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njlauren -> RE: Baby Boomers and the crime rate (6/2/2013 2:33:00 PM)
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This is a classic example of why statistics can be problematic in terms of causality, it is why when they do studies on things like cancer clusters and the like, they have to rule out other things before deciding on causality. For example, my son was born in a major NYC hospital, and if you looked at the charts on the ratio of kids dying in childbirth, you would think the hospital was crappy, since statistically it was higher than the norm. On the other hand, if you dug down, you would find that because of its expertise the hospital tended to get a lot of high risk pregnancies coming their to be delivered as compared to typical hospitals. I remember a statistic that said a certain town in south florida was a place where if you lived you were more likely to die within 10 years of moving there than anyplace else in the US; but then when you looked, you found out the town was predominantly retirement villages and that the typical resident was over 80 years old.........
With crime, you have to be careful. The spikes happening in the 80's then around 2000 were likely not caused by boomers, or at least if it was, maybe the tail end, given that most crime is in the 18-29 year old bracket.
More importantly, it leaves out other causative effects (not even going to try with the leaded gasoline one....).
-Post WWII, the mass migration of blacks from the Jim Crowe states to the north was in full swing, which brought a huge influx of poor, ill educated people, primarily into cities, and poverty concentrated is a disaster area for crime
-Immigration, especially from Puerto Rico, soared in the post WWII world, and again, mostly poor, ill educated people
(and obviously, factor in discrimination into their plight)....basically, cities saw an outflux of white, middle class people and they were replaced by poor, ill educated people, which helped destabalize cities.
If not the original immigrants, their kids, helped fuel the gang and drug related crimes that peaked by the late 80's in NYC and by 2000 elsewhere. NYC in the late 80's, when I lived in one of the boroughs, had a murder rate of 2500/year, today it is around 600, and it was fueled by drugs, crack and cocaine and dealers fighting over turf.
Plus you also have to take into consideration the cycles of single parent mothers into this equation, the multiple generations of poor, inner city kids born to poor single moms and the cycle of welfare and such. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a book about this around 1959, warning about the consequences, was chastised by liberals as demonizing the poor and blacks and such, but he was right. Arguing it was Doctor Spock is frankly right wing twaddle, conservatives have been trying to blame everything from the *gasp* sexual revolution to feminism to the vietnam war protests on it, but the reality is, most of those brought up by "Dr. Spock" became the middle class and well to do of later generations, not criminals, most crime tends to come from the underclass, not from kids coddled by middle class parents.
The crime declines are complex. In NYC, a lot of it simply was that the crack epidemic went the way of most epidemics, but it is more that that. Changes in police procedure helped target problems, and with the perception that the city was tough on crime, it economically gentrified, large swaths of neighborhoods once crime ridden and poor, are now trendy.
Age, too, helps, the population is aging, and those who were prime candidates in the 80's or 90's to commit crimes are now in their 40's or so, and that decreases the tendency to commit crimes, and there aren't the numbers coming after them, despite the mini booms and such.
It is interesting that even with the economic malaise we have seen, the rates still are not soaring. Not sure entirely why, maybe for the same reason it didn't soar as much in the 1930's as you would expect, people are riding this out, rather than turning to crime, though that is speculation.
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