Social Institutions and the Crime "Bust" of the 1990s

While scarcely visible behind the wave of media attention devoted to crime, beginning in the early 1990s, researchers began to observe declining rates in violent and other serious forms of crime in the United States.In this article, I begin by evaluating the size of these declines and comparing crime trends in the 1990s to crime trends in the U.S. since World War II.I also examine trends for different crime types and data sources, and for large cities.My review shows that crime rates in the 1990s have dropped rapidly and that declines have been sweeping, affecting all of the street crimes that are routinely tracked by the two major sources of crime data in the United States (the Uniform Crime Reports and the National Crime Victimization Survey).In short, the period from 1990 to 1997 represents the closest thing to a sustained decline in crime, or a "crime bust" that the United States has experienced in more than fifty years.In a recently published book, I argue that changes in the legitimacy of social institutions provide the most promising explanation for the rapid changes in street crime trends observed in America after World War II.'In particular, I argue that American crime rates surged in the 1960s as a result of increasing distrust of political institutions, increasing stress produced by economic institutions, and declining strength of family institutions. 2American society countered this growing legitimacy crisis by investing more in other institutions, most notably