Abstract
This article first uses the analytical lenses of crime opportunity, criminal propensity, and routine activity theory to evaluate Wendel et al.’s (2016) plausible and compelling “more drugs, less crime” hypothesis, the latest attempt to explain the crime decline that began in the 1990s. The authors’ present exposition of the hypothesis is beleaguered by methodological problems that jeopardize the validity of its central claims. An alternative media-consumption hypothesis is then briefly outlined, which suggests that changes in media-consumption patterns beginning in the 1980s were a powerful catalyst for reductions in street crime. Because both hypotheses identify mechanisms that reduce both the opportunities and the propensities to commit crime, they stand out from the majority of crime-decline accounts which are presently oriented toward opportunity almost exclusively. Both hypotheses also happen to subvert conventional wisdom in ironic ways.
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Notes
Though victimization surveys corroborate declines in recorded crime, most scholars acknowledge that the nature and extent of those declines may be “an artefact due to the lack of validity of police statistics as measures of crime” (Aebi and Linde 2010, 263). The way incentive structures have changed over the past 30 years provides an unexamined reason to scrutinize police data. Police departments were once incented to play up the prevalence of crime in order to justify greater resource investment. Now in departments that rely on COMPSTAT data, where promotions and resources depend on the demonstration of crime reductions, the incentives are reversed and police may benefit by playing down crime’s prevalence.
Three hypotheses highlight mechanisms that appear to reduce both opportunity and propensity, but opportunity is either the favored target in the analysis—as with an improving economy and increasing immigration—or the mechanism’s target is unclearly articulated—as with the civilizing process (see Farrell et al. 2014).
Only one of the seventeen hypotheses cites a propensity-relevant factor as the principal cause of the crime decline. It holds that the removal of lead from the environment beginning in the mid-1970s subsequently reduced the neurological damage to children caused by lead poisoning, thereby reducing criminal propensities over time.
For example, given that the majority of violent victimizations are not even reported to the police (Baumer 2002), official crime figures cloak the unseen and subsequently large "dark figure" of unreported crime.
Other researchers rely on the same three crimes, but Zimring does a better job than most explaining why. So he gets the credit here for the innovation.
The concept of a “stake in conformity” (Toby 1957) predates the darker empirical associations between conformity and blind obedience (Zimbardo 2007; Haney et al. 1973; Milgram 1963), yet it survives as a concept in textbooks (see, for instance, Brown et al. 2013). Its misleading connotations and potential to confuse justify a reformulation. For Toby (1957), the stake one feels is “in American society” (p. 16) and its “educational-occupational status system…Therefore, a youngster needs a larger stake in conformity in the slum than in the suburb in order to resist [the] temptation” (p. 17) to engage in “predatory crimes” (p. 12). Conformity here means obedience to the law. Yet several theoretical perspectives rely on criminogenic mechanisms that look a lot like conformity. Differential association theory holds, for instance, that offending occurs when one privileges and conforms to the norms and mindsets of one’s “intimate personal groups” rather than to the law (Sutherland and Cressey 1974, 75–76). The circuitry that allows Hirschi (1969) to link boys with “low stakes in conformity” to delinquency requires the boys to conform to the expectations and influence of “delinquent friends.” Subculture theories similarly rely on obedience and conformity; it’s just that the authority one obeys and the norms and mindsets one conforms to eschew the law. “Stakes in law-abidingness,” while a great deal less elegant a term, more accurately preserves Toby’s intent.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jennifer Green, Naomi Haber, Lila Kazemian, Anthony Marcus, Mike Rowan, and Michael Tonry for their comments on earlier drafts.
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Green, D.A. A funny thing happened on the way to mass subjugation: propensity, opportunity, and irony in two accounts of the crime decline. Dialect Anthropol 40, 363–376 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9438-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9438-1