Where have all the criminals gone

In 1966, one year after NicolaeCeaus¸escu became the Communist

dictator of Romania, he made abortion illegal. “The fetus is the property

of the entire society,” he proclaimed. “Anyone who avoids having

children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.”

Such grandiose declarations were commonplace during Ceaus

¸escu’s reign, for his master plan—to create a nation worthy of the

New Socialist Man—was an exercise in grandiosity. He built palaces

for himself while alternately brutalizing and neglecting his citizens.

Abandoning agriculture in favor of manufacturing, he forced many of

the nation’s rural dwellers into unheated apartment buildings. He

gave government positions to forty family members including his

wife, Elena, who required forty homes and a commensurate supply of

fur and jewels. Madame Ceaus¸escu, known officially as the Best

Mother Romania Could Have, was not particularly maternal. “The

worms never get satisfied, regardless of how much food you give

them,” she said when Romanians complained about the food shortwe learned not to be afraid from our children,” he said. “Most were

aged thirteen to twenty.” A few days after the massacre in Timisoara,

Ceaus¸escu gave a speech in Bucharest before one hundred thousand

people. Again the young people were out in force. They shouted

downCeaus¸escu with cries of “Timisoara!” and “Down with the

murderers!” His time had come. He and Elena tried to escape the

country with $1 billion, but they were captured, given a crude trial,

and, on Christmas Day, executed by firing squad.

Of all the Communist leaders deposed in the years bracketing the

collapse of the Soviet Union, only NicolaeCeaus¸escu met a violent

death. It should not be overlooked that his demise was precipitated in

large measure by the youth of Romania—a great number of whom,

were it not for his abortion ban, would never have been born at all.

The story of abortion in Romania might seem an odd way to begin

telling the story of American crime in the 1990s. But it’s not. In one

important way, the Romanian abortion story is a reverse image of the

American crime story. The point of overlap was on that Christmas

Day of 1989, when NicolaeCeaus¸escu learned the hard way—with a

bullet to the head—that his abortion ban had much deeper implications

than he knew.

On that day, crime was just about at its peak in the United States.

In the previous fifteen years, violent crime had risen 80 percent. It was

crime that led the nightly news and the national conversation.

When the crime rate began falling in the early 1990s, it did so with

such speed and suddenness that it surprised everyone. It took some

experts many years to even recognize that crime was falling, so confident

had they been of its continuing rise. Long after crime had

peaked, in fact, some of them continued to predict ever darker scenarios.

But the evidence was irrefutable: the long and brutal spike incrime was moving in the opposite direction, and it wouldn’t stop until

the crime rate had fallen back to the levels of forty years earlier.

Now the experts hustled to explain their faulty forecasting. The

criminologist James Alan Fox explained that his warning of a “bloodbath”

was in fact an intentional overstatement. “I never said there

would be blood flowing in the streets,” he said, “but I used strong

terms like ‘bloodbath’ to get people’s attention. And it did. I don’t

apologize for using alarmist terms.” (If Fox seems to be offering a distinction

without a difference—“bloodbath” versus “blood flowing in

the streets”—we should remember that even in retreat mode, experts

can be self-serving.)

After the relief had settled in, after people remembered how to go

about their lives without the pressing fear of crime, there arose a natural

question: just where did all those criminals go?

At one level, the answer seemed puzzling. After all, if none of the

criminologists, police officials, economists, politicians, or others who

traffic in such matters had foreseen the crime decline, how could they

suddenlyidentifyitscauses?

But this diverse army of experts now marched out a phalanx of

hypotheses to explain the drop in crime. A great many newspaper

articles would be written on the subject. Their conclusions often

hinged on which expert had most recently spoken to which reporter.

Here, ranked by frequency of mention, are the crime-drop explanations

cited in articles published from 1991 to 2001 in the ten largestcirculation

papers in the LexisNexis database:

CRIME-DROP EXPLANATION NUMBER OF CITATIONS

1. Innovative policing strategies 52

2. Increased reliance on prisons 47

3. Changes in crack and other drug markets 33

4. Aging of the population 32

5. Tougher gun-control laws 32

6. Strong economy 28

7. Increased number of police 26

8. All other explanations (increased use of 34

capital punishment, concealed-weapons

laws, gun buybacks, and others)

If you are the sort of person who likes guessing games, you may

wish to spend the next few moments pondering which of the preceding

explanations seem to have merit and which don’t. Hint: of the

seven major explanations on the list, only three can be shown to have

contributed to the drop in crime. The others are, for the most part,

figments of someone’s imagination, self-interest, or wishful thinking.

Further hint: one of the greatest measurable causes of the crime drop

does not appear on the list at all, for it didn’t receive a single newspaper

mention.

Let’s begin with a fairly uncontroversial one: the strong economy. The

decline in crime that began in the early 1990s was accompanied by a

blistering national economy and a significant drop in unemployment.

It might seem to follow that the economy was a hammer that helped

beat down crime. But a closer look at the data destroys this theory. It

is true that a stronger job market may make certain crimes relatively

less attractive. But that is only the case for crimes with a direct financial

motivation—burglary, robbery, and auto theft—as opposed to violent

crimes like homicide, assault, and rape. Moreover, studies have

shown that an unemployment decline of 1 percentage point accounts

for a 1 percent drop in nonviolent crime. During the 1990s, the unemployment

rate fell by 2 percentage points; nonviolent crime,meanwhile, fell by roughly 40 percent. But an even bigger flaw in the

strong-economy theory concerns violent crime. Homicide fell at a

greater rate during the 1990s than any other sort of crime, and a number

of reliable studies have shown virtually no link between the economy

and violent crime. This weak link is made even weaker by

glancing back to a recent decade, the 1960s, when the economy went

on a wild growth spurt—as did violent crime. So while a strong 1990s

economy might have seemed, on the surface, a likely explanation for

the drop in crime, it almost certainly didn’t affect criminal behavior in

any significant way.

Unless, that is, “the economy” is construed in a broader sense—as

a means to build and maintain hundreds of prisons. Let’s now consider

another crime-drop explanation: increased reliance on prisons. It

might help to start by flipping the crime question around. Instead of

wondering what made crime fall, think about this: why had it risen so

dramatically in the first place?During the first half of the twentieth century, the incidence of violent

crime in the United States was, for the most part, fairly steady. But

in the early 1960s, it began to climb. In retrospect, it is clear that one

of the major factors pushing this trend was a more lenient justice system.

Conviction rates declined during the 1960s, and criminals who

were convicted served shorter sentences. This trend was driven in part

by an expansion in the rights of people accused of crimes—a long

overdue expansion, some would argue. (Others would argue that the

expansion went too far.) At the same time, politicians were growing

increasingly softer on crime—“for fear of sounding racist,” as the

economist Gary Becker has written, “since African-Americans and

Hispanics commit a disproportionate share of felonies.” So if you were

the kind of person who might want to commit a crime, the incentives

were lining up in your favor: a slimmer likelihood of being convicted

and, if convicted, a shorter prison term. Because criminals respond to

incentives as readily as anyone, the result was a surge in crime.It took some time, and a great deal of political turmoil, but these

incentives were eventually curtailed. Criminals who would have previously

been set free—for drug-related offenses and parole revocation

in particular—were instead locked up. Between 1980 and 2000, there

was a fifteenfold increase in the number of people sent to prison on

drug charges. Many other sentences, especially for violent crime, were

lengthened. The total effect was dramatic. By 2000, more than two

million people were in prison, roughly four times the number as of

1972. Fully half of that increase took place during the 1990s.The evidence linking increased punishment with lower crime rates

is very strong. Harsh prison terms have been shown to act as both deterrent

(for the would-be criminal on the street) and prophylactic (for

the would-be criminal who is already locked up). Logical as this may

sound, some criminologists have fought the logic. A 1977 academic

study called “On Behalf of a Moratorium on Prison Construction”

noted that crime rates tend to be high when imprisonment rates are

high, and concluded that crime would fall if imprisonment rates

could only be lowered. (Fortunately, jailers did not suddenly turn

loose their wards and sit back waiting for crime to fall. As the political

scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. later commented, “Apparently, it takes a

Ph.D. in criminology to doubt that keeping dangerous criminals incarcerated

cuts crime.”)

The “Moratorium” argument rests on a fundamental confusion of

correlation and causality. Consider a parallel argument. The mayor of

a city sees that his citizens celebrate wildly when their team wins the

World Series. He is intrigued by this correlation but, like the “Moratorium”

author, fails to see the direction in which the correlation runs.

So the following year, the mayor decrees that his citizens start celebrating

the World Series before the first pitch is thrown—an act that, in

his confused mind, will ensure a victory.

There are certainly plenty of reasons to dislike the huge surge in

the prison population. Not everyone is pleased that such a significantfraction of Americans, especially black Americans, live behind bars.

Nor does prison even begin to address the root causes of crime, which

are diverse and complex. Lastly, prison is hardly a cheap solution: it

costs about $25,000 a year to keep someone incarcerated. But if the

goal here is to explain the drop in crime in the 1990s, imprisonment

is certainly one of the key answers. It accounts for roughly one-third

of the drop in crime.

Another crime-drop explanation is often cited in tandem with imprisonment:

the increased use of capital punishment. The number of executions

in the United States quadrupled between the 1980s and the

1990s, leading many people to conclude—in the context of a debate

that has been going on for decades—that capital punishment helped

drive down crime. Lost in the debate, however, are two important facts.

First, given the rarity with which executions are carried out in this

country and the long delays in doing so, no reasonable criminal

should be deterred by the threat of execution. Even though capital

punishment quadrupled within a decade, there were still only 478 executions

in the entire United States during the 1990s. Any parent

who has ever said to a recalcitrant child, “Okay, I’m going to count to

ten and this time I’m really going to punish you,” knows the difference

between deterrent and empty threat. New York State, for instance,

has not as of this writing executed a single criminal since

reinstituting its death penalty in 1995. Even among prisoners ondeath row, the annual execution rate is only 2 percent—compared

with the 7 percent annual chance of dying faced by a member of the

Black Gangster Disciple Nation crack gang. If life on death row is

safer than life on the streets, it’s hard to believe that the fear of execution

is a driving force in a criminal’s calculus. Like the $3 fine for latearriving

parents at the Israeli day-care centers, the negative incentive

of capital punishment simply isn’t serious enough for a criminal to

change his behavior.The second flaw in the capital punishment argument is even more

obvious. Assume for a moment that the death penalty is a deterrent.

How much crime does it actually deter? The economist Isaac Ehrlich,

in an oft-cited 1975 paper, put forth an estimate that is generally considered

optimistic: executing 1 criminal translates into 7 fewer homicides

that the criminal might have committed. Now do the math. In

1991, there were 14 executions in the United States; in 2001, there

were 66. According to Ehrlich’s calculation, those 52 additional executions

would have accounted for 364 fewer homicides in 2001—not

a small drop, to be sure, but less than 4 percent of the actual decrease

in homicides that year. So even in a death penalty advocate’s best-case

scenario, capital punishment could explain only one twenty-fifth of

the drop in homicides in the 1990s. And because the death penalty is

rarely given for crimes other than homicide, its deterrent effect cannot

account for a speck of decline in other violent crimes.

It is extremely unlikely, therefore, that the death penalty, as currently

practiced in the United States, exerts any real influence on

crime rates. Even many of its onetime supporters have come to this

conclusion. “I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede

that the death penalty experiment has failed,” said U.S. Supreme

Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun in 1994, nearly twenty years after

he had voted for its reinstatement. “I no longer shall tinker with the

machinery of death.”

So it wasn’t capital punishment that drove crime down nor was it the

booming economy. But higher rates of imprisonment did have a lot to

do with it. All those criminals didn’t march into jail by themselves, of

course. Someone had to investigate the crime, catch the bad guy, and

put together the case that would get him convicted. Which naturally

leads to a related pair of crime-drop explanations:Innovative policing strategies

Increased number of police

Let’s address the second one first. The number of police officers per

capita in the United States rose about 14 percent during the 1990s.

Does merely increasing the number of police, however, reduce crime?

The answer would seem obvious—yes—but proving that answer isn’t

so easy. That’s because when crime is rising, people clamor for protection,

and invariably more money is found for cops. So if you just look

at raw correlations between police and crime, you will find that when

there are more police, there tends to be more crime. That doesn’t

mean, of course, that the police are causing the crime, just as it doesn’t

mean, as some criminologists have argued, that crime will fall if criminals

are released from prison.

To show causality, we need a scenario in which more police are

hired for reasons completely unrelated to rising crime. If, for instance,

police were randomly sprinkled in some cities and not in others, we

could look to see whether crime declines in the cities where the police

happen to land.As it turns out, that exact scenario is often created by vote-hungry

politicians. In the months leading up to Election Day, incumbent

mayors routinely try to lock up the law-and-order vote by hiring more

police—even when the crime rate is standing still. So by comparing

the crime rate in one set of cities that have recently had an election

(and which therefore hired extra police) with another set of cities that

had no election (and therefore no extra police), it’s possible to tease

out the effect of the extra police on crime. The answer: yes indeed, additional

police substantially lower the crime rate.

Again, it may help to look backward and see why crime had risen

so much in the first place. From 1960 to 1985, the number of police

officersfell more than 50 percent relative to the number of crimes. Insome cases, hiring additional police was considered a violation of the

era’s liberal aesthetic; in others, it was simply deemed too expensive.

This 50 percent decline in police translated into a roughly equal decline

in the probability that a given criminal would be caught. Coupled

with the above-cited leniency in the other half of the criminal

justice system, the courtrooms, this decrease in policing created a

strong positive incentive for criminals.

By the 1990s, philosophies—and necessities—had changed. The

policing trend was put in reverse, with wide-scale hiring in cities

across the country. Not only did all those police act as a deterrent, but

they also provided the manpower to imprison criminals who might

have otherwise gone uncaught. The hiring of additional police accounted

for roughly 10 percent of the 1990s crime drop.

But it wasn’t only the number of police that changed in the 1990s;

consider the most commonly cited crime-drop explanation of all:

innovative policing strategies.There was perhaps no more attractive theory than the belief that

smart policing stops crime. It offered a set of bona fide heroes rather

than simply a dearth of villains. This theory rapidly became an article

of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth

Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional

wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree

to which it affects our personal well-being.

The story played out most dramatically in New York City, where

newly elected mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his handpicked police

commissioner, William Bratton, vowed to fix the city’s desperate

crime situation. Bratton took a novel approach to policing. He ushered

the NYPD into what one senior police official later called “our

Athenian period,” in which new ideas were given weight over calcified

practices. Instead of coddling his precinct commanders, Bratton demanded

accountability. Instead of relying solely on old-fashioned copknow-how, he introduced technological solutions like CompStat, a

computerized method of addressing crime hot spots.

The most compelling new idea that Bratton brought to life

stemmed from the broken window theory, which was conceived by

the criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. The broken

window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn

into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it

isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’s all right to break the

rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too.

So with murder raging all around, Bill Bratton’s cops began to

police the sort of deeds that used to go unpoliced: jumping a subway

turnstile, panhandling too aggressively, urinating in the streets, swabbing

a filthy squeegee across a car’s windshield unless the driver made

an appropriate “donation.”

Most New Yorkers loved this crackdown on its own merit. But

they particularly loved the idea, as stoutly preached by Bratton and

Giuliani, that choking off these small crimes was like choking off the

criminal element’s oxygen supply. Today’s turnstile jumper might easily

be wanted for yesterday’s murder. That junkie peeing in an alley

might have been on his way to a robbery.As violent crime began to fall dramatically, New Yorkers were more

than happy to heap laurels on their operatic, Brooklyn-bred mayor

and his hatchet-faced police chief with the big Boston accent. But

the two strong-willed men weren’t very good at sharing the glory.

Soon after the city’s crime turnaround landed Bratton—and not

Giuliani—on the cover of Time, Bratton was pushed to resign. He

had been police commissioner for just twenty-seven months.

New York City was a clear innovator in police strategies during the

1990s crime drop, and it also enjoyed the greatest decline in crime of

any large American city. Homicide rates fell from 30.7 per 100,000

people in 1990 to 8.4 per 100,000 people in 2000, a change of 73.6policing strategies probably had little effect on this huge decline.

First, the drop in crime in New York began in 1990. By the end of

1993, the rate of property crime and violent crime, including homicides,

had already fallen nearly 20 percent. Rudolph Giuliani, however,

did not become mayor—and install Bratton—until early 1994.

Crime was well on its way down before either man arrived. And it

would continue to fall long after Bratton was bumped from office.

Second, the new police strategies were accompanied by a much

more significant change within the police force: a hiring binge. Between

1991 and 2001, the NYPD grew by 45 percent, more than

three times the national average. As argued above, an increase in the

number of police, regardless of new strategies, has been proven to reduce

crime. By a conservative calculation, this huge expansion of

New York’s police force would be expected to reduce crime in New

York by 18 percent relative to the national average. If you subtract

that 18 percent from New York’s homicide reduction, thereby discounting

the effect of the police-hiring surge, New York no longer

leads the nation with its 73.6 percent drop; it goes straight to the middle

of the pack. Many of those new police were in fact hired by David

Dinkins, the mayor whom Giuliani defeated. Dinkins had been desperate

to secure the law-and-order vote, having known all along that

his opponent would be Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor. (The

two men had run against each other four years earlier as well.) So

those who wish to credit Giuliani with the crime drop may still do so,

for it was his own law-and-order reputation that made Dinkins hire

all those police. In the end, of course, the police increase helpedeveryone—

but it helped Giuliani a lot more than Dinkins.

Most damaging to the claim that New York’s police innovations

radically lowered crime is one simple and often overlooked fact: crime

went down everywhere during the 1990s, not only in New York. Fewother cities tried the kind of strategies that New York did, and certainly

none with the same zeal. But even in Los Angeles, a city notorious

for bad policing, crime fell at about the same rate as it did in New

York once the growth in New York’s police force is accounted for.

It would be churlish to argue that smart policing isn’t a good thing.

Bill Bratton certainly deserves credit for invigorating New York’s police

force. But there is frighteningly little evidence that his strategy

was the crime panacea that he and the media deemed it. The next step

will be to continue measuring the impact of police innovations—in

Los Angeles, for instance, where Bratton himself became police chief

in late 2002. While he duly instituted some of the innovations that

were his hallmark in New York, Bratton announced that his highest

priority was a more basic one: finding the money to hire thousands of

new police officers.

Now to explore another pair of common crime-drop explanations:

Tougher gun laws

Changes in crack and other drug marketsFirst, the guns. Debates on this subject are rarely coolheaded. Gun

advocates believe that gun laws are too strict; opponents believe exactly

the opposite. How can intelligent people view the world so differently?

Because a gun raises a complex set of issues that change

according to one factor: whose hand happens to be holding the gun.

It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask a rudimentary

question: what is a gun? It’s a tool that can be used to kill someone, of

course, but more significantly, a gun is a great disrupter of the natural

order.

A gun scrambles the outcome of any dispute. Let’s say that a tough

Where Have A l l t h e C r i m i n a l s G o n e?

guy and a not-so-tough guy exchange words in a bar, which leads to a

fight. It’s pretty obvious to the not-so-tough guy that he’ll be beaten,

so why bother fighting? The pecking order remains intact. But if the

not-so-tough guy happens to have a gun, he stands a good chance of

winning. In this scenario, the introduction of a gun may well lead to

more violence.

Now instead of the tough guy and the not-so-tough guy, picture a

high-school girl out for a nighttime stroll when she is suddenly set

upon by a mugger. What if only the mugger is armed? What if only

the girl is armed? What if both are armed? A gun opponent might

argue that the gun has to be kept out of the mugger’s hands in the first

place. A gun advocate might argue that the high-school girl needs to

have a gun to disrupt what has become the natural order: it’s the bad

guys that have the guns. (If the girl scares off the mugger, then the introduction

of a gun in this case may lead to less violence.) Any mugger

with even a little initiative is bound to be armed, for in a country like

the United States, with a thriving black market in guns, anyone can

get hold of one.

There are enough guns in the United States that if you gave one to

every adult, you would run out of adults before you ran out of guns.

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. homicides involve a gun, a far greater fraction

than in other industrialized countries. Our homicide rate is also

much higher than in those countries. It would therefore seem likely

that our homicide rate is so high in part becauseare so easily

available. Research indeed shows this to be true.

But guns are not the whole story. In Switzerland, every adult male

is issued an assault rifle for militia duty and is allowed to keep the gun

at home. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than

just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the

world. In other words, guns do not cause crime. That said, the established

U.S. methods of keeping guns away from the people who docause crime are, at best, feeble. And since a gun—unlike a bag of cocaine

or a car or a pair of pants—lasts pretty much forever, even turning

off the spigot of new guns still leaves an ocean of available ones.

So bearing all this in mind, let’s consider a variety of recent gun initiatives

to see the impact they may have had on crime in the 1990s.

The most famous gun-control law is the Brady Act, passed in

1993, which requires a criminal check and a waiting period before a

person can purchase a handgun. This solution may have seemed appealing

to politicians, but to an economist it doesn’t make much

sense. Why? Because regulation of a legal market is bound to fail

when a healthy black market exists for the same product. With guns

so cheap and so easy to get, the standard criminal has no incentive to

fill out a firearms application at his local gun shop and then wait a

week. The Brady Act, accordingly, has proven to be practically impotent

in lowering crime. (A study of imprisoned felons showed that

even before the Brady Act, only about one-fifth of the criminals had

bought their guns through a licensed dealer.) Various local guncontrol

laws have also failed. Washington, D.C., and Chicago both

instituted handgun bans well before crime began to fall across the

country in the 1990s, and yet those two cities were laggards, not leaders,

in the national reduction in crime.One deterrent that has proven

moderately effective is a stiff increase in prison time for anyone

caught in possession of an illegal gun. But there is plenty of room for

improvement. Not that this is likely, but if the death penalty were

assessed to anyone carrying an illegal gun, and if the penalty were

actually enforced, gun crimes would surely plunge.

Another staple of 1990s crime fighting—and of the evening

news—was the gun buyback. You remember the image: a menacing,

glistening heap of firearms surrounded by the mayor, the police chief,

the neighborhood activists. It made for a nice photo op, but that’s

about as meaningful as a gun buyback gets. The guns that are turnedin tend to be heirlooms or junk. The payoff to the gun seller—usually

$50 or $100, but in one California buyback, three free hours of

psychotherapy—isn’t an adequate incentive for anyone who actually

plans to use his gun. And the number of surrendered guns is no match

for even the number of new guns simultaneously coming to market.

Given the number of handguns in the United States and the number

of homicides each year, the likelihood that a particular gun was used

to kill someone that year is 1 in 10,000. The typical gun buyback

program yields fewer than 1,000 guns—which translates into an expectation

of less than one-tenth of one homicide per buyback. Not

enough, that is, to make even a sliver of impact on the fall of crime.

Then there is an opposite argument—that we need more guns on

the street, but in the hands of the right people (like the high-school

girl above, instead of her mugger). The economist John R. Lott Jr. is

the main champion of this idea. His calling card is the book More

Guns, Less Crime, in which he argues that violent crime has decreased

in areas where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry concealed

weapons. His theory might be surprising, but it is sensible. If a criminal

thinks his potential victim may be armed, he may be deterred

from committing the crime. Handgun opponents call Lott a pro-gun

ideologue, and Lott let himself become a lightning rod for gun controversy.

He exacerbated his trouble by creating a pseudonym, “Mary

Rosh,” to defend his theory in online debates. Rosh, identifying herself

as a former student of Lott’s, praised her teacher’s intellect, his

evenhandedness, his charisma. “I have to say that he was the best professor

that I ever had,” s/he wrote. “You wouldn’t know that he was a‘right-wing’ ideologue from the class. . . . There were a group of us

students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally

had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other

professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material.”

Then there was the troubling allegation that Lott actually in-vented some of the survey data that support his more-guns/less-crime

theory. Regardless of whether the data were faked, Lott’s admittedly

intriguing hypothesis doesn’t seem to be true. When other scholars

have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws

simply don’t bring down crime.

Consider the next crime-drop explanation: the bursting of the crack

bubble. Crack cocaine was such a potent, addictive drug that a hugely

profitable market had been created practically overnight. True, it was

only the leaders of the crack gangs who were getting rich. But that

only made the street-level dealers all the more desperate to advance.

Many of them were willing to kill their rivals to do so, whether the

rival belonged to the same gang or a different one. There were also gun

battles over valuable drug-selling corners. The typical crack murder

involved one crack dealer shooting another (or two of them, or three)

and not, contrary to conventional wisdom, some bug-eyed crackhead

shooting a shopkeeper over a few dollars. The result was a huge increase

in violent crime. One study found that more than 25 percent of

the homicides in New York City in 1988 were crack-related.The violence associated with crack began to ebb in about 1991.

This has led many people to think that crack itself went away. It

didn’t. Smoking crack remains much more popular today than most

people realize. Nearly 5 percent of all arrests in the United States are

still related to cocaine (as against 6 percent at crack’s peak); nor have

emergency room visits for crack users diminished all that much.

What did go away were the huge profits for selling crack. The price

of cocaine had been falling for years, and it got only cheaper as crack

grew more popular. Dealers began to underprice one another; profits

vanished. The crack bubble burst as dramatically as the Nasdaq bubble

would eventually burst. (Think of the first generation of crackdealers as the Microsoft millionaires; think of the second generation

as Pets.com.) As veteran crack dealers were killed or sent to prison,

younger dealers decided that the smaller profits didn’t justify the risk.

The tournament had lost its allure. It was no longer worth killing

someone to steal their crack turf, and certainly not worth being killed.

So the violence abated. From 1991 to 2001, the homicide rate

among young black men—who were disproportionately represented

among crack dealers—fell 48 percent, compared to 30 percent for

older black men and older white men. (Another minor contributor to

the falling homicide rate is the fact that some crack dealers took to

shooting their enemies in the buttocks rather than murdering them;

this method of violent insult was considered more degrading—and

was obviously less severely punished—than murder.) All told, the

crash of the crack market accounted for roughly 15 percent of the

crime drop of the 1990s—a substantial factor, to be sure, though it

should be noted that crack was responsible for far more than 15 percent

of the crime increase of the 1980s. In other words, the net effect

of crack is still being felt in the form of violent crime, to say nothing

of the miseries the drug itself continues to cause.The final pair of crime-drop explanations concern two demographic

trends. The first one received many media citations: aging of the population.

Until crime fell so drastically, no one talked about this theory at all.

In fact, the “bloodbath” school of criminology was touting exactly the

opposite theory—that an increase in the teenage share of the population

would produce a crop of superpredators who would lay the nation

low. “Just beyond the horizon, there lurks a cloud that the winds

will soon bring over us,” James Q. Wilson wrote in 1995. “Thepopulation

will start getting younger again. . . . Get ready.”But overall, the teenage share of the population wasn’t getting

much bigger. Criminologists like Wilson and James Alan Fox had

badly misread the demographic data. The real population growth in

the 1990s was in fact among the elderly. While this may have been

scary news in terms of Medicare and Social Security, the average

American had little to fear from the growing horde of oldsters. It

shouldn’t be surprising to learn that elderly people are not very criminally

intent; the average sixty-five-year-old is about one-fiftieth as

likely to be arrested as the average teenager. That is what makes this

aging-of-the-population theory of crime reduction so appealingly

tidy: since people mellow out as they get older, more older people

must lead to less crime. But a thorough look at the data reveals that

the graying of America did nothing to bring down crime in the 1990s.

Demographic change is too slow and subtle a process—you don’t

graduate from teenage hoodlum to senior citizen in just a few years—

to even begin to explain the suddenness of the crime decline.

There was another demographic change, however, unforeseen and

long-gestating, that did drastically reduce crime in the 1990s.Think back for a moment to Romania in 1966. Suddenly and

without warning, NicolaeCeaus¸escu declared abortion illegal. The

children born in the wake of the abortion ban were much more likely

to become criminals than children born earlier. Why was that? Studies

in other parts of Eastern Europe and in Scandinavia from the

1930s through the 1960s reveal a similar trend. In most of these cases,

abortion was not forbidden outright, but a woman had to receive permission

from a judge in order to obtain one. Researchers found that

in the instances where the woman was denied an abortion, she often

resented her baby and failed to provide it with a good home. Even

when controlling for the income, age, education, and health of the

mother, the researchers found that these children too were more likely

to become criminals.The United States, meanwhile, has had a different abortion history

than Europe. In the early days of the nation, it was permissible to have

an abortion prior to “quickening”—that is, when the first movements

of the fetus could be felt, usually around the sixteenth to eighteenth

week of pregnancy. In 1828, New York became the first state to restrict

abortion; by 1900 it had been made illegal throughout the

country. Abortion in the twentieth century was often dangerous and

usually expensive. Fewer poor women, therefore, had abortions. They

also had less access to birth control. What they did have, accordingly,

was a lot more babies.

In the late 1960s, several states began to allow abortion under extreme

circumstances: rape, incest, or danger to the mother. By 1970

five states had made abortion entirely legal and broadly available:

New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. On January

22, 1973, legalized abortion was suddenly extended to the entire

country with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade. The

majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, spoke specifically

to the would-be mother’s predicament:The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant

woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. . . .

Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman

a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent.

Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care.

There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the

unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child

into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to

care for it.

The Supreme Court gave voice to what the mothers in Romania

and Scandinavia—and elsewhere—had long known: when a womandoes not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be

unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to

raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she

may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby’s

health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn’t yet received

enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not

now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide

a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and

productive child.

In the first year after Roe v. Wade, some 750,000 women had abortions

in the United States (representing one abortion for every 4 live

births). By 1980 the number of abortions reached 1.6 million (one

for every 2.25 live births), where it leveled off. In a country of 225

million people, 1.6 million abortions per year—one for every 140

Americans—may not have seemed so dramatic. In the first year after

NicolaeCeaus¸escu’s death, when abortion was reinstated in Romania,

there was one abortion for every twenty-two Romanians. But still: 1.6

million American women a year who got pregnant were suddenly not

having those babies.Before Roe v. Wade, it was predominantly the daughters of middleor

upper-class families who could arrange and afford a safe illegal

abortion. Now, instead of an illegal procedure that might cost $500,

any woman could easily obtain an abortion, often for less than $100.

What sort of woman was most likely to take advantage of Roe

v. Wade? Very often she was unmarried or in her teens or poor, and

sometimes all three. What sort of future might her child have had?

One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the

earliest years of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more

likely than average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent

more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors—

childhood poverty and a single-parent household—are among the

strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growingup in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child’s propensity to

commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has

shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor

leading to criminality.

In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American

women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children,

had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal

lives.

To be sure, the legalization of abortion in the United States had

myriad consequences. Infanticide fell dramatically. So did shotgun

marriages, as well as the number of babies put up for adoption (which

has led to the boom in the adoption of foreign babies). Conceptions

rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent, indicating

that many women were using abortion as a method of birth

control, a crude and drastic sort of insurance policyPerhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however,

and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime.

In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe

v. Wade was hitting its late teen years—the years during which young

men enter their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall. What

this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the

greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued

to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose

mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized

abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime;

legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.

This theory is bound to provoke a variety of reactions, ranging

from disbelief to revulsion, and a variety of objections, ranging from

the quotidian to the moral. The likeliest first objection is the most

straightforward one: is the theory true? Perhaps abortion and crime

are merely correlated and not causal.

It may be more comforting to believe what the newspapers say,that the drop in crime was due to brilliant policing and clever gun

control and a surging economy. We have evolved with a tendency to

link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or

difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a

snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. The

snakebite, you conclude, must have killed him. Most of the time,

such a reckoning is correct. But when it comes to cause and effect,

there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thinking. We smirk now

when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes—the

warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin

that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace

faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in

which he has a vested interest.

How, then, can we tell if the abortion-crime link is a case of causality

rather than simply correlation?One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure

crime data in the five states where abortion was made legal before

the Supreme Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country.

In New York, California, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, a

woman had been able to obtain a legal abortion for at least two years

beforeRoe v. Wade. And indeed, those early-legalizing states saw crime

begin to fall earlier than the other forty-five states and the District of

Columbia. Between 1988 and 1994, violent crime in the earlylegalizing

states fell 13 percent compared to the other states; between

1994 and 1997, their murder rates fell 23 percent more than those of

the other states.

But what if those early legalizers simply got lucky? What else might

we look for in the data to establish an abortion-crime link?

One factor to look for would be a correlation between each state’s

abortion rate and its crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest

abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops inthe 1990s, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller

crime drops. (This correlation exists even when controlling for a variety

of factors that influence crime: a state’s level of incarceration,

number of police, and its economic situation.) Since 1985, states with

high abortion rates have experienced a roughly 30 percent drop in

crime relative to low-abortion states. (New York City had high abortion

ratesand lay within an early-legalizing state, a pair of facts that

further dampen the claim that innovative policing caused the crime

drop.) Moreover, there was no link between a given state’s abortion

rate and its crime rate before the late 1980s—when the first cohort affected

by legalized abortion was reaching its criminal prime—which

is yet another indication that Roe v. Wade was indeed the event that

tippedthecrimescale.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 964