The Crime Drop in America (Cambridge Studies in Criminology)

Rating:
Summary: You Can't Judge a Book by its Cover
Review: 'But blurbs, publication dates, and personal knowledge may suffice. Cambridge University Press' blurb for this book begins, "Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980s and continued to climb until 1991 after which something unprecedented occurred. For the next seven years it declined to a level not seen since the 1960s." The blurb continues, "As the authors point out, the trends that have contributed to the decline in violent crime...(include) gun control efforts (at both the local and federal levels), changes in drug markets (the decline of crack cocaine), and economic shifts (high employment in the flourishing economy of the late 1990s)..."

'In August of 1999, John Donohue of Stanford Law School and Steven Levitt of the National Bureau of Economic Research put up on the internet site of the Social Science Research Network Electronic Library ... a paper titled "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime." The SSRN site was far from user-friendly and required a late version of Adobe Acrobat to download its several thousand freely downloadable papers, but papers' abstracts didn't require Adobe, and Donohue and Levitt's abstract began, "Crime has fallen dramatically in the 1990s. While many explanations for this decline have been offered, these other explanations have difficulty explaining the timing, large magnitude, persistence, and widespread nature of the drop." The abstract continued, "The empirical evidence we present is consistent with abortion playing an important role. First, the timing of the crime drop corresponds to the period in which the first cohorts affected by abortion are reaching the peak ages of criminal activity. Second, states that legalized abortion before the rest of the nation were the first to experience decreasing crime. Third, states with high abortion rates have seen a greater fall in crime since 1985, even after controlling for other factors that would be expected to influence crimes. Fourth, the declines in crime in high-abortion states are disproportionately concentrated among those under the ages of 25..."

'This remarkable paper was the most downloaded paper of all time at the SSRN site in 2000, but it was apparently widely ignored by the media in this country. Donohue and Leavitt point out that their paper simply illustrates that wanted babies are less likely to become young criminals than unwanted babies.

'Hopefully a revised edition of The Crime Drop in America by Blumstein, Wallman and Farrington will include a discussion of the Donohue and Levitt paper and the reaction to it.'

The preceding is a rewritten version of a my "review" of The Crime Drop in America which Amazon.com published on February 4, 2001. Evidently, Cambridge University Press has not issued a revised edition of the book since then, and my comments on its subject matter remain timely.

Rating:
Summary: You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover
Review: But blurbs, publication dates, and personal knowledge may suffice. Cambridge University Press' blurb for this book (from about Sept, 2000, the hardcover publication date) starts: "Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980"s and continued to climb until 1991 after which something unprecedented occurred. For the next seven years it declined to a level not seen since the 1960s." It concludes, "As the authors point out, the trends that have cotnributed to the decline in violent crime -- gun control efforts (at both the local and federal levels, changes in drug markets (the decline of crack cocaine), and economic shifts (high employment in the flourishing economy of the late 1990s) -- cannot continue indefinitely. . . ." In August of 1999, John Donohue of Stanford Law School and Steven Levitt of the National Bureau of Economic Research put up on the internet site of the Social Science Research Network Electronic Library (http://www.ssrn.com) a paper titled "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime." The SSRN site is far from user-friendly and requires a late version of Adobe Acrobat to download its several thousand freely downloadable papers, but papers' abstracts don't require Adobe, and Donohue and Levitt's begins: "Crime has fallen dramatically in the 1990s. While many explanations for this decline have been offered, these other explanations have difficulty explaining the timing, large magnitude, persistence, and widespread nature of the drop." The abstract continues: "The empirical evidence we present is consistent with abortion playing an important role. First, the timing of the crime drop corresponds to the period in which the first cohorts affected by abortion are reaching the peak ages of criminal activity. Second, states that legalized abortion before the rest of the nation were the first to experience decreasing crime. Third, states with high abortion rates have seen a greater fall in crime since 1985, even after controlling for other factors that would be expected to influence crimes. Fourth, the declines in crime in high-abortion states are disproportionately concentrated among those under the ages of 25." And the abstract concludes: "All else equal, we predict that crime rates will continue to fall slowly for an addtional 15-20 years as the full effects of legalized abortion are gradually felt." This remarkable paper was (and is still, if I'm not mistaken) the most downloaded paper of all time at the SSRN site, but the paper has gone almost completely unremarked-upon in the big media in America. The authors point out that their paper simply illustrates that wanted babies are less likely to become young criminals than unwanted babies. Hopefully a second edition of C.U.P.'s Crime Drop in America will discuss Donohue and Levitt.

Rating:
Summary: Informative and Accurate
Review: This is a highly informative and accurate book. It presents the data in a clear and graphic form, with a minimum of statistical manipulation. The studies cited by the previous reviewer, Lloyd Rowsey, are based on econometric modeling. Since the one he mentions, two other econometric models of abortion and homicide have been published with opposite results. One is by Ted Joyce, the other by John Lott and John Whitney. Econometric modeling can prove anything. If you want to understand crime in America in the 1990s, buy The Crime Drop.