Word: rates
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Lockup Factor In his book Why Crime Rates Fell, Tufts University sociologist John Conklin concluded that up to half of the improvement was due to a single factor: more people in prison. The U.S. prison population grew by more than half a million during the 1990s and continued to grow, although more slowly, in the next decade. Go back half a century: as sentencing became more lenient in the 1960s and '70s, the crime rate started to rise. When lawmakers responded to the crime wave by building prisons and mandating tough sentences, the number of prisoners increased and the number...
...counts by a total of nearly 10,000 inmates. As a result, according to the Justice Department, the number of state and federal prisoners grew by less than 1% nationwide - the smallest increase in nearly a decade. (The number of blacks behind bars is, in fact, falling as the rate of incarceration among African Americans has dropped nearly 10% from its peak...
...Economy of Crime Criminologists will tell you, however, that the tale of CompStat is not the whole story. New York City's crime rate actually began to drop a couple of years before Giuliani became mayor. And rates began falling in cities without CompStat at about the same time - though not as rapidly as in New York. For while police were changing tactics, the criminals were shifting gears...
...Criminologist Conklin believes that two statistics in particular - median age and the unemployment rate - help explain the ebb and flow of crime. Violence is typically a young man's vice; it has been said that the most effective crime-fighting tool is a 30th birthday. The arrival of teenage baby boomers in the 1960s coincided with a rise in crime, and rates have declined as America has grown older. The median age in 1990, near the peak of the crime wave, was 32, according to Conklin. A decade later, it was over 35. Today, it is 36-plus...
...million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s." To Mac Donald, this is proof that data-driven police work and tougher sentencing are the answer to crime - not social-welfare programs. Conklin thinks it may be too soon to tell. "The unemployment rate began to spike less than a year ago. We may yet see the pressure show up in crime rates," he says. It's fair to say, though, that the belief in a simple cause-and-effect relationship between income and crime has worn pretty thin. (See more about crime...