Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This papers explores the significant drop in violent crimes in the United States, from 1990-2015. The study gives attention to a range of public and private efforts to address a surging crime rate that swept the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Despite generally-accepted assumptions that a weak economy, with high unemployment and increased poverty would lead to increased crime rates after the Great Recession began in 2007, scholars and policy makers were surprised to witnessed continued decline in violent crime rates. This paper considers the convergence of a host of important shifts in public policy, as well as cultural changes, and the influence of new technologies and elements in popular culture to explain the decline, offering heretofore unpublished theories on the decline.