The Great American Crime Decline

Franklin E. Zimring The Great American Crime Decline. New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. 258 pp. Paperback: $29.95.

Franklin E. Zimring, one of the nation's leading scholars on issues of crime and justice, presents a compelling assessment of the forces behind the steady decline in criminal offending in the United States during the 1990s. Contrary to the predictions of criminologists, the official crime rate declined every year from 1991 to 2000 for every serious crime, in every region of the country, and among all demographic groups. In this book, the author presents a compelling assessment of a wide range of explanations for this surprising decline in crime. Full of statistics and complicated arguments, this book is appropriate for upper-level undergraduate and graduate criminology courses and is an excellent pedagogical tool to teach crime trends, crime control, and the measurement of crime.

The book is well organized, separated into four distinct parts. The first section addresses the question, "What Happened in the 1990s?" The first chapter begins with an explanation of how crime data is gathered for the Uniform Crime Reports and includes a visual depiction of crime trends during the 1990s by each index offense, gender, race, city size, suburban or rural environment, and region of the United States. Furthermore, similarities in crime patterns shown by victimization data are discussed, an assessment of the crime decline in the most populous U.S. cities is presented, and international comparisons are presented. Most significantly, this section illustrates that the crime decline during the 1990s was substantial, broad, similar to the trends shown in Canada and elsewhere, and a complete surprise to experts in the field.

The second chapter details the skepticism of the American public toward the effectiveness of crime policies, characterized by the "Nothing Works" paradigm and strengthened by the failure of the Kansas City Preventative Patrol experiment. The sustained period of crime decline in the 1990s, however, helped to revive the public's attitudes about the efficacy of police and criminal justice policies and emboldened advocates of order maintenance and three strikes policies. In response, the author raises the issue of the euphoric fallacy, which states that the decline in crime is not proof that criminal justice policies are effective. The author cautions that the expansive overreactions...