Attack of the MOMS - Part I

In the past few days I've read around sixty exam papers dealing with the question of restorative versus retributive justice. Of these, I'd guess around twenty start off with a sentence like "All over the world, crime rates are soaring." This piqued my curiosity. All of these students are studying social sciences, so we might expect them to know that in most developed countries, crime rates, while continually fluctuating, have in general fallen over the last two decades (crime rates in Third World countries vary wildly because there are so many factors involved, from endemic corruption to civil war). I am not saying that this is something to be jubilant about: the US homicide rate is still higher than it was in 1960 while in some European countries, crime in general has fallen but violent crime has risen. In Japan, street crime is now widespread; a common scenario is for an elderly person to approach a group of street-toughs to ask for directions, only to find that they give him the wrong directions. Moreover, reasons for the fall are obscure; even decreased lead levels in the atmosphere have been credited. But whatever the reasons, one thing is clear: crime rates are not soaring. The interesting part is why people believe that they are.

The simplest explanation is just that it takes a while for information to spread; by the time most people have noticed the fall in crime, crime will probably have started rising again. However, I shall lay Occam's razor to one side for a moment in order to contemplate another hypothesis, which I call the MOMS syndrome, MOMS here standing for "malaise of modern society". The idea that crime is increasing is attractive not just because for a while it did increase, but because increasing crime is part of the MOMS: modern society has a high crime rate because modern society is fundamentally flawed. You can choose one or more of many aspects of the malaise to explain crime: decline in religious belief, rampant consumerism, single mothers … take your pick. Any of these can be pulled in to say why, for about thirty years, crime rose to almost nineteenth-century levels. Ah yes, that's the problem. Take a look at these figures [Source], which give the murder rate in Britain (per 100,000 per year averaged by decade):

1860	1870	1880	1890	1900	1910	1920	1930	1940	1950	1960	1970	1980	1990
1.7	1.6	1.5	1.1	0.9	0.8	0.7	0.8	0.8	0.7	0.7	1.0	1.2	1.4

(Figures for the USA are similar but higher overall, and have a spike around 1920–1930 because of prohibition.)
The rise in crime in the late twentieth century now looks more like a normalisation. Furthermore, when we look at crime on the basis of centuries rather than decades, crime is not soaring but plummeting (if you can talk about something plummeting over centuries). As I mentioned in a previous entry, the murder rate in thirteenth-century England was 20 per 100,000, which is around four times what it was in 1700 and fourteen times the last peak of 1990. Whatever disadvantages modernity may have brought in its wake, crime is not one of them.


Attack of the MOMS - Part II

P.S. The latest statistics from the British Crime Survey show the murder rate at its lowest for 20 years, even though 75% of the population think crime is rising (Guardian article).