Drop In Crime Research Paper

Crime rates in the United States have been steadily dropping since the early nineties after having been on an upward trend since the sixties. They reached a historical peak in 1992 and from 1993 to 2000, the U.S experienced an unexpected 48% and 51% drop in violent and property crime rates, respectively (U.S Dept. of Justice). Many researchers have tried to explain this sharp drop in crime, but there seems to be a lack of consensus on the most influential factors. On one side, there are researchers who believe that most of the reduction of crime was due to changes in enforcement in addition to improving economic factors. On the other side of the debate, there are those who believe that the fall in crime rates was due to an environmental factor, attributing most of the fall to the reduction of lead exposure after the late seventies. In this paper, I will be focusing on the environmental side of the debate since it is a relatively new approach at explaining the decline in crime. The non-environmental theory for the drop in crime rates has support from a lot of literature because it focuses on those factors that more or less affect crime directly. Levitt (2004), for example, found that the most …show more content…
In order to find the link between lead exposure level and crime rates, many researchers have used around a 20 to 23 year time lag (Reyes 2014; Nevin 2007). For example, lead exposure levels recorded in the 1950s would be matched with national crime rates in the 1970s. This type of study has been done at national, state, and city levels-- all of them concluding that there is the same upward and downward trend in both lead exposure levels and national crime rates which seem to match after placing a ~20 year time lag (Mielke & Zahran 2012; Reyes 2014; Nevin 2007)