Attack of the MOMS - Part I

[robinturner]

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).

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Indeed - and in the thirteenth century, if you didn't get murdered, there was still a greatly expanded choice of other unpleasant ways to die relatively young.

Of course there are lots of things I don't like about modern society, and at the top of the list is all the blessed noise; but when I get really infuriated about it, it's often good to remind myself that at least I am not suddenly going to drop dead from cholera, smallpox, plague &c.

[solri.livejournal.com]

And of course the criminal justice system in the thirteenth century meant that you could be hanged for a whole range of activities, like hunting or gathering firewood. (Interestingly, the phrase "by hook or by crook" originally refers to legal acquisition, since hooks and crooks were used in gathering dead wood, which was allowed.)

[solri.livejournal.com]

That's why it's good to focus on murder, since it's something everyone regards as a crime, and it's pretty unusual for it to go unreported.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

I'd be very rich if I had a dollar for every paper I've read that cited the ever increasing crime rates. I think it's just something that people repeat so often that they forget to question it. Maybe that's why Scorsese made Gangs of New York.

It's a great fear for politicians to exploit.

[vret.livejournal.com]

I recently had a conversation with a new neighbour in which he asked whether I knew of any burglaries around here. I told him I knew of 3 in the last 10 years, 2 minor ones next door, and one major one across the road, as well as 1 car theft. All of those were at least 5 or 6 years ago, and the major burglary was in the only house on the estate that didn't have an alarm. He thought that confirmed what he had heard, that this is a high crime area.

In the 90s, when I lived several hundred yards down the road, I was burgled several times, as was every other house in the road (that's maybe 100 houses). At one point every house on the main road for a mile or so was burgled over 2 weekends; those that escaped the first time were done a week later.

Over several years in the early 90s my car was broken into and attempts made to steal it roughly once every 6 weeks, doing several hundred pounds of damage each time. The police only investigated and took prints once, the time a witness could identify the thieves. There was so much car crime they didn't bother investigating it unless they already knew who had done it. The main road was often used at night as a race track by joy riders, who would sometimes crash the cars outside where I lived so they could run through the ginnels and into the woods (which would mean spending half the night with a helicopter hovering over the houses).

Seems to me that crime in this area is only a few percent of what it was 10 to 15 years ago, but people still think that crime levels are high.

[solri.livejournal.com]

When I was living in Belle Vue Road, they'd sometimes use the back of BVR as a kind of training area for novice joyriders. Once they even set the car on fire when they finished - we called the police and fire brigade. The fire brigade were there in about two minutes; the police showed up eventually.

We also got burgled twice, though in neither case could the thieves find anything we owned that was worth stealing. They ate some chocolates and broke into the gas meters, which was great because we had free gas for a month. One of them nearly managed to get a Darwin Award by trying to cut through the computer cables - including the mains cable.