To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

2. AMERICAN VIOLENCE SINCE THE VIOLENCE COMMISSION:
REGAINING PERSPECTIVE¹

Surveying the state of violence in America at the end of the 1960s, the Violence Commission's Task Force on Individual Crimes of Violence found much to be alarmed about. For millions of Americans, they wrote, "few things are more pervasive, more frightening, more real today than violent crime and the fear of being assaulted, mugged, robbed, or raped." The fear of victimization had "touched us all in some way." Many were "fleeing" the cities to the presumed safety of the suburbs; others wouldn't venture onto city streets at night. "Unchecked criminal violence" was threatening to tear apart America's "fragile sense of community."²

Those were troubled, and troubling, words. But the Violence Commission's disturbing view was not lightly arrived at. Though it was well aware of the problems of existing crime statistics, the Commission concluded that serious crimes of violence had increased markedly in the late 1960s. Violent crime was hardly a new problem in America. But something had changed. Violence was more pervasive than ever before in our postwar history, and it was altering the quality of social life for vast numbers of Americans.

Thirty years later, there is, at least in the official rhetoric among politicians and the mass media, a very different tone. Since the Violence Commission, all Presidents have, one way or another, declared "victory in the war against crime." Today, among some commentators at least, there is a sense that we really, and finally, have "turned the corner" on violent crime. Along with our low unemployment, vigorous economic growth, and booming stock market, America's perceived success against crime is offered as evidence that we are, at long last, doing things right. Those successes, moreover, often are attributed to the growing "toughness" of the criminal justice system -- especially the increasing willingness to sentence offenders to prison for long terms and the spread of aggressive policing strategies, like the "zero tolerance" model adopted in New York City. There is a new triumphalism about our ability to control crime through an unshackled criminal justice system. As the former Commissioner of the New York City police recently put it, "we have learned that we can manage our way out of the crime problem."

That view was strongly rejected by the Violence Commission, as well as other noted commissions that preceded it. In the late 1960s, it was widely believed that turning around America's violence problem in an enduring way would require significant investment and a frontal attack on the poverty and inequality that shamed the nation -- and that predictably bred violence. Today it is common to hear that sustained intervention is neither necessary nor desirable: we can deal with violent crime without addressing, for example, vast and shameful inequality in income, wealth, and opportunity; young child poverty that is almost 25%; deteriorating public schools; continuing high inner-city unemployment; and racism in drug sentencing laws. In this view, though it may have been true in the past that the criminal justice system wasn't doing much to reduce crime, that is only because we didn't let it: a squeamish society handcuffed the police and the courts. Now, we've tossed off our self-imposed shackles, and it is working.

A Longer View

But a longer view uncovers a much more disturbing picture. For while it is true that levels of violent crime have fallen significantly since the early part of the 1990s, it is also true that violent crime in big cities is generally worse today in America than it was when the Violence Commission drew its devastating portrait of our ravaged cities. For example, for homicide, rape, aggravated assault and robbery -- the 4 FBI "violent Index crimes" combined -- the offense rate per 100,000 population in cities with 250,000 people or more was 860 in 1969 and 1218 in 1998. (See Appendix 5.)

In addition, while perceptions of fear generally have fallen in recent years, over the longer run, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, fear has risen. For example, in 1967, respondents in a national survey were asked, "Is there any area right around here -- that is, within a mile -- where you would be afraid to walk at night?" Thirty one percent answered "yes" in 1967. The same survey reported that 41 percent answered "yes" in 1998. (Appendix 5.)

From this longer, and deeper, perspective, it is painfully clear that, when it comes to violence, we remain a society in deep trouble. How deep is masked by the extraordinary explosion of imprisonment since the time of the Violence Commission, which has shunted a good part of our crime (and drug) problem behind walls and, accordingly, out of most people's sight -- and in the process has created massive new social problems of its own. But even with the unprecedented investment in the penal system, American rates of serious violent crime are not only higher than they were 30 years ago, but far higher than those in comparable industrial nations around the world, again just as they were 30 years ago.

In the 30 years since the Violence Commission, in short, we have made little clear progress against violent crime, and we are now saddled with a swollen, racially biased, often self-defeating, and sometimes brutal correctional system which is looked at askance by people throughout the world. There have indeed been welcome successes against violence in the last several years. But there is a great danger of both exaggerating and misinterpreting those successes -- and, accordingly, of drawing the wrong lessons from them.

The good news, as we shall see later, is that we are at a point in our history when we actually have the wherewithal -- both the knowledge and the material resources -- to launch an honest and effective attack on the violent crime that still afflicts us, in ways that are both enduring and humane. But we will never get to that point if we keep trying to fool ourselves that we are there already.

From a more narrow perspective, violence has declined since about 1993. The decline is welcome. It translates into many thousands of lives saved and a better quality of life in many hard-hit communities. But it is crucial to put the decline into perspective, for it is often exaggerated -- and can obscure some fundamental truths about violence in America.

The first of them is that, despite the declines in violent crime since the early 1990s, we remain a far more violent place than the rest of the advanced industrial world. In 1969, the Violence Commission noted that while the U.S. was "not alone" among industrial societies in suffering incidents of violence, we were "constantly a leader." That, unfortunately, remains the case. That hard reality is obscured for a variety of reasons; partly because in our public discussion of policy we very rarely look anywhere else in the world for a reality check on our own condition, and partly because of some rather misleading claims that have been made about the level of crime in other industrial societies.

According to most conventional measures, when it comes to less serious forms of crime -- property crime and relatively minor violence -- the U.S. may have been surpassed in recent years by some other industrial countries that had suffered fewer of those offenses in the past. Even for these crimes, however, the evidence is less straightforward than many people believe. The extent of minor crimes is even harder to measure reliably than that of more serious ones, and problems of sampling and reporting are even greater. But more importantly, when it comes to the most serious violence -- homicide, gun assaults, forcible rape, armed robbery -- no one seriously denies that the U.S. remains a "leader"-- that we are in fact an anomaly, an "outlier," among the world's advanced industrial countries.

And that unfortunate global dominance forces us to put the recent declines in violence in the U.S. in proper perspective. For those differences, especially for the most serious of violent crimes, are extreme -- particularly, and most tragically, for the young. At its peak in the early 1990s, our homicide death rate among young men aged 15-24 was 36 per 100,000. By 1996 it had dropped to about 30 per 100,000; it has fallen still further since then, and is now probably closer to 25 per 100,000. That means that a lot of young men are alive who would be dead at the earlier rate. But that rate is still higher than it was as recently as 1987. And more importantly, it is still extreme by the standards of every other industrial democracy.³

A drop from a rate of 36 to 25 deaths per 100,000 would mean that the relative risk of homicide death for our young men, versus those in England, has fallen from 33 to 1 to "only" 23 to 1. In 1996, 5,665 young American men aged 15-24 died of homicide. If the U.S. had had the English youth homicide death rate there would have been roughly 210 of them, and over 5,400 young men -- disproportionately young men of color -- would be alive today. An African American girl aged 1-4 in the United States, at last count, was 7 times as likely to die by homicide as a teenaged-to-young adult man in England. There is a limit to how much we can celebrate these realities.⁴

A look at the other nations which meet or exceed our youth homicide level is instructive -- and gives us some hints for policy. In recent years, all of the other societies with such high and rising rates of youth homicide have either been in the developing world or in some of the nations of the former Soviet bloc -- including Estonia, Russia, Venezuela, and Mexico. What most of these countries share, in addition to the extreme levels of youth violence, is very weak (and sometime collapsing) social safety nets, along with large and typically increasing gaps between haves and have-nots, frequently coupled (as in Mexico, with one of the most troubling recent records of violent crime of any nation in the world) with deliberate "austerity" policies imposed by national governments. A similar pattern appears, too, in the few advanced industrial nations that have suffered sharply rising levels of serious crime in recent years. In the United Kingdom, for example, rising property crime and some forms of violence have emerged simultaneously with deepening poverty, widening economic inequality, and the chipping away at long established standards of social protection for low-income people.

There is a lesson here. In many countries around the world, there has been, especially since the 1980s, an unreflective acceptance of the idea that simply "unleashing" the forces of the private market would bring not only prosperity but social well-being; that the end result of often harsh, Darwinian policies would, somehow, be societies that were not only richer but better and safer. That has not happened in Russia, Estonia, Mexico -- or the United States.

In addition, when it comes to homicide with firearms, America far outdistances other wealthy nations, most of which have far more restrictions on firearms. The firearms death rate in the United States today is 8 times greater than those of 25 other wealthy nations combined. In 1996, handguns were used to murder 2 people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Great Britain, 106 in Canada, 213 in Germany and 9,390 in the United States.⁵

The rate of violent death from assault in the United States is from 4 to 18 times as high as in other G7 nations. This disparity is largely a consequence of the widespread use of handguns in assaults and robberies. "You're just as likely to get punched in the mouth in a bar in Sydney [Australia] as in a bar in Los Angeles. But you're 20 times as likely to be killed in Los Angeles."⁶

The second hard reality is that, even measured against our own American standards, the recent declines in violent crime are by no means as reassuring as they are sometimes claimed to be. In the media, especially, the declines are typically presented as if they represented a sudden fall from a high plateau which we have occupied for a long time -- which appears quite spectacular -- when the reality is that they represent a falling-off from an extraordinary peak of violence, the high point of an epidemic that began in the mid-1980s and that was almost unprecedented in our recent history. (See Appendix 5.) Today we are at the tail end of that epidemic, which is much better than being in the middle -- but which also leaves us back at the very high levels of endemic violence we've been suffering for more than 30 years.

The best news in the past few years has been the significant drop in the homicide rate from its peak in the early 1990s. But it is important to keep in mind that the recent decline leaves our homicide rate just about where it was in 1968, despite the enormous increases in the prison population -- and despite the very significant medical improvements in our ability to keep people from dying if they are badly hurt in an assault. The picture is considerably more troubling, moreover, if we look at homicide trends among different age groups. For though homicide deaths have fallen at all ages from the 1990s peak, they remain much higher for the young than they were in the era of the Violence Commission. Among 14-17 year olds, the risk of death by homicide was almost half again as high in 1998 as in 1970, despite a sharp fall since 1993. For those aged 18-24, the situation is worse: their homicide death rate remained nearly twice as high in 1998 as it was in 1970. The long-term reductions in homicide have come entirely among people over 25. The similarity in the nation's overall homicide rate between the late 1990s and the late 1960s, in short, masks radically different trajectories for the young and the not-so-young: the plight of the young remains dramatically worse today than it was 30 years ago.

For crimes other than homicide, the numbers are, of course, far less reliable -- because they are not reported as accurately. But it is important to bear in mind that reported rates for all other violent crimes are higher, and in some cases far higher, today than in the late 1960s -- after the explosion of "crime in the streets" had accelerated national concern and spurred the fearful responses the Violence Commission described. The reported robbery rate in 1998 was 26% higher than in 1968; reported rates of rape and aggravated assault more than twice as high. (Appendix 5.) And though some of that change -- especially for aggravated assault, where increased reporting of domestic assaults sharply raised official rates in the late 1980s -- clearly reflects differences in reporting rather than differences in the true crime rate, it is unlikely that all of it does.

The failure to make real headway against our endemic levels of violent crime over the long run, however, is actually understated by the conventional way in which we measure crime. Most importantly, our usual measures of crime do not allow us to assess the meaning, for an understanding of crime rates in America, of the unprecedented increases in incarceration since the time of the Violence Commission. This issue is crucial in evaluating America's experience with violent crime in the past generation and the success of our present policies in reducing it. For in a very real sense, over the past 30 years we have simply hidden our crime problem in the United States, not beaten it.

The fact that we pay little attention to this fundamental reality is due both to the nature of the public response to crime and, also, to some of the conventions of how we measure crime. Because the public is most interested in getting criminals safely off the street, the public discussion about crime rarely counts the people behind bars as part of our crime problem. Instead they are usually counted as part of the solution, if they are counted at all. But as a result, the issue of what it means for our assessment of ourselves as a society -- as a civilization -- that we have such an extraordinary proportion of our population behind bars rarely comes up. But there is another reason: the way we typically measure crime tends to obscure the extent to which our society continues to produce it -- and to exaggerate our success against it.

The basic problem is simple. When we try to assess the severity of our crime problem, we usually fail to include that part of the problem that is represented by the people currently behind bars. We do this so naturally that it is completely unreflective, but on reflection this is actually a very odd way to go about measuring the extent of a social problem.

One of the most distinctive things about the United States with respect to crime and punishment, after all, is that we not only have an unusually high level of serious violent crime -- but we maintain that high level of violent crime despite the fact that we also boast the highest level of incarceration of any country in the world but 1 (and when it comes to incarceration for ordinary street crimes, we probably even beat Russia).

Common sense would tell us that this means that our real crime problem is even worse than our measured crime "rate" itself would indicate -- because the conventional rate leaves out all of the "criminality" represented by the masses of people behind bars. We are not talking here about the crimes offenders commit while they are behind bars -- though that is itself important in understanding our real crime rate. For example, most of us would shudder to think what would happen to our official rate of rape if we counted what goes on in jails and prisons.

But the more important conceptual problem is that we measure our crime rate without factoring in the reality that we've simply shifted some of the total "pool" of criminals in our society from one place to another. We haven't stopped producing them. We have just moved them. The problem, in short, is that we traditionally measure the "crime rate" rather than what we might call the "criminality rate." What we call the "crime rate" measures the activity of those criminals who are still on the street. That kind of measure is useful in many ways. But as an measure of the deeper problem of criminality -- as an indicator of the tendency of our society to produce criminals -- it is obviously defective. Measuring crime this way is like measuring the extent of some physical illness in our society while systematically excluding from the count all those people who are so sick we've had to put them in the hospital. No one would think of doing that in the field of public health: We do it as a matter of course when it comes to the official crime statistics used by our leaders and the media.

This isn't just an abstract or philosophical issue, because it significantly affects how we think about the problem of crime in our society and how we assess the meaning of the recent trends. And it is an issue that can be framed in terms of concrete numbers. There are several ways in which we might measure the "criminality rate," and in fact we have some bits and pieces of research that suggest how.

The basic strategy is straightforward. We need a measure of the amount of criminality represented by the offenders currently on the street combined with the amount of criminality represented by offenders currently incarcerated. The key is to arrive at a good estimate of the individual crime rates -- what some criminologists call "lambda" -- of offenders behind bars and add to it the rates of those on the outside.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we assume that the average number of reported robberies committed by incarcerated robbers is, say, 5 a year. There were about 135,000 inmates in state and federal prisons with robbery as their most serious charge in 1995. Other things being equal, then, those robbers, had they been on the street, would have been responsible for an additional 5 X 135,000, or 675,000, robberies--on top of the 580,000 actually reported in 1995. Factoring in the level of criminality in the incarcerated population to arrive at what we might call the "latent" robbery rate thus more than doubles the conventional rate.

And looking at crime this way gives us a very different picture of the trends in violence in recent years. By this (extremely rough) calculation, our "criminality index" for reported robbery in 1995 was about 1,250,000 -- that is, adding the 675 to the 580 thousand. Now let's go back to 1985, and do the same calculation. In that year imprisoned robbers accounted for an estimated 94,000 X 5 robberies, or 470,000, because there were fewer robbers in prison; add to that the 498,000 reported, and the total is 968,000. Thus the index increased by 287,000, or about 30%, between 1985 and 1995. Measured the conventional way, the number of robberies increased too in those years, but by only 16%. So the rate of increase in the robbery problem, by this measure, was twice the conventionally reported one.

Again, there are many technical issues involved in this kind of calculation, and we do not claim that these numbers are precise ones. But the general point is beyond serious doubt. If we measure our crime problem by our tendency to produce criminality, then we may be in a real sense losing the "war on crime" even as we have successfully hidden some of the losses behind prison walls -- and therefore appear superficially to be winning it.

That obviously gives us a very different sense of the health of our society and the effectiveness of our present social policies. But looking at crime this way is only common sense. We feel intuitively that something is especially wrong if we have both very high rates of violent crime and very high incarceration rates, at the same time -- something that isn't captured in the conventional crime rate alone. Suppose 2 countries have the same official rate of violent crimes, but 1 country has, proportionally, 5 times as many violent offenders behind bars. Do they really have the same violent crime problem?

This, again, is much more than a statistical quibble. The fact is that this is the way we go about measuring most other social ills -- with the exception of criminality. In a reasonable culture we would not say we had won the war against disease just because we had moved a lot of sick people from their homes to hospital wards. And in a reasonable culture we would not say we have won the war against crime just because we have moved a lot of criminals from the community into prison cells.

One problem with the new "triumphalism" about crime, then, is that to some extent it represents a state of denial -- in which we exaggerate our recent successes against serious crime and ignore the implications of our comparative standing vis-a-vis other countries, not to mention our vast prison population. But there is also another problem. Granting that there have been significant reductions in violent crime since the early 1990s, the new triumphalism is misleading on the "why" of those declines. This interpretation is dangerous, in that it could lead us to adopt (or to continue) all the wrong anticrime policies while ignoring the things that could make an enduring difference.

There are 2 facets to the new triumphalism. First, it exaggerates the role of certain criminal justice strategies in accounting for the welcome declines in crime in the last few years; second, it underestimates the role of other, economic and human investment factors which are probably more important. Put together, those twin fallacies constitute the core of a new ideology about crime control that could lead us to policy mistakes that, once made, are very difficult to correct.

Two things in particular, in some combination, have often been given the bulk of the credit for our recent declines in violent crime. One is tough sentencing laws which have dramatically boosted incarceration rates; the other is tough policing, especially the so-called "zero tolerance" approach adopted with the most media fanfare in New York City. The media have been full of stories about the supposed success of both of these strategies. But the reality is that ascribing too much effect to either our booming incarceration rates or our media-celebrated zero tolerance policing flies in the face of the evidence -- or more precisely, in the face of the lack of evidence.

The Impact of Incarceration. It is doubtless true that our mushrooming prison population has had some dampening effect on our rates of violent crime. That is what many years of serious criminological research on "incapacitation" would lead us to expect. Put enough offenders behind bars, and it would be strange indeed if there were no impact on crime -- at least on some kinds of crime. But that is very different from believing that incarceration is the major reason for the declines in serious violence in America -- or that we could drive our rates of violence even lower if we just did more of the same.

The idea that booming prison populations are the key reason for the declines in serious criminal violence runs up against a number of stubborn realities. One is that the magnitude of the declines varies enormously across different states, and it does not vary in any consistent fashion with those states' use of incarceration relative to their crime rates. Some of the slowest declines in violence (and in FBI-reported serious "Index" crime generally) have been in Southern states with very high and very rapidly rising incarceration rates; some of the fastest declines have been in the Northeast, which traditionally incarcerates relatively sparingly. Some of the most spectacular successes against youth violence have taken place in Boston, in a state with a traditionally low incarceration rate relative to its crime rate.⁷

Twenty years of research on incapacitation backs up that common-sense observation. That research tells us that if a state boosts its prison population dramatically, there will probably be moderate effects on some "high rate" crimes, notably burglary and perhaps 1 violent crime, robbery -- but astonishingly small effects on most other serious crimes of violence, including homicide, serious assault and forcible rape. Yet homicide has fallen as fast as robbery, and considerably faster than theft or burglary, since 1994. Can our sixfold increase in the prison population explain some of the decline in homicide? Probably. Can it explain most of it? No.⁸

As one of the most prestigious American studies of prison building to date, by a panel of the National Academy of Science, has concluded, the criminal justice response to crime is, at most, "running in place."⁹

One of the major goals for prison building has been to reduce drugs. Yet, "almost 70 years after the failure of Prohibition, the much-trumpeted 'War on drugs,' begun more than a decade ago, has itself hugely misfired. 'We have a failed social policy and it has to be re-evaluated,' says Barry R. McCaffrey, the 4-star general in charge of national drug control policy." General McCaffrey also has concluded that, "if measured solely in terms of price and purity, cocaine, heroin and marijuana prove to be more available [today] than they were a decade ago."¹⁰

Nor have boot camps been successful. Their failure has been documented well in studies by the University of Maryland that have been published by the United States Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice.¹¹

The Cost of Incarceration. It is not just that incarceration has been exaggerated. It also has cost America a great deal -- in terms of dollars, budget tradeoffs (for example in education and housing), use of prisons as mental hospitals, racial bias in the criminal justice system and implications for women.

The cost of a single cell can run from about $20,000 per year to about $100,000 per year, based on the location in the country and the level of security. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson likes to say, it costs more to go to jail than to Yale.¹²

The Violence Commission did not foresee the sevenfold increase in the prison population, or a time when, in the richest nation on earth, the scale of prison spending would have significantly diminished the chances of a decent public education for a wide swath of the nation's children -- while violence remained, if anything, even more pervasive than at the end of the 1960s. Yet today, the states spend more on prison building than on higher education -- whereas 15 years ago, the opposite was true.¹³

In the 1980s, in many ways, prison building became our national housing policy for the poor. We more than quadrupled the number of prison cells, at the same time we reduced appropriations for housing the poor at the federal level by over 80%.¹⁴

Because over 90% of the nation's psychiatric hospital beds have vanished since the 1950s, criminal justice facilities have, by default, become our new asylums. It is estimated that some 670,000 mentally ill individuals enter United States jails each year, nearly 8 times the total admitted annually to mental hospitals across the nation. Approximately 13% of those who enter the criminal justice system have severe mental illness, as compared to less than 2% of those in the general American population. Mentally ill individuals in the criminal justice system generally do not fare well. More than 95% of those who succeed in committing suicide while incarcerated are identified as having a treatable psychiatric illness. Jails and prisons are generally unequipped to provide mental health services.¹⁵

There are profound racial implications to prison building. In the early 1990s, 1 out of every 4 young African-American men in America was in prison, on probation or on parole at any one time, according to the Sentencing Project in Washington, DC. Yet today 1 out of every 3 young African-American men is in prison, on probation or on parole, at any one time, in America. In big cities, the number is 1 out of every 2.¹⁶ Similarly, we know from Professor Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, that the rate of incarceration of African-American men in America today is 4 times greater than the rate of incarceration of black men in pre-Mandela, apartheid South Africa.¹⁷ And today Hispanics are the fastest growing group of prisoners.¹⁸

One of the key reasons for this is the racial bias in our mandatory minimum sentences, especially when it comes to drugs. For example, sentences for crack cocaine, used disproportionately by minorities, are greater than sentences for powder cocaine used disproportionately by whites. As a result of these and related practices, America's prisons are disproportionately populated by minorities.¹⁹

In effect, the United States has developed a 2-track system for addressing substance abusers, with the tracks largely defined in racial terms. For minorities, a primary track leads to arrest, conviction and incarceration. For white Americans, especially those who are more affluent, there is often either no intervention or intervention through the health and treatment system. In one case, drug abuse is treated as a crime. In the other, it is treated as an illness.²⁰

Prison building also has become a kind of job generating, economic development policy for rural white Americans -- who now send lobbyists to Washington to fight for still more prisons, as part of an emerging prison-industrial complex.²¹

The human costs of prison have mounted in terms of gender, as well as race. In the past 10 years, the number of women in prison has multiplied almost 4-fold. The war on drugs has driven much of this dramatic increase: approximately 60% of incarcerated women today are serving sentences for drug convictions. In 1986, fewer than 15% were serving such sentences. Many of the most publicized cases of disproportionate sentencing occur among women who serve as "drug mules." Such women often have no prior criminal history but are arrested for carrying drugs for their boyfriends. They often receive the heaviest sentences because of naivete about the criminal justice system and the strength of the cases against them for drug possession.²²

Zero Tolerance Policing. As with prison building, the effects of some forms of policing have been exaggerated, and carry many human costs. The belief in the effectiveness of aggressive "zero tolerance" policing is widespread in the media and among elected officials, and it has sometimes been used as a justification for harsh and even brutal police tactics. It's sometimes argued that without aggressive policing violent crime would go back up again, in New York and elsewhere, and so we should be willing to tolerate practices we otherwise wouldn't -- for after all, if crime rises again, the worst victims will be precisely those minority communities that now are most aggrieved by "tough" police tactics.

In fact, in 1999, homicide in New York City increased by about 10%, and the New York Police blamed media coverage, which, said the Department, resulted in police being less assertive.²³

But no one has in fact ever shown that aggressive policing is responsible for declining rates of violent crime in our cities -- much less that aggressive policing is necessary in order to have reductions in crime. Again, the counter-evidence is stark, and obvious. Many cities across the country have enjoyed sharp drops in violence without resorting to the heavy-handed and heedless methods adopted by some urban police departments, like New York City. That includes a number of cities which have indeed done innovative things with their police, but in ways that have improved relationships among youth, police and the community. Boston, Columbia, South Carolina and San Diego are good examples. These also are cities in which the police have done virtually nothing new, but which have also enjoyed striking drops in violent crime. San Francisco is an example. Another illustration is East St. Louis, Missouri. From 1991 to 1996, homicide declined more rapidly in East St. Louis than in New York City -- even though East St. Louis did not introduce zero tolerance. The sharp homicide drop in East St. Louis occurred at a time when the police were so deeply in debt that police layoffs were common. Many police cars did not have functioning radios, and many cars were idle because there was no money for gas.²⁴

This isn't to say that nothing the New York Police Department has done is relevant to its crime declines; some tactics, notably the strong emphasis on crime analysis and targeting resources on guns and drug gangs, have probably been a significant part of the story. But what is too often forgotten, especially in the media's treatment of these issues, is that we utterly lack evidence that rousting "squeegee men" or harassing homeless people -- or emptying weapons into innocent young immigrants -- has anything whatever to do with reducing serious violent crime. Can the police help to prevent crime? Yes, and more than we once thought. Is "zero tolerance" policing mainly responsible for the drop in the national homicide rate since 1992? No.

The flip side of the exaggeration of the effect of harsh sentencing and aggressive policing is the underestimation of the impact of deeper, economic and human investment forces in producing the recent declines in violence. Once again, this inattention serves an ideological purpose: It helps to bolster the claim that, for example, lack of caring adults for youth development, lack of opportunity, continuing inner city youth unemployment in a supposedly "full employment" economy, child poverty, income inequality, vast disparities in inner city versus suburban public school investment, and racism in drug sentencing aren't important in explaining crime and incarceration. But the implication of these recent declines for intelligent national policy are very different if you believe, as we do, that much of the explanation may be the extraordinary economic boom the nation has enjoyed since about 1993.

It is important to bear in mind the magnitude of this burst of prosperity. As the New York Times put it in a recent editorial, these are "astounding" economic times. Sustained economic growth since 1993 has brought unprecedented rises in employment -- which, of course, have made the U.S. the wonder of most of the rest of the post-industrial world. To be sure, the rosiness of the American job picture relative to that of, say, Europe is routinely exaggerated. For example, in spite of official statistics, former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall estimates the true rate of unemployment in the U.S. to be perhaps 15% -- when one includes the official government figures, persons who have stopped looking for work, and the unemployed equivalent of the great number of underemployed people in an America where, for example, more and more families have needed both parents working to keep up. According to the Center for Community Change in Washington, DC, the "jobs gap" is over 4 million nationally, with over 2 million in the inner city. And this estimate does not include our nearly 2 million incarcerated people.²⁵

Still, the job gains since the late 1980s have been significant. These economic gains have been concentrated among the better-off. But they have also significantly changed the economic condition and the economic prospects -- at least the short-term prospects -- of millions of low-income Americans. Unemployment rates have fallen sharply, even among the groups who have traditionally had the worst employment problems. The unemployment rate among African-American teenagers, for example, has fallen by close to 20% since 1992 -- paralleling the drops in reported robbery and homicide.

Beyond that, the boom has begun to pull at least some people into the labor force who until recently were too far out of it to even be counted as unemployed. It has also begun, more recently, to push up wages and hence family incomes for people underemployed in low-wage jobs, and, among African Americans in particular, to shift some people out of contingent work into more or less steady jobs.

From a variety of perspectives, we know that this matters. It matters first of all because it gives people, especially young people on the edges of the economy, a better stake in legitimate occupations as opposed to illegitimate ones. If you are a bright teenager who now has a realistic opportunity to go to work at Banana Republic, where before your only economic opportunity was selling drugs on the corner, Banana Republic can begin to look very appealing by comparison, given the dangers and uncertainties -- and moral quandaries -- of the street drug life. It matters also because it pulls some people -- especially young men -- out of settings in which they face a high risk of becoming either the perpetrators or the victims of violence, like bars and street corners, and into the workplace, where those risks are much lower. It matters, too, because it diminishes the risks of intimate violence behind closed doors, as steady work and better incomes reduce the pressures on families and couples and provide low-income women with the means of self-support.²⁶

The economic boom as explanation has the virtue of actually fitting the trajectory of the real-world crime trends in the 1990s. It fits, for example, with the otherwise perplexing fact that homicide has fallen faster than some property crimes. If putting great numbers of people in prison were the main explanation for declining rates of crime, then we would expect large drops in property crimes and small ones in homicide, because, again, that is what many years of incapacitation research would predict. Instead, some of the biggest drops are in homicide, a crime notoriously resistant to incapacitation effects. On the other hand, in a booming economy with rising employment, we would predict contradictory effects on some property crimes -- because there is more to steal -- but falling homicide rates, for the reasons just described.

Lest we overemphasize the boom, we must also remind the reader that, in spite of economic expansion since 1993, the only super power in the world still has about 1 out of every 4 children aged 5 and under living in poverty, according to the National Center for Children and Poverty at Columbia University.²⁷ By comparison, the corresponding child poverty rate is about 15% in Canada, 12% in Japan, 7% in France, 4% in Belgium and 2% in Finland.²⁸ At the millennium, we have phenomenal prosperity and more jobs in the United States. Many of the poor are better off than in the 1980s. But, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, the extremely poor are worse off.²⁹

The Waning of the Crack Epidemic. Another crucial part of the explanation for the recent declines in violence is related to the economic boom -- the waning of the crack epidemic. Recent research -- by Alfred Blumstein, Richard Rosenfeld, Janet Lauritsen, and others -- confirms what more anecdotal evidence suggests: as the crack epidemic swamped the cities after the mid-1980s, bringing with it an enormous escalation in the gun trade, street violence shot upward to some of its highest levels in American history. It is in cities where the crack epidemic started later, moreover, that rates of serious violence often have remained most stubborn. The reasons for the waning of the crack epidemic, of course, are complex: it is certainly not unrelated to the growth of new and intensive law enforcement strategies, but it is also, in part, a reflection of the growth of realistic opportunities for legitimate work for people ready to abandon the trade in illicit drugs.³⁰

An Economic Downturn? Both of these factors -- the booming economy and the waning of the crack epidemic -- are very positive, and welcome, developments. But they also contain a warning: if indeed we have been rescued from our recent crime epidemic mainly by 2 trends, then, by the same token, we are likely to be in trouble if those beneficent trends should change.

And some change is highly probable. It is true that the current economic boom is unusually strong and long-lasting, and some even argue that the traditional business cycle may have become a thing of the past. That is possible, but it would be foolish to bet on it. And if, as many people expect, the inevitable downturn comes, is there really much doubt that violent crime will worsen? We suspect that, if and when that happens, we will relearn rather quickly that more underlying explanations of crime do indeed matter. What, realistically, will we expect if great numbers of those recently employed young men are thrown out of their new-found legitimate jobs and onto the street -- especially after we have steadily chipped away for years at what remains of our social safety net?

Thirty years ago the Violence Commission's Task Force on Individual Crimes of Violence warned that if the then-current trends in violence were not "redirected by creative new action," we could expect "further social fragmentation of the urban environment, formation of excessively parochial communities, greater segregation of different racial groups and economic classes, imposition of presumptive definitions of criminality on the poor and on racial minorities, a possible resurgence of communal vigilantism and polarization of attitudes on a variety of issues."³¹

The Violence Commission was almost uncannily on target. We did not, in fact, invest in the kind of "creative new action" the Violence Commission had in mind -- at least not enough to forestall the results predicted, every one of which in fact came true during the next 3 decades.

What the Violence Commission clearly understood was that pervasive and deep-rooted violence in a highly fragmented and unequal society cannot be reliably contained by criminal justice policies -- even extreme ones. The experience of the past 30 years has proven the Commission right, indeed more dramatically than anyone could then have expected.

"Creative new action," then, is just as indispensable today as it was in 1969. It is accordingly past time to press relentlessly to insure that this nation makes those preventive investments in human capital that can reduce violent crime in enduring and humane ways, rather than simply suppressing it, hiding it or denying it.

Notes

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