NPR’s “Morning Edition” carried a story yesterday morning that made me go “Hmmmm”.

The thesis – bad dconomies don’t cause crime waves:

There are few outlaws in the United States as famous as Bonnie and Clyde — a young couple, with no jobs or prospects, driving across the country robbing banks and killing police officers to make ends meet during the Great Depression.

It’s an indelible image of what people will do during desperate times. For a while, Bonnie and Clyde were almost American heroes.

There’s only one problem: The Depression years had very little crime.

The story went from there to claim that…:

Just look at the 1920s, says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention at John Jay College of Criminal Studies.

“It was a period of booming economic prosperity, the roaring ’20s, and very high crime,” he says.

The 1950s and ’60s were the same. The economy was great, but crime rates rose every single year.

Well, I know one thing; my kids aren’t going to John Jay College of Criminal Studies.

The 1920’s were a booming stretch of time; they were also the peak of Prohibition, which helped organized crime metastasize out of the inner metropoli out across the entire country. 

And by the way, crime rates in general may have been low-ish, but the murder rate peaked at 9.7 per 100,000 in 1933. 

And what happened during the ’50’s and ’60’s?  “Urban Renewal” and the building of the Interstate system gutted the stable beating hearts out of many American cities (including both of the Twin Cities), disrupting low-income communities (like Saint Paul’s Rondo and Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhoods, turning them from dowdy and low-rent but close-knit and low-crime areas into dangerous ghettoes overnight) and trashing the landscape.  The sixties also brought us the Great Society, which in trying to “declare war” on poverty succeeded in institutionalizing it, and the beginning of the “war on drugs”, which created an upward-incentive on the price of drugs and a profitable niche for criminals to both fill and violently defend (not to mention the fact that the Baby Boom got into their most criminally-susceptible years starting around 1964).  As a result, the murder rates zoomed during the seventies, peaking at a record 10 per 100,000 in 1980. 

When the economy goes bad, many people move in with parents or relatives, and they stay home more — both of which appear to have a calming effect, experts say.

The “experts” seem to be focusing on property crime, rather than violent crimes, especially murder.  I’d suspect (with no academic proof whatsoever) that property crime is a “smile problem”; if people have stuff to steal, people will steal it (especially given that liberal government policy has created both a permanent underclass and a permanently-inflated drug market).  If people have no stuff to steal…

…well, you probably don’t go to John Jay College of Criminal Justice or work for Morning Edition, so you know where this is going, right?

The question isn’t so much why they arrived at their conclusion, or why NPR ran the story. 

The real question is “how does NPR story think this is going to benefit an Obama Administration”.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under Crime and Punishment, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.