Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology articles from June 1998

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology archives from June 1998

FOREWORD.
June 22, 1998... Violent crime rates are at their lowest levels since the early 1970s. While some State and local crime trends may coincide with national trends, it is also true that the nature of the crimes and who commits them can vary widely from State to...

Explaining recent trends in U.S. homicide rates.
June 22, 1998... I. THE CHANGING HOMICIDE RATE During the past decade some sharp swings have occurred in the homicide rate in the United States. The rate in 1980 was a peak of 10.2 per 100,000 population, and by 1985 it fell to a trough of 7.9. It then...

Declining crime rates: insiders' views of the New York City story.
June 22, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Something dramatic happened in New York City in 1004: a lot of people stopped committing crimes, especially violent ones. The reduction in the number of persons committing murders, for example, while not unprecedented,(1)...

The improbable transformation of inner-city neighborhoods: crime, violence, drugs, and youth in the 1990s.(Brooklyn, New York, NY)
June 22, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION At the peak of the crack epidemic in many American cities--when people seemed ready to write off inner cities as hopelessly lost--a remarkable transformation began to take place. In a global economy where the gap between...

Declining homicide in New York City: a tale of two trends.
June 22, 1998... The mass media pay plenty of attention to crime and violence in the United States, but very few of the big stories on the American crime beat can be classified as good news. The drive-by shootings and carjackings that illuminate nightly news...

Social institutions and the crime "bust" of the 1990s.
June 22, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION 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...

Alcohol and homicide in the United States 1934-1995 - or one reason why U.S. rates of violence may be going down.
June 22, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION In the last few years, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the apparent decline in rates of homicide and other kinds of violence in the United States. Commentators debate whether rates of violence are actually...

Asymmetrical causation and criminal desistance.
June 22, 1998... Although criminologists have long been concerned with desistance or cessation from crime,(1) tests of theory are typically based on etiological invesugations.(2) Desistance studies, in contrast, have historically been used for program...

Understanding the time path of crime.
June 22, 1998... With all of the random factors that influence the amount of criminal conduct, it is virtually impossible to fully explain or precisely predict the crime rate at any point in time. If the World Trade Center bombers had succeeded in their goal of...

Volunteerism and the decline of violent crime.
June 22, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION This paper makes four general points. There are organized community anti-crime activities going on across the country. Neighborhood residents, acting together through community organizations, have made a serious...

Effective law-enforcement techniques for reducing crime.
June 22, 1998... In their article Asymmetrical Causation and Criminal Desistance, Christopher Uggen and Irving Piliavin discuss "devising theoretically relevant interventions."(1) As a white-collar criminal defense attorney and a former federal prosecutor, I...

Which homicides decreased? Why?
June 22, 1998... In a sense, criminologists are luckier than economists. Economists are asked to forecast what will happen to the economy, and a lot of them get it wrong. Criminologists are asked to back-cast, to explain what happened after it happens, and...