Zimring, Francis E. The Great American Crime Decline.

• Author: Eisenman, Russell
• Position: Book review

Zimring, Francis E. The Great American Crime Decline. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv + 258 pages. Cloth, $29.95.

An amazing thing happened in the United States in the 1990s--the crime rate declined. No one was expecting this. Pundits had predicted an increase, based on the size of the youth and young adult population expected in the 1990s. Since this age group accounts for much of the crime in the United States, especially violent crime, crime rates should have skyrocketed; instead, they decreased. How can this be explained? Many explanations were advanced for this surprising drop in crime. Perhaps it was the Broken Windows approach in New York City, where people were arrested for minor crimes such as breaking a window or trying to get on the subway without paying, or the Three Strikes and You're Out policy in California, or the Incapacitation approach which advocated sending convicted felons to prison for long sentences so that they could not hurt people while imprisoned. Many other explanations are in circulation. But correlation does not mean causation. How does one make sense out of the data? This is where Zimring comes in. He has produced a masterpiece of scientific work, making sense of the data when possible and showing his readers when it is not possible to conclude anything. This is exactly what a scientific approach should yield.

Zimring covers his topic comprehensively, dealing with many possible explanations, not just one or two or a few. For the most part, he shows that the alleged explanations do not hold up. And, to make matters worse for those thinking that they have the explanation for declining crime in the United States in the 1990s, Zimring points out that Canada experienced a similar decline around this time. Canada thus becomes a control group of sorts, against which any explanation must compete.

This reviewer believes that there were several factors that, perhaps, accounted for the 1990s decline in crime. I have suggested that the decrease in the use of illegal drugs may have played a major role. (1) My own data show a decrease in both legal and illegal drugs in the United States from 1972 through 1990. (2) Also, because I have worked in a prison, incapacitation makes sense to me. How can felons hurt the general public if they are locked up for long periods of time? But, Zimring argues against incapacitation, since...