Until recently, most post-1960 social-trend data
spelled trouble. There were more pregnant unmarried
girls, more fatherless violent boys, more people
on welfare. But since 1993, the news on many key social
indices has been very good. Fewer teenagers, black
and white, are having children outside of marriage. Welfare
rolls have receded rapidly. Rates of violent crime
have dropped dramatically. But not all post-1993 social
measures point in a positive direction. Poor children still
lag badly in basic literacy. Rates of certain types of substance
abuse have surged. But the list of favorable trends
is longer than the litany of frightening ones.
Taking their cues from these post-1993 trend lines,
many thinkers on the left and on the right are convinced
that America has now turned the corner on post-1960 social
ills. With pardonable pride, they attribute the victory
largely to ideas and policies promoted by themselves
and like-minded others. Unfortunately, they also discount
contrary data and dismiss as perfectionists, puritans,
or pessimistic party-poopers anyone who won't
join them in uncorking the champagne.
Should we start celebrating? Do even the most favorable
post-1993 trends represent a lasting change in social
climate--or just a temporary change in social weather?
Let's answer by zeroing in on the single most widely
cited corner-turning trend: violent crime.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' national
crime victimization surveys, violent crime fell by about
21 percent from 1993 to 1997. As I have detailed elsewhere,
the BJS changed its survey methods in 1995, and
the surveys systematically undercount violent crimes. So
do the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, an annual count of
crimes reported to police as tallied by more than 17,000
local law enforcement agencies. But let's take the positive
post-1993 crime data at face value.
In 1997 roughly 1.6 million violent crimes were reported
to the police. The rate of violent crimes reported
to the police that year was about 61 per 10,000 U.S. residents. In 1965 the rate was 20. In 1970 it was 36.4. By
1980 it had risen to 59.7. In 1992 it peaked at nearly 76.
By 1997 it had fallen back to its 1980 level, which was
three times the 1965 rate.
In 1967 a presidential commission on crime in America
noted with alarm that in 1965 118,916 robberies were reported
to the police, or six reported robberies per 10,000
U.S. residents. For 1994, the BJS survey counted 1.3 million
robberies, and the FBI tallied 719,000 robberies reported
to police. That makes 27.5 reported robberies per
10,000 U.S. residents in 1994, or 4.6 times the 1965 rate.
In 1967 the president's commission warned that violent
crime was rising, especially among young minority
males in urban slums. In 1997 Americans suffered about
4 million rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, plus
millions more less serious violent crimes. In the mid-
1990s homicide rates among young black males reached
all-time highs. Black males aged 14 to 24 constituted just
above 1 percent of the population but more than 15 percent
of the homicide victims and more than 25 percent of
the homicide perpetrators.
The best post-1993 news about violent crime is that
overall black homicide victimization rates have fallen by
more than 30 percent, and violent crimes against blacks
have fallen by about 40 percent. Translated into lives
saved, the 30 percent drop means that roughly 4,000
fewer blacks were murdered in 1997 than would have
been killed had the peak homicide rate suffered by
blacks in 1991 (and repeated in 1993) proved to be a
decade-long plateau.
In 1967 the president's commission warned that
"enormous numbers of young people appear to be involved"
in juvenile delinquency and youth crime. As evidence,
it noted that in 1965 the rate of juvenile violent
crime arrests for persons aged 15 to 17 was 223 per
100,000. By the mid-1990s violent crime arrests per
100,000 persons aged 10 to 17 (a younger cohort) peaked
at around 500. A fifth of "juvenile delinquency" cases in
the mid-1990s involved so-called person offenses (e.g.,
murder, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault). Juvenile
probation authorities handled more than a half million
cases annually. In 1995 alone, some 47,000 juvenile offenses
classified as mere "public disorders" involved
weapons violations.
Between 1993 and 1998 juvenile violent crime rates of
all types fell steeply. Yet they remained above the levels
that so worried the president's commission in the mid-1960s.
Many cities did not experience major declines in
juvenile violence. For example, between 1995 and 1998
the annual number of juvenile homicide victims in
Philadelphia dropped insignificantly (from 163 to 157),
and the annual number of juvenile gunshot victims fell
by a single soul (from 137 to 136).
When the late great University of Pennsylvania criminologist
Marvin E. Wolfgang compared boys in successive
cohorts, he found that each cohort offended at a
higher rate than the previous one. For example, boys
born in 1958 and criminally active in the 1970s and early
1980s committed robberies at five times the rate of boys
born in 1940 and criminally active in the 1950s and early
1960s. In a just-published book on the history of street
gangs, Wolfgang's Penn colleague, historian Eric C.
Schneider, cautions that we not "take too much hope
from the recent downturn in homicide and other crime"
among juveniles because each cycle of youth violence
"ends at a higher plateau than the previous one and then
recedes to a new plateau."
In 1967 the president's commission offered eight
broad sets of recommendations to combat adult crime
and juvenile delinquency. By the mid-1980s the vast majority
of these proposals had been legislated, implemented,
and funded. By 1994 government at all levels spent a
combined total of $94 billion a year on all criminal jus-
tice activities (e.g., courts, cops, and corrections). Untold
billions more were spent by Washington and the states
on prevention programs administered mainly or solely
through human services agencies or social welfare agencies
rather than by law enforcement agencies.
As government's post-1967 anti-crime efforts expanded
in all directions, many Americans voted with their feet
and moved away from high-crime neighborhoods to relatively
low-crime suburbs. Both central-city and suburban
Americans made massive investments in personal security.
The explosion in annual spending for household burglar
alarms, gated communities, private security guards,
and the like continues unabated. In addition, average citizens
of every socioeconomic status and demographic
description have habituated themselves and their children
to all manner of personal crime-avoidance behaviors
(e.g., lock the car doors, be wary of strangers, stay off
certain streets, don't go out at night alone, and so on).
It would be incredible if our nearly third of a century's
worth of unprecedented public, private, and personal
anti-crime exertions had yielded no crime-reduction
dividends. Lord only knows how much higher post-1967
violent crime rates would be in their absence.
The reality, however, is that for all we have spent and
done, today's Americans, especially the inner-city poor,
are victimized by violent crime at rates at or above those
that made our parents or grandparents wince.
Should we keep wincing or start celebrating? Our answer
should depend at least in part on what we believe
is driving the post-1993 progress against violent crime
and other social ills. Politically popular explanations for
the decline in crime -- for example, Washington's
"100,000 new cops on the beat" -- are hardly sufficient.
But either or both of two intellectually serious theories
-- let's call them the re-norming thesis and the re-administering
thesis -- might convince us that recent victories
over violent crime and social decline are not hollow
and need not be fleeting.
The re-norming thesis maintains that recent progress
against violent crime and other social problems reflects
the rebirth of certain social norms (e.g., communal well-being
over individual self-interest, group cooperation
over group conflict, moral standards over moral relativism).
One leading re-norming theorist, Francis Fukuyama,
argues that social capital runs in cycles: We use it,
we lose it, and we eventually replenish it (and then
some). The re-norming process, he speculates, is guided
by our experience of negative social consequences and
goaded by our species' innate sociality. "There is growing
evidence," he writes, "that the Great Disruption
[a.k.a. the social impact of the '60s] has run its course,
and that the process of re-norming has already begun."
In the re-administering thesis, the good news has less
to do with societal or culture-wide re-norming than it
does with specific policy changes that rationalize the conditions
under which citizens receive public support or
suffer public penalties: Violent criminals who commit
new crimes get reincarcerated for longer periods and at
higher rates; police crack down on quality-of-life criminals
and open up to community leaders; welfare recipients
are required to work and helped to find jobs; and so
on. One leading re-administering theorist, Lawrence
Mead, terms these changes in social-policy implementation
"the new paternalism." Continue to re-administer social
policies paternalistically, he argues, and we will continue
to see good social results for years to come.
There is something to be said for each thesis. Take the
case of Boston. For nearly two and a half years beginning
in 1995, the city had no gun-related youth homicides.
Re-norming was undoubtedly a part of the story.
Inner-city faith communities mobilized grassroots campaigns
to "stop the noise" (deviancy norms were redefined
back up). Re-administering mattered too. The
shooting ceased as the number of young males busted
for probation violations quadrupled (detention centers
were filled back up). Re-norming met re-administering
as preachers and probation chiefs joined together on a
slew of new community-based anti-violence initiatives.
Some youths have been shot dead in Boston since 1997,
but the city's homicide rates have remained at levels not
seen since the mid-1960s.
Still, there are many significant inter- and intra-city
differences in rates of violent crime and other social ills
that neither thesis captures and neither would predict.
Why has Boston been re-norming and re-administering
but not Philadelphia? How does re-norming relate to the
fact that in 1997 non-marital births were twice as high in
New Mexico as they were in Idaho? Why did homicide
rates go into a free fall in New York City as officials re-administered
policing, but also in Los Angeles and other
cities where officials did no such thing?
Re-norming and re-administering aside, what of "reinvesting,"
as in the nation's unprecedented post-1993 economic
boom? Didn't Boston also witness an expansion
in jobs and economic opportunity in the violence-ridden
neighborhoods where more than 80 percent of the city's
serious street violence had long been concentrated? In
Boston and nationally, what will happen to re-norming
and re-administering during the next recession?
What of the fact that fatherlessness remains a norm in
many communities and for an estimated 1.3 million sons
and daughters of incarcerated men? What of the fact that
we have yet to re-administer a single big-city child protective
services agency even though the incidence of substantiated
child maltreatment has reached record highs,
and even as we acknowledge that today's abused kindergartners
will by the year 2006 number among the country's
21 million teens, the largest teen cohort since 1980?
What it took over three decades to ruin should take at
least a decade to predictably and reliably regain. If the
violent crime data and other positive post-1993 social
trends are still looking so good on New Year's Eve 2003,
let's celebrate. For now, however, let's watch, wait,
work, wince and pray
