Crime is a pursuit of the young. The prime years for both property and violent crime are the late teens and early twenties, and by age 30 it drops off dramatically.
At least, it used to. Rick Nevin passes along an interesting chart that shows what happened after lead poisoning in toddlers was cut way down:
Back in the bad old days, property crime rates skyrocketed among the young. The peak was at age 18 and it was 3x higher than the rate at age 30.
But the light blue line shows what that looks like today. Property crime goes up in the late teens, and it peaks at age 19. But not only is that peak far lower than it used to be, it's also nearly the same as it is at age 30. There's no more age-crime curve.
The same is true of violent crime, though a little less dramatically. Today's 19-year-olds are two-thirds less violent than they used to be and no more violent than an average 30-year-old.
The role of lead in all this is interesting, of course, but beyond that I'm not sure what to make of it. I guess one thing, though, is that people should stop being so afraid of young men. They are far less prone to both violent and property crime than in the past, and they aren't uniquely violent compared to other age groups. They're just another demographic.
One wonders if the cops are aware of this development.
What is the median age of police officers in this country?
If the majority of cops are still older than say 40 or 45, they prolly aren't.
I wonder how much culture has to do with this. When I was a kid a lot of toxic masculinity was taken as normal, while I don't have a lot of interaction with youth culture today my impression is that there is a lot less pressure for boys today to conform to these stereotypes. Maybe men aren't all that violent naturally and it was the culture pushing them to be so all along.
Not that this garbage is completely gone but it does appear to be a lot better. There are a lot more models for boys to follow then in the past. And there's still room for improvement, I still see a lot of stuff trying to bring back the bad old days and encourage men to engage in their worst impulses, as if those cultural assumptions about men were something inherent in our biology as opposed to cultural constructs. This appears to be another piece of evidence against that biological determinism.
Gavin Mc Innes is 51. Prime leaded brain age.
Once the Proud Boi Generation shuffles off to the convalescent home, replaced by the performatively transgressive Odd Future cohort, the culture at large will reflect the marginal changes we see now.
I think there's probably as many different explanations or factors in the equation as there are different racial and cultural subgroups. And, also, a lot depends on how you define "toxic masculinity". It can range from white conservative Christians talking about how Jesus didn't turn the other cheek, to traditional expressions of machoism, to traditional "honor culture", to the weird form of "honor culture" that I saw developing in young African-American men during the crack wars of the 1980's. Some similarities but a great many differences, too.
Equally, the type of cultural changes you suggest would presumably result in fewer young people starting a life of crime rather than resulting in more young people remaining in a criminal culture (which is how I read Kevin's study).
Property crimes -- auto theft, burglary, etc. -- are also harder to commit these days than a generation or two ago, mostly due to new security and surveillance technology. You can't pick electronic locks. Cars have all sorts of tracking devices in them. People can watch their property via nanny cams or other internet devices. Apparently the last low-hanging fruit is UP railroad cars parked at LA Union station.
The widespread use of credit, debit and benefit cards mean that both individuals and stores have less cash to be robbed of. The mass looting events some stores have suffered, whether in broad daylight or by break in after close, is another way thieves can make a large amount (by selling the goods they strip)
But carjackings are up:
https://wgntv.com/news/chicagocrime/carjackings-in-chicago-on-pace-to-be-worst-in-2-decades-as-police-issue-community-alert/
And many of them are done by teens. But why....
https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/projects/how-the-pandemic-is-accelerating-carjackings-in-chicago
Overall numbers are low compared to total crime--but it's a crime that makes people fearful. And can play on the local news, which magnifies its impact.
Newer cars can't just be hot-wired to steal. I suspect this is why cars are being stolen when the drivers are in them with chipped keys or electronic fobs.
Since the feds don't keep track, are they really up?
I like the much lower numbers in the recent graphs. Boys playing video games and getting their rapey, violent urges satisfied that way, instead of on the street? Well, maybe it's one of a lot of factors. (Like everything else is.)
I don’t understand why this would be occurring and I’d really like to see additional studies showing that it is. My impression is that young criminals tended to either become, more or less, permanently incapacitated due to long periods of imprisonment or else they aged out of the business through marriage or general fatigue (being a high rate armed robber, for example, is very stressful).
Leaded or unleaded, it’s difficult to see why young people who aren’t involved in organized crime of some sort are continuing in a very tough business as opposed to drifting over time either into straight jobs or to the periphery of criminal activities (which has been the norm for generations).
I was a criminology major in college (way back in the early 70’s). The studies at the time indicated that the recidivism rate dropped precipitously when criminals reached their mid-thirties. At that point in life people stop feeling indestructible and start seeing consequences to their actions. Many years ago I had this conversation with a work friend. He immediately got it. He said that when he was in his twenties there was a place at Lake Tahoe where you could climb up some rocks and jump into a pool of water. He did this all the time. Then, one day when he was about 33 he went there, climbed up the rocks and looked down and decided it was too dangerous. He never did it again.
Of course, some people never learn and others graduate in to less dangerous criminal activities.
Yes, the realization of one's mortality as a spur to change has always been seen as a major part of why criminals tended to age out of committing even non-violent crimes. Along with other things like getting married and having children. Except for a small group of truly violent, dangerous high-rate offenders, most people tend to leave a life of crime as they age. So our understanding seems to be the conventional wisdom.
Another aspect of why I think young people aren't aging out is that a life of crime is now a matter of choice and "lifestyle" rather than of economic necessity. My formative experiences with criminals were mostly during the "crack wars" of the 1980's and early 1990's. In New Orleans, where I was living and working at the time, there was basically a depression; no jobs; and people were hanging on to entry level jobs for dear life. Realistically, most of the kids selling crack on the street could've make more money working at MacDonalds and probably that's where they would've been working if the opportunities had been available. So these are young people who would've been expected to move into the straight world once opportunities started to open up but, according to Kevin's study, they stayed in the life of crime.
One aspect of this which I think might contribute to young people not eventually moving to get straight jobs is the dehumanizing brutality of the American prison system. When I moved back to California in the late 1990's, I saw a lot of young people who went into the system as troubled young men but between the prison system and the gangs, they turned into vicious animals who are incapable of reintegrating into straight society. This isn't a good trend and we need reform of the police (to catch criminals) and reform of the prison system to segregate (and reform) those who can be redeemed.
I worked in Los Angeles Juvenile Hall during the late 70’s. Most of the kids I saw were already pretty far gone, particularly the Crips and the Bloods who were engaged in a major turf war at the time.
I found the Latino gang situation at the time pretty weird. Mostly arrested for fighting (many times deadly) for no particular reason other than neighborhood affiliation. Later, of course, it got to be more of a drug thing.
Why haven't you stepped into the Spotify-Joe Rogan quagmire? Just wondering.
hard to find something meaningful to plot???
😉
I see my reply was BRUTALLY DEPLATFORMED.
Looks like Antiwoke Warrior Kevin Drum did to me what the Antiamerican Wokeness Freaks are doing to Joe Rogan.
Those are arrests, not *exactly* crimes.
Are there reasons to believe at least one of
- arrests occur *substantially* later than the crimes were committed?
I assume this is not true for petty theft and muggings, but it could be true(?) for murder and rape.
- 20 yr old criminals are substantially savvier than 35 yr old criminals (in terms of things like "don't take your phone, whose position can be tracked, on the crime with you"?
I honestly don't know, and have no strong stake in the outcome either way. But these two possibilities immediately struck me.
The other question I'd consider interesting, perhaps trending differently, and unanswered at either the Nelson link, or the sources he used, is various classes of sexual crimes. That's tricky (one wants to strip out the technically crime but who gives a fsck cases like 19yr old having consensual sex with 17yr old) but having done that, what does one see?
Kevin's chart is actually one of many things which are not consistent with the lead-cohort explanation for the 90's crime wave. If a lead-affected cohort were responsible for the crime, it should have continued to commit crime as it aged. Youths aged 18-19 were primarily responsible for the violent crime wave of the early 90's, as this chart among other data shows. If this were due to a cohort, the peak should have moved to older ages with the passage of time. If the cohort was committing the crime at age 19 in 1992 there should be peaks at age 29 in 2002, at age 39 in 2012 and at age 49 in 2022. Those older-age peaks are completely absent. I have verified this with the complete data. During the time of greatest crime peaking in the early 90's the modal age of criminals did not shift with time, it remained at 18-19. The red and black curves in Kevin's chart show this. If a cohort were responsible, the 1988 peak should be 8 years later than the 1980 peak (for example).
The age data are actually completely inconsistent with a cohort hypothesis. What they seem to indicate is some criminal gang-type activity, most likely drug dealing (crack), involving 18-19 year-old youths. In other times and other places crime has certainly not been restricted to ages 18-19.
At one point Kevin appeared to acknowledge that the age data are not consistent, but he has apparently forgotten this. Or maybe he just never understood it in the first place. His practice is to talk about things which he thinks are consistent with the hypothesis but ignore the things which are not.
According to the cohort hypothesis,the 1988 peak should at 8 years greater age than the 1980 peak.
But the '88 kids were still being poisoned at the same rate.
Let's blame technology! So many video games and tiktok to go through, there's no time for crime.
Of course, that would mean you should still be afraid of young men. The good ones are at home staring at a screen. Only the really bad ones are out in public.
In reality, this is a very interesting development. I'm curious about the age breakdown these days. Are the recent increases in some crimes concentrated in some age groups, or evenly spread out? The news is full of young teens carjacking people, but is that just because the young teens are crappy at carjacking and are the ones to get caught?