Crime and Justice, Volume 43: Why Crime Rates Fall, and Why They Don't

Violent and property crime rates in all Western countries have been falling since the early and mid-1990s, after rising in the 1970s and 1980s. Few people have noticed the common patterns and fewer have attempted to understand or explain them. Yet the implications are essential for thinking about crime control and criminal justice policy more broadly. Crime rates in Canada and the United States, for example, have moved in parallel for 40 years, but Canada has neither increased its imprisonme…