More poverty = more crime theory challenged

Heather MacDonald says recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most common social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s.

"If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?" So asks Heather MacDonald, senior scholar ath the neo-conservative thinktank, the Manhattan institute, challenging the theory that crime is a result of poorly-distributed income and lack of material opportunity.

That theory, known as differential-opportunity theory, connects lack of opportunity to delinquency and criminality rates. (Incidentally, it also provided the scholarly impetus behind much of President Johnson's "Great Society" programs.)  

MacDonald says you can't look Great Recession-era crime statistics in LA and NYC blow that theory out of the water.

"If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration...Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.

The 1960s themselves offered a challenge to the poverty-causes-crime thesis. Homicides rose 43%, despite an expanding economy and a surge in government jobs for inner-city residents. The Great Depression also contradicted the idea that need breeds predation, since crime rates dropped during that prolonged crisis...Even then crime patterns were defying expectations.

And by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.

The recession crime free fall continues a trend of declining national crime rates that began in the 1990s, during a very different economy. The causes of that long-term drop are hotly disputed, but an increase in the number of people incarcerated had a large effect on crime in the last decade and continues to affect crime rates today, however much anti-incarceration activists deny it. The number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2008, from 300,000 to 1.6 million."

So what does MacDonald credit for the reduction in crime? The intensive use of crime data to determine policing strategies and to hold precinct commanders accountable—a process known as Compstat.

More: "A Crime Theory Demolished"