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Crime and age inequality
Stratergies to reduce crime
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Crime and age inequality
Stratergies to reduce crime
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
In the late nineteenth century in America, crime became a big problem in urban societies. These crimes consisted of prostitution, assault, pickpocketing, murder, counterfeiting, grafting and much more. Timothy Gilfoyle claimed that crime in industrial cities was directly connected with those who have a lower social status and could not maintain a secure and stable life. After reading many primary and secondary sources from Gilfoyles book The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York: The Autobiography of George Appo, I have come to agree with his statement. Although crime was and will never be acceptable, it was justifiable during this time.
Crime itself is an innate part of society, some may view it as a necessary component in one's society. New York city has had a history of high crime rates at one time. In the article, “How New York won the War on Crime” by Steve Chapman, the author discuss how New York City during the 1960s to the 1980s was viewed as “chaotic”, and mentioned that in 1984 there were at least “5 murders a day”. However, New York City now is not the same one it was during that time. The NYPD website provides a graph describing the crime rates and population growth in New York City between 1990s to to 2014.
Crime went down in the 1990’s. Chapter Four of Freakonomics goes over some of the reasons why various experts in the field believed that it was going down. When the experts came out with random ideas, the newspapers ran with the ideas in their headlines. One of the ideas of why crime was going down had to do with the increased reliance of prisons. The question that Freakonomics Study Guide asks is, whether or not this is a viable explanation for the drop in crime?
Unlike Freakonomics, Gladwell brings the attention of the reader in an effective and subtle way, allowing the readers to connect to a situation as mundane as a restaurant recommendation; in contrast, Levitt and Dubner use statistics to prove their point. Using percentages to represent the number of children likely to be raised with only one parent or in poverty does not emphasize the fact that abortion caused the crime drop in the 1990’s. In addition, Levitt and Dubner include unattractive tables and charts that support their claims, but do not relate to the readers at all. Bare facts are boring to read about and should be accompanied by a connection to the reader. Some argue that statistics are more credible, but in reality they can be
The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner talks about many different things, including cheating teachers and sumo wrestlers, how abortion lowered crime rates, how a street crack gang works, and whether the way parents raise their children even matter. These topics seem to have nothing in common, but all of these topics were identified in the same way: an economist (Levitt) looked at school test scores, crime data, and all sorts of other information, looking at them in unconventional ways. Because of that, he has come to many interesting and unique conclusions that make complete sense. These findings were based on some simple ideas: the power of incentives, conventional wisdom is not always right, things may not have obvious causes, and experts often serve their own interests instead of the interests of others. Perhaps the most important idea in the book is, as Levitt and Dubner state, “Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so” (14).
Short Summary: Chapter 2 of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison was about how the way society sees crime can be distorted by the media, the justice system, and the information we are presented with about what crime really is. It points out that medical neglect, known environmental hazards, dangerous workplace conditions, and poverty cause more injuries yearly than murders, assaults, and robberies. Most people see the latter as “crime,” but not the former. Long Summary: Chapter 2 of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison discusses people’s skewed perspective when it comes to what they think crime really is. The reader is asked to do an exercise regarding their own reason.
This article, written by William Spelman, focuses on the controversial relationship between prison populations and crime rates. Spelman demonstrates the controversy by referencing studies that yielded a wide array of results ranging from rising prison populations causing a decrease in crime to having no effect at all, and even a study that showed crime increasing as prison populations did. Spelman states that this controversy has long been present when discussing this issue. He expresses concern with the divergent findings due to the fact that they are largely all based on the same data set. This, Spelman believes, is largely due to the fact that the varying studies used different methods in conducting their research.
This theory was established to prevent more serious crime from occurring over time. This article examined the effects of the Broken Windows Policing Approach involving these following topics under the direction of Bill Bratton’s Tenue: implementations, success, and failures. It also demonstrates whether or not the “Broken Windows Effect” has a minimal impact on the crime rate throughout the Bill Bratton’s era and did he remained “an exemplar of “good ‘broken windows’ practice” during his two-year stretch as NYPD commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Based on this concept, the New York City Police Department implemented a “zero tolerance” policy for policing petty
(Witkin 2) From there, Witkin begins to analyze the connection between the crime decrease and harsher prison sentencing and smarter policing (Witkin 2) As stated by Witkin, “Imprisonment...seems to be important, but not the underlying cause of the crime drop…” and while “...smarter policing was spectacularly decisive in some cities… it probably was not the key factor nationwide.” (Witkin 3-4).
Goetz shot the four men and became a known figure in New York for standing up against “dangerous criminals.” However, in the 1990s when Goetz went to trial court, New York’s crime rate had declined at a surprising rate and citizens viewed him as a murderer and racist for his actions on the subway. In “The Power of Context,” Gladwell expands into his own personal theories behind the city’s decline in crime. He brings attention to two hypotheses: the power of context and the broken-window hypothesis. The broken-window hypothesis was implemented by New York leaders in collaboration with the police department to take stricter action with minor crimes occurring in the city, such as graffiti and small burglaries.
To expand my research to attain the goal of understanding specification of both explanations, The southern subculture of violence theory blames higher crime rates in the South on “cultural values that evolved from that region’s unique history” (Ousey, 2000:268). All cultural explanations are based on the social learning approach, which holds that criminality is learned through intimate interactions with others. Another example is that capital punishment is highest in the South. The economic deprivation explanation to differences of crime rates within regions of the country is synonymous with strain theories.
My conclusion is that this book's reception depends on the reader's background, past life experiences, and the willingness to change the way we deal with crime and
Freakonomics is somewhat random grab bag of topics. The unifying theme of this book for me was finding ways to ask questions so that one's available statistics and data can provide an answer, time after time they used available statistics to provide some time of reasoning or answers to the question being asked. Some of these efforts were more successful than others. Some of the questions Levitt and Dubner study felt unnecessary, that no one really cares about. But there are also some good subjects.
Stud Terkel quoted in his book "Hard Times," “What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.” (pg. 195). During the Hard Times crime rate increased as the family lost everything. This ultimately led people, to do anything to gain money. Hence, the growth in crime
Thus, accepting any idea because of the effectiveness of its source does not look any better than rejecting it due to the badness of its source. In other words, the inappropriate argument from authority concerning the social problem of panhandling is a fallacy. For example, accepting the idea that New York City was as safe in 1962 as it is currently is a fallacy as the reader was earlier brainwashed that the level of street crime was high in the New York City and the number of panhandling arrests on the subways had tripled since 2013 (Podhoretz para. 12). However, the author again argues that the major crime remains a rarity in the New York City.