Many people believe that economic depressions and recessions cause crime, and that economic booms are associated with low crime rates. History, however, tells a different story.
In my new LSU Press book, The Roots of Violent Crime in America: From the Gilded Age through the Great Depression, I examine in detail United States crime rates over a sixty-year period, from roughly the 1880s to 1940. I wrote about a more recent period, 1940 to 2015, in my previous book, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America (2016). Together, these works provide new insights into the relationship between crime and various social conditions: poverty, immigration, economic crises, weakness in the criminal justice system, group subcultures of violence, and more.
A major issue addressed by Roots of Violent Crime, which I would like to touch on here, is the relationship between economic conditions and violent crime. I will limit my remarks to crimes of violence, that is, murder, rape, assault, and forcible robbery. This leaves out property crimes, such as theft/larceny, fraud, burglary, and arson. I’m also excluding so-called public order offenses, including drunk driving, weapons violations, and immigration crimes.
Property crimes and public order offenses correlate with economic conditions in a different way than violent crimes. One can readily see why. Suppose we have a terrible depression, as in the 1930s, with millions of people desperate for necessities and even for food itself. It doesn’t take much to imagine theft and burglary rising in such a situation. As I will show, however, violent crime does not follow the same trajectory as property crime, though it is widely believed that economic decline is a principal cause of crime increase.
The United States has suffered numerous economic recessions, the worst of which (the Great Depression) lasted for more than a full decade, from the stock market crash of late 1929 to the war boom of 1941. Major recessions also occurred in 1873–1879, 1893–1897, and 2007–2009. But there was no consistent relationship between economic decline or economic booms and violent crime.
In the 1890s, a major recession and the influx of millions of massively impoverished immigrants should by popular assumption have produced higher violent crime rates. As I write in Roots of Violent Crime (p. 168):
“If cities breed crime, then the late nineteenth-century United States should have experienced a crim
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.