Contrarian View - NPR broadcasts story that Bad Economies do not lead to crime waves

Mark Twain is credited with saying, there are liars, damn liars, and statisticians. That is the problem with examining crime data from the Great Depression era. Mainstream criminologists examine sterile statistical data and make general assumptions about human behavior and crime based on this data. However, frequently, there are nuisances in the data that render the conclusions of the data invalid. Consider the category of crime called "floating bodies," this is the way that Ecorse Police Department of Michigan recorded dead human bodies pulled from the river that float down from Detroit and parts north in the early 1990s. This mis-labeling had the effect of hiding the crime data as there is no FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) category called floating bodies. Hmmmm.

Well in a more heinous manner, crime data being analyzed from the 1930s have been likewise scrubbed of real meaning leaving the picture that crime actually went down during the Great Depression -- leading some to falsely assume that we should expect no crime wave from the economic downturn. Nothing could be further from the truth -- crime was horrible, and it took specific large actions to combat crime before it finally receded. This is not considered in the article that appeared on National Public Radio titled,

Experts: Bad Economies Don't Cause Crime Waves
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97234406#commentBlock
Article conclusion: “The Depression years had very little crime.” “With the economy's current troubles, many people assume a crime wave is just around the corner. But criminologists say that's just an American myth. Just look at the 1920s, says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention at John Jay College of Criminal Studies. "It was a period of booming economic prosperity, the roaring '20s, and very high crime," he says. The 1950s and '60s were the same. The economy was great, but crime rates rose every single year.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Not only was there a huge crime wave in starting in the 1920s and extending in greater flagrancy in the 1930s with the onset of the Great Depression, but the crime was so severe that the Federal Government created a strategic crime control plan of sweeping broadness that it rivals the Paulsen Financial Plan today. Consider that the US government went to great strides to combat crime in the 1930s that included the creation of the FBI, elimination of Prohibition stripping organized crime of illegal gains from liquor sales, and most formidably, the era saw the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps to incapacitate serious habitual offenders and provide crime demand reduction programming for the young male unemployed population living in the cities, and they were sent to rural work bootcamps.

There is a strong linkage between negative economic shocks, economic hardship, unemployment, and loss of purchasing power and crime -- and the relationship is stronger with more significant economic shocks. The crime wave that was prevalent during the in the 1920s and early 1930s was significant and brutal, and was only brought under control after the implementation of the FBI and the extraction of serious habitual offenders from the general population, along with a large cohort of young unemployed men at greatest risk for crime. Modern researchers fail to understand the significant crime environment of the 1930s and falsely claim that statistical reports of reduced crime during the depression occurred as a natural result. Rather crime went down during the Depression when over 500,000 unemployed young men of greatest risk for crime involvement were taken out of the cities and placed into 2300+ work camps managed by the CCC. The statistics show that in 1934, young men between the ages of 18-24 comprised only 6% of the population, but accounted for 51% of arrests for auto theft, robbery, burglary, rape, and assault; one-third of larceny arrest, and two of ten homicide arrests. It was necessary for the US Government to proactively remove a significant portion of the unemployed population at greatest risk of crime involvement, and they placed them in work camps in rural areas managed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This is the primary reason that crime reduced -- there were fewer likely offenders. The impact of a huge targeted diversion program, taking the unemployed males of greatest risk out of the city and sending them to camps in the rurals had a huge impact by reducing likely offenders.

On background, the CCC was created by President Franklin Roosevelt on March 23, 1933, just three weeks after his inauguration. The CCC would operate as many as 2,650 rural work camps with up to 500,000 young high-risk unemployed males engaged in these camps. The “enrollees” were removed from the general population and were geographically isolated so that they could not be a risk to the populations remaining in the cities. The camps operated with military discipline and supervision of the US Army. Free time was provided for enrollees but there was no access or transportation to leave the work areas. These camps provided the geographical containment of a prison through their isolation.

These and other notes are contained in my forthcoming book, Severin Sorensen, CPP, Economic Misery and Crime Waves: The future history of the second coming of the Great Depression and the crime wave that followed, and what to do about it.

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Sorensen, Severin. "Contrarian View - NPR broadcasts story that Bad Economies do not lead to crime waves." Weblog post. Economic Misery and Crime Waves. 21 Nov. 2008. .