Losing Legitimacy by Gary Lafree

Author:Gary Lafree [Lafree, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429978760
Google: iTlMDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Middle Postwar Period, 1961–1973

If economic trends in the early postwar years seem to fit crime trends nearly perfectly, economic trends in the middle postwar years posed a challenge for American criminologists that ended up fundamentally reshaping both research and policy on crime for decades to come. The central problem is well expressed in James Q. Wilson's 1975 challenge to criminologists to explain "the paradox" of "crime amidst plenty."40 Indeed, in many respects the economic picture of the United States in the middle postwar period was even more favorable than it had been in the early postwar years. Productivity declined slightly in the 1960s but remained at historically high levels. A typical working male in his late twenties in 1959 would see his real income grow by 49 percent over the decade of the sixties.41 These trends are illustrated in Figure 7.1, which shows median income for American men in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1947 to 1995. To allow easy comparison, I include robbery rates for the same period.

Figure 7.1 clearly demonstrates the vulnerability of common strain theory explanations based on the connections between economic stress and crime in the middle postwar period. As shown in Figure 7.1, inflation-adjusted income for American males grew steadily from 1960 to 1973—about the same time as the postwar crime boom. In fact, it didn't just grow, it exploded. From 1960 to 1973, median income of American men 14 years and over, in inflation-adjusted dollars, rose from just over $19,000 to more than $26,000—a 35 percent increase. As we have seen previously, during these same years total street crime rates more than doubled.

FIGURE 7.1 Trends in Median Income of Males and Robbery Rates, 1947-1995 (in 1995 Dollars) NOTE: Males 15 years and over beginning in 1980 and males 14 years and over for previous years.

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Money Income in the United States: 1995," Current Population Reports, Series P-60, No. 193 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), p. B-12.

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