Word: crackings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What makes these numbers important, not just encouraging, is that they extend what is plainly a sustained retreat from the crack-fueled crime wave of the late 1980s. According to the FBI, violent crimes started to decline in 1993. As always with crime, an area of famously wiggly trend lines, the downward curve is not to be found everywhere. Minneapolis, Minnesota, for instance, is still puzzling over why in 1995 homicides climbed more than 56% over the preceding year. Even with the downward trend, crime rates remain bloodcurdlingly high, especially when compared to the relatively peaceable kingdom...
...that, even the experts in bad behavior are intrigued. Something is happening here. The question is, Why? The lineup of contributing factors includes most of the usual suspects: a decline in the proportion of young males in the general population, the leveling off of crack cocaine use, a moderate unemployment rate and tougher sentencing that gets more felons off the street and keeps them off longer...
...trade in crack cocaine also appears to have changed. Perhaps it has lost its cachet. "As with any drug epidemic, the attractiveness of the drug begins to wear off, partly because users see so many of their friends dead," says James Q. Wilson, the UCLA professor who is one of the nation's most prominent thinkers on crime. That's important, because crack was the great impetus to crime in the late 1980s as brash new dealers muscled in. Another theory is that the trade has simply stabilized into a "mature market," as they say in the business schools, with...
...potential synergy between cops and residents works not only in big cities: Taylor, Texas, about 28 miles northeast of Austin, has just 13,300 people. But no place is too small for the drug trade. Five years ago, crack moved in among the cotton gins and railroad tracks, bringing with it assault, rape, car theft and murder. Crime got so bad that Mae Willie Turner, 79, and her sister, Gladys Hubbard, 73, could no longer sit at night on their front porch. "The place was infested," says Turner...
Predicting a generation's future crime patterns is, of course, risky, especially when outside factors (Will crack use be up or down? Will gun laws be tightened?) remain unpredictable. Michael Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, argues that the demographic doomsayers are unduly alarmist. "There will be a slightly larger number of people relative to the overall population who are at high risk for doing bad things, so that's going to have some effect," he concedes. "But it's not going to be an apocalyptic effect." Norval Morris, professor...