Customer Reviews

The Great American Crime Decline (Studies in Crime and Public Policy)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Great American Crime Decline is a model of what social science research can be. It deserves a place next to Durkheim's Suicide, Putnam's Bowling Alone, and Conley's The Pecking Order for its clear crisp writing, brilliant analysis and rigorous and understandable use of statistical graphics. The new information on Canada as a comparison fills an essential gap in the literature. The case study of the crime decline in New York City is better than anything else on a much discussed subject. This is the definitive book on the crime decline, building on Blumstein and Wallman's The Crime Drop in America. It should be read by anyone fed up with failed and futile efforts to force criminological data into econometric equations. I am using excerpts in my communications class at Rutgers University, as well as in the research methods class. No one interested in crime in America, or in American society, should miss it.

Book is poorly written and is very difficult to follow. Book needs to be rewritten. Several of the statistics in the book do not exactly line up and the author sometimes makes very invalid points.

Had to read this book for a class. Do yourself a favor and just read the part about Canada and the last section. This book was informative but drowned me in statistics. Could have been really good on a less than recognized topic.

I can only give this book 3.5 stars. The book is well written and compelling but the author does not mention a great deal of research; he seems almost selective. The author makes several points worth noting.

1) "The decline in New York City was nearly twice that of the rest of the country." That may be mathematically true; however, the comparing the average of other urban cities in the US and the "rural" areas in the US may, and probably does, inflate the disparity. NYC did have the greatest decline in crime in the 1990s - there is no debate about that - but the degree to which it was twice the rate of the rest of the US is not methodologically sound.

2) The author states that Canada is an appropriate comparison to the US. If this is the case, why does the author not use Mexico? One can only wonder what happened to crime during that time and why did the author not mention it. If the argument is made that Canada's culture has more in common with the US than Mexico, then still why did San Diego have such a dramatic decrease in crime. (Many Canadians will also strongly disagree that the US and Canaga have "comparable" cultures.) In addition, the author (correctly) states that comparisons with other countries are appropriate to determine what was going on throughout the world during the crime decline in the 1990s. However, a better and more thorough account of international crime rates is offered in Michael Tonry's recent book "Thinking about Crime." In "Thinking about Crime," Tonry states that the crime drop in the US was concurrent with a general worldwide crime drop. I did not count but it seems that Tonry examines more countries than does Zimring in his analysis.

3) The author does not mention a host of policing research, such as the `stop and frisk' procedures done by Larry Sherman. This was a randomized controlled "experiment," something that the author states will provide the highest level or confidence in causation. This and other policing research was not mentioned.

4) Early in the book, the author notes that incarceration does incapacitate offenders and results in a decrease in crime at the present. However, a more thorough examination of this in Todd Clear's book "Imprisoning Communities," which shows that there are a host of criminogenic unintended consequences that accompany incarceration. But for mentioning the diminishing marginal returns of incarceration, Zimring does not mention any of this, which is truly disappointing.

5) The author does give an excellent account of debunking the pop culture that is polluting the minds of so many readers - such as that abortion is a good cause for a crime drop. The author's analysis of how this is not a well research proposition is excellent.

In general, I recommend this book for experience readers of criminology, but I do not recommend this book for policy makers or for the novice crime reader. I work in criminal justice and have a graduate education in criminology; I think this book will leave the average reader with too many unanswered questions and some incomplete conclusions. Knowledge that is only half understood has potential to be twice as dangerous.