Published: Sunday, January 23, 2000

Crime rate falls in U.S., and no one is sure why

The drop in crime is one of the great successes of the 1990s, every bit as welcome, unforeseen and important as the skyrocketing stock market. Serious crime has fallen for more than seven years in a row, to the lowest level in a quarter century. Robbery is at rates last achieved in the 1960s. And murder has declined a third since 1993, and now stands at levels not seen in more than three decades.

There's no consensus on why crime has declined so swiftly and steeply, although theories abound. Is it the booming economy, benefits of which now are trickling down even to the poor and undereducated? Are longer prison sentences and record incarceration rates to be credited? With nearly 2 million convicts behind bars, America houses a quarter of the world's prison inmates, not counting 4 million plus on probation or parole.

Is it the declining popularity of crack? Smarter policing? Or the sheer number of new cops on U.S. streets? A demographic quirk in a nation with fewer adolescents and young men in their peak crime years? Or a statistical gift, a return to a less extreme level of mayhem after a crazy spike sent crime rates careening off the charts?

Much of the evidence offered to support these theories is, in the end, contradicted by history or otherwise unraveled. Yes, the economy is better. But it also boomed during the 1960s, when crime began its steep upward march. And in the past, crime has waned during economic downturns, most notably during the Great Depression.

The fact that more people are in prison offers an appealing theory, but why, then, are crime rates often worst in places where incarceration rates are the highest?

More and smarter police makes some sense, but why has crime also declined where police forces are generally thought to be inefficient?

Risk vs. reward?

Typically, what one believes about what is driving crime down is linked to what one believes lies at the root of crime in the first place.

Those who pin crime on social factors believe that if society can fix those conditions, then crime will decline. Others believe crime will decline only if we take enough criminally inclined people off the streets and inhibit those remaining with the prospect of harsh punishment if they transgress.

It's a debate that has raged in one way or another since criminology emerged as a discipline more than a century ago.

Robert Moffit, the scion of a family of Philadelphia police officers, is a professional policy wonk -- a former Reagan administration official and director of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He believes criminals make rational choices: They commit crimes because they weigh their chances and decide they're worth the risk.

The criminal's calculus must be altered, Moffit says: The price of crime must be raised by making capture sure and punishment swift and severe. And while economic factors play a minor role in reducing crime, Moffit says, smart policing and tougher prison sentences are far more important.

That view has proved persuasive in Congress and many state legislatures that have imposed mandatory criminal sentences and appropriated money to hire tens of thousands of new police officers.

For years, criminologists have warned of ``hot spot'' crime areas, habitual felons and the corrosive effects of allowing small violations to go unpunished, he says. Now, police and policymakers are finally listening.

``The notion that a police commander in the 1950s, 1960s would listen to a Harvard professor would have been crazy,'' Moffit says, noting that for years, departments were guided largely by intuition rather than operating scientifically. Where police themselves once argued that crime rates were largely a product of demographics or social factors out of their control, they now increasingly rely on computer analyses of where, when and what kinds of crimes are committed, then try to keep a step ahead by disrupting existing patterns.

Police are also expending more money and energy to target minor crimes as an aid in stamping out serious ones. This approach, argued most memorably by criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, is rooted in the belief that going after even petty crimes will create an atmosphere that makes all crime less likely.

``We are not dealing with a sociological phenomenon that is beyond our control,'' Moffit says, offering New York City as Exhibit A.

There, top police officials have adopted the policing techniques of the moment, aggressively targeting major crime trends and petty criminals -- subway fare beaters, loiterers, those who drink or urinate in public. That not only makes New York less menacing and more livable, it also nets many serious criminals, Moffit says. In 1991, one of six fare beaters carried a weapon or was wanted on an outstanding warrant.

Overall, crime in New York has dropped 55 percent in the past six years, and even after a slight increase last year, murder is down almost 70 percent since 1990.

That's given considerable ammunition to those who argue that there is a direct link between policing and crime. But what happens after the cops are finished also attracts their attention: Criminals are going to jail in record numbers. The number of people in the nation's prisons and jails has nearly quadrupled since 1980 and is projected to surpass 2 million early this year.

Moffit sees the huge incarceration rate as the unfortunate price of fighting crime, and an important reason why we now appear to be winning.

Combination of factors?

Moffit's admonition certainly resonates. Recent Justice Department surveys found that a third of the suspects arrested for violent felonies were on probation or parole, or free on bail.

And the public is cheering the hard-liners. In New York, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is riding his crime-fighting success into front-runner status in that state's U.S. Senate race. Baltimore Democrat Martin O'Malley was swept to election as mayor largely on his promise to institute ``zero tolerance'' policing in a city demoralized by crime.

But if tough policing and longer prison sentences stop crime, then why did crime continue to rise in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when incarceration rates were growing most rapidly? In fact, incarceration rates were rising for 19 years before crime spiked in 1992 and began to decline. Did it really take that long for the benefit to be realized? And what's going on in San Francisco, where both crime and incarceration rates are down?

Those questions fairly jump from James Austin, a George Washington University criminologist who is convinced tough policing and imprisonment policies are relatively minor factors.

Between 1995 and 1998, violent crime declined 33 percent in San Francisco. More stunning is that the city reduced both crime and the number of people it sent to prison -- from 2,136 in 1993 to 703 in 1998, according to a recent study.

While New York City's hard-line approach grabbed international headlines and praise, San Francisco has quietly employed an approach that stresses alternative sentences and education for offenders and community involvement -- strategies long ago dismissed as ineffective by some.

``If it is true that incarceration rates are what dictate crime rates, how do you ever explain the fact that the highest crime rates are in places with high incarceration rates?'' Austin says.

Austin calls declining crime a happy result of the confluence of several factors: a robust economy; declining drug and alcohol use, which experts call a response to lower unemployment rates and better drug education; and the fact that young males between 15 and 24, the most crime-prone demographic group, are a smaller portion of the nation's population.

Also, after decades of spiraling crime increases, he says, we are seeing something of a ``regression to the mean,'' which means crime is sliding back after hitting an unusual peak that was largely due to the nation's crack epidemic.

Habitual criminals

``The thing that I never will forget is just how normal people were in prison,'' says Austin, who for four years was a counselor in the notorious Illinois prisons at Joliet and Statesville. He says criminals are mostly desperate losers who end up behind bars because they have few options. His book cites surveys showing most prison inmates were convicted of petty crimes -- ones that involved no significant amounts of money or injury to others.

Many people ``need to be incarcerated for a long period of time,'' Austin says. ``But that is not everyone in prison. That is maybe 15 to 20 percent of the (prison) population.''

By contrast, Moffit, in a collection of essays he edited with former attorney general Edwin Meese III, points to one study that found that over an 11-year period, 240 criminals had committed 500,000 crimes -- an average of about 190 crimes per criminal per year.

Moffit cites studies suggesting that many prisoners are habitual criminals. One found that 43 percent of inmates released from prison were rearrested within three years, half of them for violent crimes.

``Probably yes, there are too many people in prison,'' he says, but adds that the vast majority should be there.

Moffit believes broken homes, abusive parents and plain moral failure are what cause people to break the law. Unfortunately, these aren't things we know how to fix effectively, he says. Anti-poverty efforts, social programs and educational opportunities appear to make little difference. Here Moffit quotes Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas: ``If social spending stopped crime, we would be the safest country in the world.''

Abortion affect?

That bottom-line way of viewing crime prevention reached something of a zenith in a report released last year by two leading economists, the University of Chicago's Steven D. Levitt and John J. Donohue III of Stanford Law School. The nation's crime drop, they argued, is the result of an increase in abortions following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to the procedure. Fewer crimes are being committed now, the authors concluded, because many unwanted children who might have grown up amid conditions that often lead to criminal lives were never born.

The logic was infuriating to some, as there was no escaping the reality of the people whose abortions were being talked about: young black women. Any discussion of crime based on biological factors -- and nothing could be more biological than birth itself -- carries the specter of racism because of the disproportionate share of prison inmates who are African-American.

Blacks accounted for 31 percent of the nation's prison population in 1923, when they were arguably more oppressed than protected by the criminal justice system. Despite decades of civil rights reforms, the numbers have only grown more lopsided -- about half of the nation's prison inmates are black, even though black people account for only 12 percent of the country's population. (Hispanics, about 11 percent of the population, account for 15 percent of the prison population.)

Overall, blacks are more than 10 times as likely as whites to be incarcerated. Some studies say that 29 percent of black males born this year are expected to be imprisoned during their lifetimes.

It may well be that there is no way to know what will happen with America's crime rates because the factors that influence them are too complex.

In his new book, ``Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior,'' British economist Paul Ormerod argues that human behavior is essentially unpredictable, in large part because individuals are as likely to be influenced by one another as by objective factors such as poverty or the police.

Will crime rise or fall in the next generation? You can ask the same thing about hemlines with as much chance of accurately predicting the answer, he maintains.