Crime rates should drop during good economic times and rise during bad ones. So very soon if you are walking the streets of New York late at night, you may be at risk of being mugged by gangs of investment bankers, driven to acts of desperate violence by the travails of the credit markets. This seems logical at first glance – people who lose their jobs may turn instead to burglary and theft to get what they want. But there is little evidence to suggest that crime rates drop during good economic times and rise during bad ones. Crime rates rose every year between 1955 and 1972, even as the economy surged, with only a brief, mild recession in the early 1960s. A bad economy doesn’t always bring more crime. Crime rates fell about one third between 1934 and 1938 while the nation was struggling to emerge from the Great Depression and weathering another severe economic downturn in 1937 and 1938.

Declining wages for poor young males drew them to crime as crack ravaged inner cities during the economic boom of the late 1980s. Low wages and the lure of crack profits thus discouraged young men from finding honest work. Economists and criminologists who can refer to data from all 50 U.S. states to help them understand what is going on have found little indication of a strong link between economic growth and crime. They instead credit some of the sharp fall in crime in the U.S. in the 1990s to larger police forces and harsher prison sentences. More stringent laws and larger government expenditures have also played an important role in the fall in the crime rate.

The truth is that broad figures on crime conceal large differences in specific crimes, each with its own particular explanation. Crimes, broadly speaking, have been falling for a decade. Car thefts are down because cars are harder to steal. Modern televisions and other home electronic equipments tend to be either too large to steal or too cheap to bother with.

That should take the focus away from crime. The economic downturn is threatening an increase in crime, illegal immigration, and extremism, putting further strain on tight police budgets. Illegal working is forecast to increase as migrants’ opportunities for legal employment decline and businesses seek to save costs.

Economic downturn also risks increasing the appeal of far right extremism and racism. Experiencing racism can be one of the factors that can lead to people becoming terrorists.

Local police resources could come under increasing pressure. The ever increasing gas prices might leave the police forces facing financial pressures.

So if the war against crime is to be won, then more stringent laws and increased federal, state, and local spending on law enforcement are needed. In other words, crime declines not because the economy is booming but because the government passes stringent laws and spends money – larger prisons, more police, and tougher punishments.

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