“When I’m in a downtown crowd I wonder if the jihad will catch up with me,” said a young American. I responded “When I was a kid in the 1970s you didn’t have to wonder if you’d be the victim of violence. You knew that if you went downtown after dark that you would be.”
What is responsible for the falling crime rate? I’ve seen various theories but am wondering if there is a simple explanation: welfare is a more attractive alternative for most people.
Let’s look at the old, old, days. There was no central government-provided welfare (though religious and social organizations ran various programs, as did some towns). Both men and women who couldn’t get jobs might find crime attractive, therefore. And in fact women were active as criminals throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in England (see Moll Flanders!).
Early welfare programs were designed primarily for women with children. Thus if a woman was able to produce or obtain a child, she could in many cases earn a better living from welfare than from crime. A 1988 change in federal law made it potentially more lucrative for a woman to collect child support from a one-night sexual encounter than to go to college and work (see “History of Divorce”). That left an American world in which it only men found it economically rational to be criminals.
SSDI was greatly expanded in the 1970s (see “Disability Policy and History”), thus making a lot more men eligible for welfare. The conditions of collecting welfare gradually improved for both men and women. The free government-provided house changed from an apartment in a squalid high-rise filled with other welfare collectors to an apartment in a “mixed income” building, potentially the same apartment that a person earning 4-5X the median wage would rent. A person relying on welfare might also find him or herself in a single-family suburban house (see “Vouchers Help Families Move Far From Public Housing” (NYT, July 7, 2015), for example, for how an adult who has obtained custody of minor children can get $1,840 per month to live in the better neighborhoods of Dallas), essentially living the American Dream.
If the “better welfare leads to less crime” theory is correct, why do we still have crime at all then? Perhaps some people are not well-informed regarding welfare options, e.g., how much more comfortably they could live if they moved to a different welfare jurisdiction (we surveyed college-educated Massachusetts residents and found that they typically underestimated the potential profits from child support by a factor of 5-10, for example). Perhaps some people are not good at handling the paperwork challenge of qualifying for all of the various programs (see this posting asking “Just how many government workers can a poor American support?”). Perhaps the answer is that, for young men who don’t have custody of minor children, the waiting list for a free house is so long that the benefit is rendered useless and the immediate cash benefits from welfare are not enough to outperform a life of crime.
I guess it would be a good thing if we could just pay people to be law-abiding. But I’m skeptical that entitlement increases is the reason crime has dropped. Steven Pinker has of course written at length on the topic. http://freakonomics.com/tag/crime/ says the introduction of debit cards for government payments made a measurable difference. And there’s the lead theory, which I find appealing. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline Lots more on this topic on the web.
philg: “If the “better welfare leads to less crime” theory is correct, why do we still have crime at all then?”
Even if better welfare leads to less crime, there is no reason to expect that it would eliminate it (Pareto principle). We might have some crime for the same way we have investment bankers (some people might not be satisfied with what welfare or a middle class salary provides). Some young men might just be bored.
Can’t we look to socialized countries’ welfare policies versus crime statistics for data?
Crime rates are manipulated and don’t reflect the true crime rate. I read in yesterday’s LA Times that the LAPD misclassified 25,000 crimes to a lower significance. This regularly happens all over the country.
Long-term incarceration of repeat offenders should help lower the crime rates; though, any reduction would be eliminated by the unending supply of adolescent males.
On the other hand, forty years of uncontrolled legal and illegal immigration of low skill, poor people has increased the crime rate, as well as the unemployment rate – further boosting the crime rate.
Senorpablo: The U.S. is a “socialized country”. See http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/09/poverty-and-the-social-welfare-state-in-the-united-states-and-other-nations for how “Among affluent nations, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States has one of the highest levels of social welfare spending per capita.”
Smartest Woman on the Internet:
Is there any reason to believe that other countries don’t also manipulate their crime statistics? It’s probably a wash. One can also look at prison population per capita to get an idea of a nations crime.
As for your notion of immigrant crime rates, this article begs to differ:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mythical-connection-between-immigrants-and-crime-1436916798
“It also holds true in states with large populations of illegal residents. A 2008 report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants are underrepresented in the prison system. “The incarceration rate for foreign-born adults is 297 per 100,000 in the population, compared [with] 813 per 100,000 for U.S.-born adults,” the study concludes. “The foreign-born, who make up roughly 35% of California’s adult population, constitute 17% of the state prison population.””
philg:
That conclusion of that article was that we’re inefficient at welfare spending, mostly due to education and healthcare. Why not look to a “real”(successful, experienced) socialist country…
I wonder how much stricter sentencing for repeat offenders (three strikes and so forth) has done to keep habitual criminals away from the rest of the population.
Concealed carry laws have greatly expanded in most parts of the country. This means that a criminal choosing a random person runs the risk of choosing someone with a gun who might then shoot them. Better to stay on welfare or be a low-level drug dealer.
One simple answer as to why crime dropped: legal abortion. I suspect there will be a major uptick in the next decade.
The big drop in crime occurred during the 1990s, which was also when welfare reform was passed, which made welfare significantly less generous. I’m using the term welfare in the way that most Americans do, which excludes Social Security and Medicare.
Vince: if you exclude all but one of the ways that Americans can get taxpayer-funded cash and services without working then you can come up with all kinds of interesting conclusions! By excluding Social Security, for example, you’ve excluded about 9 million people on SSDI (see https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/dibStat.html ). For comparison, there are roughly 2.2 million Americans in prison and 4.75 million on probation or parole.
Most crime is committed by people who are young. The vast majority of people on SSDI are middle-aged.