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Steven Levitt In Understanding Why Crime Fell In The 1990s

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Crime is something that, no matter what we do, we will always have. Crime is not steady and completely predictable and some years have higher crime rates than others. The United States is an advanced and accepting country, but we still face the same battle against crime as all other countries. In the 1900s, leading crime experts predicted a splurge in crime rates. As I mentioned earlier crime is hard to predict and the experts were shocked when a drastic decrease in crime rates occurred rather than a splurge (Levitt, 2004). The drastic decline in crime was definitely not predicted, but researchers have come out with explanations for why the reduction occurred. In an article titled Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s written by Steven Levitt in 2004, he goes over …show more content…

This large increase in officers is oftentimes considered a large contribution to the five percent decrease in crime rates (Levitt, 2004). A second contribution to crime rates decreasing in the 1990s’ according to Levitt was the rising number of individuals incarcerated in our prison system. Between 1972 and 2000, the number of people in prison quadrupled. More than half of that jump happened in the 1990’s. A large reason for this increase was stricter drug laws, harsher sentences, and frequent parole revocations (Levitt, 2004). Many people who get released from the prison system re-offend and end up back in the system. With these harsher sentences, they are sentenced to longer prison terms so they are unable to be released and commit more crimes, thus lowering the crime rates. This particular type of crime reduction is called the incapacitation effect (Levitt, 2004). At the start of 1985, the use of the street drug crack cocaine became more widely used. Crack cocaine was illegal and the high it gave people was

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