Mostly I’m linking this New Yorker article: The Caging of America so I don’t forget to go back and read it. I’ve read the first few paragraphs, and it seems worth going back to. (h/t Roger).
Catching my eye right at the front “In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.” The former is the Northern impulse whereas the latter is the Southern.
That article was very interesting (and illuminating).
Number 72 on Stuff White People Like is “The New Yorker”.
Right after marathon running.
You’re a SWhiPL.
;)
I am awfully white. My ancestors are strictly Northern European. I am lactose tolerant, lack rhythm, can’t dance, and can’t dunk; among other things.
On the topic, no article like that should be written without a deep examination of what “The Caging of America” was a reaction to: the “De-Caging of America”, from roughly 1959 to about the mid seventies, when incarceration rates plunged because “expert opinion” was that jails were just an apprenticeship program for criminals.
The explosion is crime in the ’60s was a direct result.
I don’t think the South released large numbers of prisoners during the 60s, yet their crime rates soared along with the rest of the country.
I don’t know about that. What I do know is that you take this data and regress the incarceration rate vs. the crime rate with about a 5 year lag, and you have an incredibly high correlation coefficient for social science data.
I can’t remember the precise book source that originally correlated the two (freakonomics?) but your graph does seem to correlate well with the theory that crime decreased due to the new constitutional right for abortion (1973). The children that would have been born in 1974/5 were just a year or two out of high school at the apex of your violence chart Buzz.
(Please note that I am not suggesting this fact should change ones views on the constitutinality of abortion. Just an observation without political agenda).
I think I’ve also heard folks suggest a correlation with ditching lead paint or gas or something.
Somebody has created a statistician monster! lol
Still, one may be drawing an overly general conclusion based on national data without assessing any regional variations. That graph shouldn’t be used without some caveats, I’m thinking, since it is independent of its source data.
The problem with the abortion argument is that it does not account for the rise in crime in the first place. Ditto for things like leaded gasoline.
Seems like leaded gasoline would have to become commonly used and then have time for the affected kids to grow to be adolescents and young adults.
On abortions, I’d look at: a) when they started to become illegal; and b) decline in the child mortality rates to where kids would tend to survive even where they were unwanted.
No idea where any of that takes you.
Leaded gasoline has been widespread since the 1920s. That does not jibe with crime starting to increase in the 1960s.
Abortion became widespread in 1973, when it was legalized nationally.
Neither fact fits the complete data, the rise in crime in the 1960s and the drop in crime in the 1990s.
Did they keep stats for crime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? I would think that crime rates would have been higher in the big cities around that time; but don’t really know. (I’m just wondering if the rise in the 60s was rising from something like a baseline or from a trough of some sort.)