A Study Of The Fall In Crime In The United States During The 1990s

The crime was on a steady rise until this point, taking everyone by surprise. Experts rushed to try to explain the phenomenon, trying to answer the most important question, where did all the criminals go? The authors review the most popular explanations experts provided to explain this sudden event, ultimately unveiling that only a few explanations: the increased reliance on prisons, increased number of police, and the legalization of abortion, actually affected the crime rate.

Nicolae Ceausescu was a communist dictator in Romania who made abortion illegal in 1967.

Before 1967, abortions abortion rates in Romania were extremely high. Ceausescu had plans to make Romania stronger by increasing its population. Sure enough, his plan worked as Romania’s birth rate doubled within one year of the ban. These children were born in a country where life was miserable for most people. This quickly leads to an increase in crime in the country. The ban went on until 1989, when thousands of people, mostly consisting of the youth, took to the streets in protest.

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Ceausescu was eventually captured and executed. The abortion issue in Romania is the reverse of the crime story in the United States. In 1900, abortion was illegal in the U.S. In the 1960s and 1970s, abortion was slowly becoming legal, with it being fully legalized in the entire country by 1973 in Roe v. Wade. By 1980, there was one abortion for every 2.25 live births. With abortion costs dropping, women who were single, young, and poor were likely to take advantage of the new law.

Had these women given birth, most of those children would have had a 50% more chance of becoming criminals in the future. By the early 1990s, just as the first children born after the legalization of abortion were in their late teens, the crime rate began to fall dramatically. Crime kept falling as the entire generation became older, minus the children who would have been born had abortion been illegal. The authors acknowledge that a different explanation for the crime drop would have been more comforting, but the link between legalized abortion and the crime drop says otherwise.

The other two explanations for the crime drop include the increased reliance on prisons and the increased number of police. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of people sent to prison increased by 15 times. Sentences were also lengthened, especially those for violent crimes. By the year 2000, over two million people were incarcerated, about four times as many as back in 1972. The evidence linking the increase in prison use with the crime drop is strong, as imprisonment and longer sentences acted as a disincentive. This caused one-third of the crime rate to drop. The other factor in the crime drop is the increased number of police. The number of cops rose by 14% in the United States during the 1990s. To show causality, the authors found scenarios where police were hired for reasons unrelated to crime increase. Causality is the relationship between cause and effect. The perfect scenario is vote-hungry politicians hiring more police before election day to lock up the law-and-order vote. By comparing the crime rate in cities with recent elections with cities without elections, it was evident that additional police affected lowering the crime. Police acted as a deterrent and also provided much-needed manpower to imprison all the criminals. Extra police accounted for 10% of the crime drop.

This chapter shows that large changes in society, such as the unexpected drop in crime, often have unexpected and remote causes. Abortion is not only controversial, but it is hard to accept as the root cause of the crime drop because it happened two decades before the incident. It would be simpler to believe that a more recent event, such as a better economy, stricter gun laws, increased police force, etc, produced a more immediate effect. In conclusion, finding the root cause of an event often requires digging deeper.