in the combined family and prison explanation (which surely does capture -part- of what is going on)? The problem is that even in the countries that did not get serious about prison time, crime rates still fell in the early 90s. You see peaks around 1992-93 in country after country. Some, it is true, have had upticks recently as well, since about 1999, particularly in property crime. The improvement in the early 90s is unexplained by anything prior in family structure (which was bad and getting worse a decade or two before), or any large change in prison (low still).
In answer to your direct question, no, there hasn't been an improvement in fatherless children that can explain the fall in crime rates in the 90s. You'd be looking for a change centered about 10 years before, though spread over an average in the family data series. But there just isn't a period of stark improvement, anywhere in that series. Another issue is that family structure data, while certainly better than e.g. the American urban underclass, is nothing like perfect in some places with little crime (e.g. portions of rural America, Ireland, etc).
See also my following post for more discussion of alternate explanations. I do think that breakdown in family structure was a coincident factor, both driven and driving, in the overall cultural changes that I think do explain the crime data. But crime can be controlled without perfection on that score, and perfection on that score is not available anywhere these days. Would improvements there help? Certainly yes, but I think marginally. It is not the magic bullet, or a large enough underlying driver on its own, that some social conservatives would like it to be.
That may seem a bit counterintuitive at first, to social conservatives in particular, but it is easy enough to understand. One, there is plenty of hypocrisy in the world. Two, more churches than you might expect simply reflect the surrounding culture instead of opposing it. Three and probably the largest, crime is a rare activity in all populations. It occurs among an "outlier" group. Large portions of the population haven't been terribly religious for a long time, certainly since the period of the world wars. The pool from which most criminals are drawn has not been going to church regularly for a long time, and that did not change dramatically in the 1960s.
Drug use, however, is another story. Drug use tracks the crime wave very well for the early part of the series, but then seems to disconnect. It takes off around the same time, it gets very bad by around 1980. There is some time mismatch after that, though. In the US, drug use fell in the late 80s, appreciably. It then retraced by the mid 90s. Crime improved after, not coincident with, the decline in drug use. Slight lags and interaction with prison population changes can account for some of that. In other countries, there was not as marked a reversal on drug use.
I think that drugs are only partially a driver, but that they are definitely a "driven". That is, the same causes that make for increased property and violent crime, make for increased drug use. The time disconnects seen later on in the late 80s US, and early 90s other places, reflect drugs being somewhat indepedent and "addressable" on their own.
That is, when the US got particularly serious about cracking down on drug use, it managed to appreciably decrease drug use. Without that translating into any immediate, serious decline in other forms of crime. Increased prison population and stricter parole did reduce crime a bit later on. But with the focus off drug use, drug use (not other crime) retraced much of the late 80s improvement - without a serious consequent rise in crime. These are exactly the relations between outcomes and policy focus that you'd expect from a "collateral symptom", rather than a "driving cause".
So, drug use is one of the things a crime wave brings us, and may reflect similar underlying "drivers". It can be addressed independently. Progress on drugs does not immediately lead to more than marginal improvements in overall crime rates. And improvements in overall crimes rates are possible, even with drug use moving the other way (in the later 90s in the US e.g., ground gained on drugs in the late 80s was lost, while the crime rate continued to fall).
So on these favorite culprits, drug use is more like a symptom and church attendence changed too early (and works differently overseas compared to the US) to be the root of the matter. Both are probably related to the overall cultural, policy, and political changes that more directly drive the crime rate. But they aren't the underlying cause.
I think that is basically correct. It was a cultural change. One with political causes and manifestations, but not limited to politics narrowly considered. Many of the other social variables people are concerned about are tangentially related to the basic cultural issue.
I think people's intuitions about the matter are often sound, but not focused by close analysis. That is, they suspect this or that cause because they rightly see a correlation between some other indicator and the overall cultural change. But in fact, the overall cultural change is not passively driven by the other factors people focus on, but is instead "autonomous".
It is a matter of people's ideas and choices. People's ideas and choices changed dramatically in certain ways and at certain times, and the other factors people look to did not simply cause those ideas or choices. But they may go along with them. After the cultural shift, religion, family, drugs are looked at differently than before it.
The demographics story, on the other hand, is largely a red herring in my opinion. It does not account for the change. Everyone's behavior changed, not just immigrants or minorities. What people are correctly noticing here is the high correlation between minorities and crime. What they aren't noticing is that (1) that link has been there all along, while the crime change is relatively recent and (2) the changes in demographics cannot explain the changes seen in crime. They are too small, too late, at the wrong times, etc. Some structural differences in crime can be explained demographically or ethnically. But the crime wave as a change, its ebb and flow, cannot be explained that way.
Now, on one level this is just plain politics. Quite "surface" factors can be involved, as well as "deep" cultural ones. The socialist left attacked western establishments consciously, as part of the cold war. In case everybody just forgot, Communist grand strategy was based on encouraging revolution in the west. They did not succeed in bringing about violent revolution, but they did manage to stir up a lot more trouble than people sometimes acknowledge.
In addition, portions of the left here had a particular take on the cold war confrontation. They did not simply accept Communist goals, but they did believe in "convergence". They hoped the Soviets would "mellow" into democrats while the west "great society"-ed into socialists. That meant a drastic revision in the sense of underlying legitimacy accorded to basic institutions of the existing west.
Portions of both groups on the left also thought in terms of Gramscian ideas of capture of institutions, the role of intellectuals in society, cultural critique, changes in education, etc. The whole counterculture included spontaneous "home grown" tendencies of democratic egalitarianism and perennial hedonism, but also more calculated political attitudes.
So why the early 90s improvement? Well, the end of the cold war for one. The admission that there wasn't going to be any revolution, that the free institutions of the west were basically sound and legitimate. The level of consensus on this subject was higher in the early 90s than at any previous period since the early 1960s. We conservatives make fun of Clinton's "triangulation" because we see through it and despise the man. But as a trimmer, he trimmed toward the center for a reason. He knew he had to avoid appearing a soft-on-crime liberal, among other things, and that was a change in how the left carried itself publically. Also, kids who had grown up under Reagan and Thatcher were coming of age in the early 90s. Coincident and lagging cultural-political factors may have been directly involved.
A society that believes its basic institutions are legitimate generates less crime, and tolerates it less. Liberals have been soft on crime for a generation. They have been soft on crime for the same reason they have "questioned authority". A whole host of policy measures have gone along with these attitudes. Secondary factors have also been politicized in all of it - sexual mores, welfare policies, you name it. In other words, the "new left" tracks plenty of it.
I don't think that is all of it. Yes, the culture has changed in a fundamental way. Politics may have had a lot to do with triggering that change, but having been made it outlasts the political events that brought it about. Issues that were once matters of wide consensus aren't anymore. Legitimacy has disappeared; organized and merely partial ideological support has replaced it.
Now, it seems to me this is not the case in a place like Japan. Politics is vastly less ideological there, far more consensual. Legitimacy is still present. The same can be said until quite recently for places like Sweden, with entirely different policies in place, following a different ideology. But an agreed one, not one fought over (as mentioned, until quite recently). The culture itself has not been politicized (in the sense of divided and made a battlefield) in these places.
I don't pretend these explanations fit the case particularly better than all of the other ones typically offered. In some respects, they seem too remote from the immediacy of crime rates, compared to something like prison population differences. But it may be that social scientists can't really investigate them because their methods are determinately "value free", or avoid the subject of ideology. It is also difficult to track ideological factors in a consistent way in different countries, because the fights aren't quite the same.
For whatever it is worth...
A Blast from the Past.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.