Читать книгу Criminology For Dummies - Steven Briggs - Страница 59

One of the larger criminology controversies arose in the late 1990s. Crime rates through the 1970s and 1980s had risen to all-time highs, but in the late 1990s, as states began to implement much tougher sentencing laws, crime rates began to plunge. As Figure 3-1 shows, violent crime began to decrease dramatically in 1992 and was almost cut in half by 2003.

Proponents of tougher sentencing laws pointed out the dramatic coincidence of crime dropping at the same time that sentences were lengthening. But others saw different potential causes. For example, Steven Levitt and John Donohue concluded that the drop in crime that began in the mid-1990s was, to a large extent, the result of the legalization of abortion, which occurred in 1973. Their theory was that unwanted children from unplanned pregnancies, who are more likely than children of planned pregnancies to be involved in crime when they become adults, were aborted and, thus, never lived to commit crimes. A potential criminal who was aborted in 1973 would’ve become an adult in 1991 if she’d lived. Other criminologists have challenged the methodology of Levitt and Donohue’s analysis, questioning the assumption that unwanted children are more likely to commit violent crime. Other criminologists posited different explanations for the drop in the crime rate, such as an improving economy in the 1990s, or demographic changes, such as baby boomers aging out of their prime crime-committing years.

The lack of a clear explanation for the drop in crime rates shows that crime statistics alone are not sufficient to help guide policy choices in crime prevention.