A reader writes:
Following up on your reader’s argument about how technology – ATMs, cell phones and the Internet – lower crime: I live in New York and have lived here during the massive decline in street crime, especially street crime associated with drugs. I was always skeptical that Rudy Guliani and his tough stance was responsible largely because even as drug related crime fell, drugs, especially hard drugs, became more ubiquitous. What I did notice is that cell phones made drugs a delivery business, as dealers would not lose orders as they delivered drugs to a buyer. The cell phone address book replaced territory and sales of narcotics became deterritorialized. A lot of violent crime had centered on territory.
Another writes:
Perhaps one of the biggest reasons that caused crime to fall is video games.
Young adult males have the highest rates of violent crimes and are also the largest consumers of video games. Over the past two decades, the introduction and meteoric rise in popularity of video games has correlated directly with the drop in crime, and video game revenues rise inversely proportionally to said drop. Consoles are cheap (a few hundred dollars) and games can be borrowed, traded, and rented cheaply, while consuming dozens of hours weekly. Replayability means a single game can be played 30, 40, 50 or more hours.
Games offer escape from reality, even an impoverished one (so much so they are used after surgery to distract patients from pain). Here's one article discussing the correlation between crime and videogames. Dozens of hours a week playing games means people aren't out on the street doing crimes, and video games are a cheap substitute for using drugs as a means of escaping reality.
Another:
I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned the reason I suspect the crime rate among the bottom 10% keeps dropping: the buying power of a dollar. While the gap between rich and poor has increased, the things available to the people in the bottom 10% are wildly better than was the case 30 years ago, when a poor family might not have been able to see a new movie in an entire year. Now you can get a DVD player for $20 and rent a movie for 99 cents. $20.99 would have just gotten a family of four into one movie in 1980 without even adjusting for inflation!
A prior reader wrote about how his family could eat out once or twice a year in the 1970s. Now, even in the poorest neighborhoods, there are $1 hamburgers and $4 burritos, and the people who cannot ever afford those are basically the very poorest of the poor (i.e., the homeless, etc., who were never the people responsible for crime waves). But your average low-income family has cell phones and iPods and can go to the KFC. It's a quality of life issue; people aren't turning to crime because things are not that bad for most people.
Another:
One possible explanation for the crime drop is actually the changing demography of our most criminally prone population – 15- to 34-year-old males – to include a large number of immigrants. Along the lines of other "immigrant paradox" literature, several criminologists have suggested that increasing immigration (both legal and illegal) has actually contributed to the decline in crime, particularly violence, over the past 20 years. Here are some articles [pdf] that explain this concept in more detail.
The Dish 