Re:Shon Hopwood and Kopf’s terrible sentencing instincts
by ufmace on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @11:10AM
(#6283905)
From the reading I have done about it, in the 70s-80s or so, there was a huge crime wave that was expected to grow even worse in the 90s. Instead, crime rates fell off a cliff. I might have timeframe wrong, but that's the basic facts.
Everybody involved has been trying to figure out why crime rates dropped so hard when they were expected to grow. There's a ton of proposed reasons, and not much in the way of solid proof behind any of them. Lead in the water is one of them, also legal abortion, drug market changes, gun law changes, and many others. Maybe it was really all one of them, maybe all of them played a part, maybe just a few. We'll probably never know for sure - it's not like you can perform experiments to really isolate one of those variables properly.
Everybody involved has been trying to figure out why crime rates dropped so hard when they were expected to grow. There's a ton of proposed reasons, and not much in the way of solid proof behind any of them. Lead in the water is one of them, also legal abortion, drug market changes, gun law changes, and many others. Maybe it was really all one of them, maybe all of them played a part, maybe just a few. We'll probably never know for sure - it's not like you can perform experiments to really isolate one of those variables properly.