Losing Legitimacy

Street Crime And The Decline Of Social Institutions In America

Gary Lafree

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813334516
• eBook ISBN: 9780429978760
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In the past fifty years, street crime rates in America have increased eightfold. These increases were historically patterned, were often very rapid, and had a disproportionate impact on African Americans. Much of the crime explosion took place in a space of just ten years beginning in the early 1960s. Common explanations based on biological impulses, psychological drives, or slow-moving social indicators cannot explain the speed or timing of these changes or their disproportionate impact on racial minorities. Using unique data that span half a century, Gary LaFree argues that social institutions are the key to understanding the U.S. crime wave. Crime increased along with growing political distrust, economic stress, and family disintegration. These changes were especially pronounced for racial minorities. American society responded by investing more in criminal justice, education, and welfare institutions. Stabilization of traditional social institutions and the effects of new institutional spending account for the modest crime declines of the 1990s.

one
Understanding Postwar Crime Trends

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, as dust swirling in the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984¹

[History:] that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile brown rotting layers of Previous deaths, layers that if deep enough and squeezed hard enough make coal as in Pennsylvania.

—John Updike, Rabbit at Rest, 1990²

From the end of World War II until the early 1990s, the number of crimes committed in the streets of America skyrocketed. Murder rates doubled; rape rates quadrupled; robbery and burglary rates quintupled. By the early 1990s, nearly 25,000 Americans were being murdered each year. In just two years, more Americans were murdered than were killed in the Vietnam War; in twelve years more were murdered than died during World War II. In 1994, an estimated 620,000 Americans were robbed, 102,000 were raped, and 1.1 million were assaulted.³ Taken together, there was an eightfold increase in rates of murder, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, and theft reported to police between the end of World War II and the early 1990s.

It is difficult to gauge how important these trends have been for the social and political landscape of postwar America. Many Americans either remember or have heard stories about a time when people in their communities felt safe leaving the front doors of their homes unlocked at night or leaving keys in the ignitions of their cars while they ran off to do errands. Although some of these accounts are no doubt exaggerated, it is clear that increases in street crime since World War II have had major effects on virtually every aspect of daily life in America. As a nation, Americans now spend billions of dollars each year for protection against street crime: police, judges, lawyers, correctional officers, security systems, and private guards. Americans buy special antitheft devices for their cars; install elaborate alarm systems in their homes; and, more than people in any other developed nation, rely on firearms for protection against would-be criminals. Moreover, the price Americans pay for almost anything they buy is substantially increased by crime-related security and insurance costs.

Crime has also played an increasingly important role in shaping public policy and national politics in the postwar period. Because the United States began as a loose federation of local governments, criminal justice issues were historically viewed as state and local issues. In particular, there was long-standing opposition to anything resembling a national police force. The situation is quite different today. Law and order have become major issues in national politics. Every presidential election campaign since the early 1960s has prominently featured crime and law-and-order issues. The federal government now supports huge national bureaucracies the main official task of which is to help control crime. Crime prevention provided a major justification for the massive social programs of the 1960s. Fear of crime has been instrumental in the huge national increase in prison population beginning in the late 1970s. Concern about crime has now become an important political issue at all levels of government. And because of the influence of the United States on the rest of the world, understanding the dynamics of crime in the United States may also have important implications for other nations.

But beyond the monetary importance of crime, its impact on social policy in the United States, and its implications for other nations, there are a host of less tangible effects of crime that are more difficult to gauge but perhaps also more disturbing. Some Americans have become virtual prisoners in their own neighborhoods.⁴ A great many others routinely avoid certain neighborhoods at night or change the direction they drive or walk home because of their fear of crime. Fear of crime has become an important issue for people in choosing a place to live and in selecting schools for their children. As confidence in the ability of police to offer adequate protection from crime has declined, an increasing number of people and businesses have begun to rely more on their own privately purchased security systems and guards. Walled perimeters, security gates, and armed patrols have become important selling points for housing subdivisions and apartment complexes throughout the nation.

In fact, it is probably impossible to put a value on the many ways in which street crime has affected American society. It is difficult to estimate the social costs of urban environments that, at their worst, have become so violent that many children grow up personally knowing another child who has been murdered. It is equally difficult to estimate the social costs to citizens of living in neighborhoods where they are afraid to walk, even in broad daylight, or the costs to society of diverting public resources away from new schools, parks, and community centers in favor of prisons, police substations, and detention facilities.

The purpose of this book is to describe and explain street crime trends in America following World War II; especially the crime "wave" of the 1960s and 1970s.⁵ Although the term street crime is imprecise, it has generally come to include the familiar crimes of murder, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, and theft. The sociologist Daniel Glaser calls these crimes "predatory" because they all involve offenders who "prey" on other persons or their property.⁶ He contrasts these offenses with "nonpredatory" crimes such as prostitution and gambling. I am especially interested in predatory crimes here because they evoke the greatest popular fear and concern. They also draw the most universal condemnation from society. Probably as a consequence of these characteristics, we also have more complete information on predatory crimes than on any other crime types.

Interpreting American Crime Trends

The approach I follow in this book is unique in three ways. First, I concentrate almost entirely on national rather than state, city, or individual-level crime data. These other data sources can tell us a great deal about how the characteristics of cities or states are related to crime rates or about the likelihood that individuals with particular characteristics will be involved in crime. Here, however, I am interested in developing a much broader understanding of crime trends during the second half of the twentieth century My focus throughout is on how changes in the United States as a whole have been related to crime rates during the postwar years.

Second, much of the research on crime to date has been based on cross-sectional "snapshots," comparing individuals or geographical units (e.g., cities, counties, states) at one point in time. These snapshots provide useful comparative information on why certain types of individuals are more likely to commit crime or why certain areas or regions are characterized by high or low crime rates. But they provide few insights into how changes over time have been related to crime trends. As a result of this cross-sectional emphasis, much thinking about crime is trapped in what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called "the permanent present."⁷ For example, it has become common for researchers and policymakers these days to examine the current high crime rates In the United States and conclude that the United States has always been a violent or "criminogenic" culture.⁸ But as we shall see, the allegedly criminogenic U.S. culture had relatively low crime rates in the 1940s and 1950s.⁹

Moreover, U.S. crime rates have undergone major changes in the past century that are lost in cross-sectional analysis. Crime rates did not rise uniformly in the postwar period: Some years were characterized by stable or declining rates whereas others witnessed rapid growth. By examining how crime rates have changed over time and by looking at the correlates of these changes, I hope to provide insights into how crime trends in postwar America are related to major social, economic, and political developments.

Finally, although certainly understandable, our unwillingness to deal directly with connections between race and crime in the postwar United States has probably hampered our ability to accurately describe crime problems and deal effectively with them. Like roadways circling a large city, discussions of crime and justice in the United States seem inevitably to lead to issues of race. This connection is not unprecedented. It resembles earlier connections between ethnicity and crime for other groups of Americans. Thus, research shows that in the nineteenth century Irish and German immigrants were disproportionately involved in street crimes in New York City¹⁰ and during the first two decades of the twentieth century Italian immigrants were far more likely than other groups to be imprisoned for murders in Philadelphia.¹¹

Although African Americans in the mid-1990s constituted only 12 percent of the U.S. population,¹² they accounted for 59 percent of all robbery arrests, 54 percent of all murder arrests, and 42 percent of all rape arrests.¹³ This means that African American arrest rates for robbery were more than ten times higher than rates for all other groups combined. Late-twentieth-century estimates are that more than half of all African American men in the nation's largest cities will be arrested at least once during their lifetime for a serious crime.¹⁴

These same grim statistics are reproduced in the nation's prisons, jails, probation departments, and county morgues. In the mid-1990s, nearly 25 percent of all black men age 20 to 29 were in prison or jail or on probation or parole in the United States.¹⁵ In fact, the United States in the 1990s had substantially more black men in the correctional system (609,690) than in colleges and universities (436,000).¹⁶ For young black men in urban areas, murder has become the leading cause of death.¹⁷ If these trends continue into the twenty-first century, one out of every twenty-one black men will be a murder victim.¹⁸

Because of the negative implications of these statistics, there has been a general unwillingness in the postwar United States to directly confront connections between race and crime. In fact, the sociologist William Julius Wilson¹⁹ claims that many researchers have avoided race-related research on crime because of the sharp criticisms aimed at earlier scholars who examined these issues.²⁰ Nevertheless, it seems that any credible explanation of postwar crime trends is going to have to account for the disproportionate number of young, African American men enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

What the Crime Trends Tell Us

My review of postwar street crime trends in America permits three main conclusions. First, changes in crime rates were sometimes extremely rapid—especially from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. Second, the crimes reviewed here exhibited fairly consistent historical patterns. In general, we can identify three main postwar crime periods: an early period (1946-1960) with stable, low crime rates; a middle period (1961-1973) with rapidly accelerating crime rates; and a late period (after 1973) with stable, high crime rates. Finally, the data consistently show that African Americans, and in particular young, male African Americans, were disproportionately involved in producing the crime patterns observed. These three conclusions have important implications for understanding crime in postwar America.

The simple rapidity of crime change has far-reaching significance. In some ways, a crime wave is a more puzzling phenomenon than more highly organized social events such as the rise of a political party or a social movement. Crime waves occur through the actions of diverse individuals, largely working alone or in small groups, with little communication, with no organization and no special resources, and lacking a commonly shared ideology or worldview. Nevertheless, these diverse individuals, most often acting independently, have the ability to greatly increase criminal behavior, such as robberies, that is very similar in form from one region to another.

The rapidity of change in postwar crime rates clearly favors some explanations of crime and makes other explanations less convincing. Many popular explanations of criminal behavior are based on biological, psychological, or social characteristics that change only slowly. But if crime is produced by deep-seated biological drives, slowly evolving psychological characteristics, or widely held cultural values passed between generations, it is difficult to explain a doubling or tripling of crime rates in a short time. The rapidity of postwar crime change suggests that under the right circumstances the variables that regulate crime must be capable of equally rapid transformation. A major focus of this book is on identifying the changes in postwar America that were rapid enough to account for the explosive growth of crime during the middle postwar years.

The specific timing of postwar crime trends provides further insights. For example, if crime rates surged in the early 1960s, then variables explaining crime should have undergone commensurate changes at about the same time. Similarly, if crime rates were relatively low and steady during the 1950s, then variables explaining crime should exhibit similar temporal characteristics. In fact, the timing of the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s wreaked havoc on several popular explanations of crime. Here was an explosion in crime that seemed to be occurring at a time when many economic variables looked favorable; educational opportunities were expanding as never before; and unprecedented gains were being made in extending equal rights to disadvantaged groups, especially members of racial minority groups.

Finally, the crime-related behavior of African Americans during the postwar period poses serious problems for both liberal and conservative views of crime. Liberals have a difficult time explaining why African American crime rates were lowest during the overtly discriminatory 1940s and 1950s and highest during the presumably less discriminatory 1970s and 1980s. Conservatives have problems explaining why crime rates for African Americans in the 1980s and 1990s remain at extremely high levels in the face of what is probably the most extensive regimen of punishment ever experienced by a particular societal subgroup in a modern democratic nation.

Based on what I now know about postwar street crime trends and the research of those who have studied these issues before me, I conclude that the most plausible explanation for the crime patterns observed in the postwar United States is the strength of American social institutions. I present this argument in detail later but provide a brief overview here by way of introduction.

Crime and Social Institutions

The main thesis of this book is that historical and social changes in America created a crisis in institutional legitimacy that produced the postwar crime wave. At the most basic level, institutions are the patterned, mutually shared ways that people develop for living together.²¹ They include the rules, laws, norms, values, roles, and organizations that define and regulate human conduct. As used here, legitimacy refers to the ease or difficulty with which institutions are able to get societal members to follow these rules, laws, and norms.²²

The sociologist Peter Berger points out that institutions channel human behavior into preestablished "grooves."²³ If we look at institutions in this way, we see that societies with tremendous conformity have deep and narrow grooves whereas less conformist societies have broader and wider grooves. I argue in this book that the grooves that contained human conduct in the postwar United States started to become broader and wider in the early 1960s. This process cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Understanding Postwar Crime Trends
• 2 Riding the Wave: Street Crime Trends in Postwar America
• 3 Offender Characteristics and Crime Trends in Postwar America
• 4 Evaluating Common Explanations of Crime
• 5 Crime and Social Institutions
• 6 Crime and American Political Institutions
• 7 Crime and American Economic Institutions
• 8 Crime and Changes in the American Family
• 9 Institutional Responses to the Legitimacy Crisis: Criminal Justice, Education, and Welfare
• 10 Crime and Institutional Legitimacy in Postwar America
• Notes
• Index