There is surely something in this.

Crime is primarily carried out by young men 16-25. They now have a very interesting activity that many of them engage in. There is far less 'hanging around' with dodgy mates on streets with little to do.

The crime decline also didn't occur just in the US but all across the developed world which suggests that Roe vs Wade had less impact than Levitt and other suggest.

By the 1990s consoles had become cheap enough that many more people could afford them.

That and as someone else has said, cheap and available porn. Cheap porn was available by the 1990s in magazines and videos. Online it's now much cheaper and prevalent, but it's been there for quite a while.

VCR was big in the 90s (VHS was released in the US in 77, with Betamax a year before, hitting close to saturation in about 1990).

Or free and easy access to porn. Really.

90s dialup Internet was not in every house yet. Microsoft succeeded in getting PCs in homes but free was not the name of the game with pay per minute online access. Things didn’t really take off until the 00s with broadband access.

Not true. Pay per minute Internet access did not last that long, by the mid 90s it wasn't even a thing. Image porn on the Internet was a big deal in the 90s, especially in the second half of the decade. Plenty of people had dial up, hence the massive popularity of ICQ and later AIM. And of course email, online gaming, and the dotcom bubble...

And I never said Internet porn. While not free, porn was still cheap and easy to get on cable or satellite, or at video rental stores.

VCR was out in the late 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocassette_recorder

I doubt it was just porn though. I believe that simply getting teenagers / young adults inside for long periods of time (and not just for the purpose of abusing drugs / alcohol) is a big victory (for crime stats, not society in general).

lack of porn causes crimes ? frustration based ?

IIRC teenage drinking and violent crime plummeted among high school boys after original World of Warcraft release.

I think there were articles in the year following, at least in scandinavia, about it.

I don't think homeless can afford consoles and escape reality.. however they can afford drugs to escape reality.

Also note: Prison provides free housing, free meals, free gym, and free healthcare.

Haven't the cost of illegal drugs been falling in real terms since the 1970s. Would be interesting to look into what the cost of drugs does to crime rates.

Cocaine was much cheaper back in the 80s at least than now. And much purer too.