Abstract
No account of national decline is free to exclude its most visible symbol—street crime.
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Notes
One is the F.B.I. Uniform Crime Report, compiled since 1930 from statistics provided by the nation’s police chiefs’, the other is the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which cites annual surveys of the crimes experienced in American households over the past year.
The U.S. Justice Department compiles the country’s statistics on street crime and violence. See “Crime Statistics: A Historical Perspective,” Crime and Delinquency 23, January 1977, pp. 32–40.
Blumstein, Alfred, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffery A. Roth, and Christy A. Visher, eds. Criminal Careers and Career Criminals. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1986.
Coffey, Thomas M. The Long Thirst: Prohibition in America 1920–1933. New York: Norton, 1975.
Both of these cases were exhaustively reported by the local and the national press, with the latter case arousing by far the greater national interest.
The biggest of 1994 and 1995, this story seemed destined to keep surfacing prominently for at least the rest of the century, inspiring books, movies, and the widest possible coverage in all other media.
The death of Elisa Izquierdo was seized on, by the system and the press, as a paradigm of the times. The tragedy sparked investigations, legislative initiatives, and deep analysis by The New York Times and others in late 1995 and early 1996.
Cook, Philip J. “The Influence of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns.” In Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, Vol. 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 49–89.
Fox, J.A., and J. Levin. Mass Murder: America’s Growing Menace. New York: Plenum Press, 1985.
Butterfield, Fox. All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Martin, John M., and Joseph P. Fitzpatrick. Delinquent Behavior. New York: Random House, 1964.
Canada, Geoffrey. Fist Stick Knife Gun. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
The Children’s Defense Fund and its director, Marion Wright Edel-man, have performed heroically in documenting the plight of our “underclass children.”
Colson, Charles W. “The New Criminal Class.” The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 1996.
Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor Glueck. Family Environment and Delinquency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
Carroll, Leo, and Pamela Irving Jackson. “Inequality, Opportunity and Crime Rates in Central Cities.” Criminology, May 1983, pp. 178–194.
Conklin, John E. Criminology. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling. “Broken Windows.” Atlantic Monthly 249, March 1981, pp. 29–38.
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© 1996 Tony Bouza
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Bouza, T. (1996). Street Crime. In: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6034-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6034-4_10
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