Showing papers in "Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology in 1998"

Declining crime rates: Insiders' views of the New York City story

Abstract: Something dramatic happened in New York City in 1994: a lot of people stopped committing crimes, especially violent ones. The reduction in the number of persons committing murders, for example, while not unprecedented,' was extraordinary. Since 1994, a debate has raged about why this happened. Putting our position up front, we believe the police played an important, even central, role in getting people to stop committing crime in New York City. Despite arguments to the contrary,' no evidence exists that the substantial drops in crime in New York City, especially the initial ones when one of the authors of this paper, William Bratton, was commissioner, were the result of economic change, changes in drug use patterns, or demographic changes. Arguably, New York City's economy, drug use patterns, and demography might be different now in 1998. Unemployment was at 10% the month Bratton took over the New York City Police Department (NYPD) (January 1994) and at 8.7% when he resigned (April 1996)-hardly a booming economy.3 And remember as well, the initial reductions in crime were so steep that by August of 1995-three years ago, but only twenty months after Bratton took office-New York maga-

Declining Homicide in New York City: A Tale of Two Trends

Abstract: The mass media pay plenty of attention to crime and violence in the United States, but very few of the big stories on the American crime beat can be classified as good news. The driveby shootings and carjackings that illuminate nightly news broadcasts are the opposite of good tidings. Most efforts at prevention and law enforcement seem more like reactive attempts to contain ever expanding problems rather than discernable public triumphs. In recent American history, crime rates seem to increase on the front page and moderate in obscurity. The recent decline in homicides in New York City is an exception to the usual pattern, the most celebrated example of crime-news-as-good-news in decades. No doubt part of the public attention can be explained because the story took place in the media capital of the United States. But more than location made the New York story newsworthy. The drop in homicides was both large and abrupt-the homicide rate in the nation's largest city fell 52% in five years. Further, changes in police manpower and strategy are widely believed to have contributed to the decline. If this drop can be plausibly tied to enforcement

Alcohol and homicide in the united states 1934-1995-or one reason why u.s. rates of violence may be going down

Abstract: In the last few years, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the apparent decline in rates of homicide and other kinds of violence in the United States. Commentators debate whether rates of violence are actually declining, and what are the reasons for this apparent decline. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility that one reason for the apparent recent decline in homicide may be its relationship to the rate of alcohol consumption during this same time period. As there is a growing body of research that shows a significant relationship between alcohol and violence at different levels of aggregation, in different countries and sub-units of countries, among different types of people, and across time periods, we will also explore the homicide and alcohol relationship by race and by type of alcoholic beverage. There are also the beginnings of a theoretical body of knowledge that would explain why variations in alcohol consumption and availability should be considered part of the explanation for variations in the rate of homicide and other types of violence. These issues will be discussed in detail in this

Social Institutions and the Crime "Bust" of the 1990s

Abstract: amine trends for different crime types and data sources, and for large cities. My review shows that crime rates in the 1990s have dropped rapidly and that declines have been sweeping, affecting all of the street crimes that are routinely tracked by the two major sources of crime data in the United States (the Uniform Crime Reports and the National Crime Victimization Survey). In short, the period from 1990 to 1997 represents the closest thing to a sustained decline in crime, or a "crime bust" that the United States has experienced in more than fifty years. In a recently published book, I argue that changes in the legitimacy of social institutions provide the most promising explanation for the rapid changes in street crime trends observed in America after World War II.1 In particular, I argue that American crime rates surged in the 1960s as a result of increasing distrust of political institutions, increasing stress produced by economic institutions, and declining strength of family institutions.2 American society countered this growing legitimacy crisis by investing more in other institutions, most notably

Protecting the Innocent from False Confessions and Lost Confessions--And from Miranda

Abstract: Criminal procedure scholarship has spent little time discussing the guiltless and much discussing the guilty. Recent attempts to correct this problem have led to discussions of the plight of an innocent person who confessed to a crime he did not commit. These discussions call for still more regulation of police interrogations without attempting to quantify the problem. Such a focus is incomplete because the innocent are at risk not only when police extract untruthful confessions but also when police fail to obtain truthful confessions from criminals. It is possible that more regulation aimed at reducing false confessions may produce such a substantial drop in truthful confessions as to pose a greater risk to the innocent. The aim of this empirical essay is to think more carefully about “the numbers” – that is, to try and place the risk to the innocent from false confessions, lost confessions, and lost convictions into some perspective. Part I attempts to quantify the dimensions of the false confession problem. Part II then turns to an assessment of the relative risk to the innocent from false confessions versus lost confessions. False confessions are a relatively infrequent cause of wrongful convictions while truthful confessions are perhaps the most frequent way in which miscarriages of justice are uncovered. Finally, Part III provides an escape from these tradeoffs by suggesting videotaping of police interrogation as a substitute for the restrictive Miranda rules.

Understanding the Time Path of Crime

Abstract: This paper examines the recent drop in crime and the reasons given therefore, and concludes that to properly evaluate this phenomenon one must sort out the long-term trends in crime over the last 50 years from the short-term fluctuations around those trends. There have been two clear long-run trends in crime over the last half century: one involving sharply rising crime until the late 1970s, followed by a period of slow decline over the next two decades. As one might expect, there have been considerable short-term fluctuations around the two long-run trends, and indeed, the later period has experienced greater variability in crime around the long-term declining trend than had been the case during the initial period of the rising secular trend in crime. Section I of the paper documents these broad patterns -- murder rates rose by roughly 4.4 percent per year from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, and have fallen by roughly six-tenths of 1 percent since then -- and discusses how they illuminate the issues of why crime has fallen and where it is likely to be headed in the future. Section II builds upon this discussion to show that increased levels of incarceration and favorable demographic shifts contributed to the slow decline in crime over the last two decades, but cannot explain the sudden drop in crime in the mid-1990s after the abrupt increases in crime of the late 1980s. Section III concludes by noting that the growing cost of incarceration suggests that at some point, the public will call for an end to further increases in the number of prison inmates. Since increasing incarceration, more police, and favorable demographics have been modestly offsetting the influences pushing towards higher crime, when the increases stop and the demographic trends turn unfriendly (as they now have), crime will begin a slow secular rise for the first time in two decades, unless some other force (better policing strategies, effective social programs) controls crime or the unknown long-term criminogenic forces in society (the breakdown in the family, pernicious media influences, declining schools, growing drug use and drug markets?) abate.

Which Homicides Decreased--Why

Abstract: In a sense, criminologists are luckier than economists. Economists are asked to forecast what will happen to the economy, and a lot of them get it wrong. Criminologists are asked to back-cast, to explain what happened after it happens, and probably with about the same success as economists have at forecasting: even though we know what the outcome is, we often don't know why. But this is not for lack of trying. After reading the papers and hearing the presentations, I am struck by the care with which the authors have analyzed the homicide data at three levels: national, multi-jurisdictional, and single-city. My comments should in no way be seen as criticisms of their efforts; rather, they are suggestions as to additional steps that might be taken. My comments focus on two areas: disaggregation of homicide data, and considering whether "regression to the mean" might explain the recent decline in New York City homicides.

Does Congress Abuse Its Spending Clause Power by Attaching Conditions on the Receipt of Federal Law Enforcement Funds to a State's Compliance with "Megan's Law?"

Abstract: summary) Translate [unavailable for this document] Koenig explores several crimes that led to the national explosion of laws targeting child sex offenders, including the case of Megan Kanka, who was raped and murdered by a neighbor. He discusses several state laws, the amended federal version of Megan's Law, constitutional challenges to state versions of Megan's Law, and a potential Spending Clause challenge to Megan's Law.

Using the Innocent to Scapegoat Miranda: Another Reply to Paul Cassell

Abstract: This article responds to Paul Cassell's article, Protecting the Innocent from False Confessions and Lost Confessions - And From Miranda. In this article, Cassell suggests an alternative methodology for estimating the annual frequency of wrongful convictions arising from false confessions. The authors argue that Cassell's proposed methodology rests on empirically untenable assumptions and ignores barriers to estimating the harm of improper interrogation methods. Cassell also claims that Miranda requirements present serious risks for innocent suspects. The authors assert that this claim has no empirical foundation.

Religious perspectives on assisted suicide.

Abstract: Yale Kamisar's writings add up to an impressive argument against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia, an achievement all the more notable because it does not depend on a blanket moral condemnation of these practices and so avoids becoming mired in the contemporary debate over moral pluralism. My assigned task, nonetheless, is to explore the contribution of religious thought to the debates over both the morality of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) /euthanasia and the moral implications of their legalization. I have chosen to end with feminist theological and philosophical reflections on these questions because they supplement in important ways the "official" positions of religious bodies and so illuminate the assisted suicide debate freshly. The whole cant of this discussion may reveal a medieval sensibility about the connections between law and morality: that the bindingness of law depends on its justice, and its justice is dependent on its genuinely advancing the common good.' But given our current understandings of the ways in which social practices construct morality, perhaps such medievalism is again appropriate. My reflections come in three parts. First, what do the religions say about PAS/euthanasia? Second, in what ways are those teachings relevant to courts and legislative bodies? And, finally, what can feminist philosophers and theologians contribute to the discourse?