study maybe a year's worth of crime, and these have great value. i'm not knocking them. they're very significant. but they don't give you a broader perspective, and that's why i wrote this book. >> host: so before we get into the story of crime in america, let's set the stage for our viewers. what is violent crime? what kind of crimes are we talking about here? >> guest: well, the criminologists define it, essentially, as four different crimes. murder, but, of course, that could be treated as a manslaughter if there are certain what we call elements of the crime present or not present. so together we might refer to those as criminal homicides, so so that's one crime. and then rape, of course, is considered a violent crime.

assault is the third one, and usually we're interested in what most states calling a sated assault -- aggravated assault where you have serious bodily injury. and that would be the third. and robbery is the final one, although robbery is somewhat of a hybrid because there's a property motivation; that is, a theft motivation. and it's a combination really of theft and violence. so some people might include other things, for instance, kidnapping or some might even include arson which could, obviously, cause death or injury. but criminologists, i guess, don't include kidnapping because there's so few instances of it and don't include arson because it's mainly a property crime can with people destroying the

property to, say, collect on insurance or something along those lines. ..

system that developed in our history. african-americans in the south in part were influenced by whites in the south and develop the culture of violence in dealing with personal insult, personal disagreements, arguments and quarrel. the use of this agreements was common in the south and was common amongst the whites and black. this resort to violence to resolving personal conflict, especially the migrated north with the african-american population, the the great migration was not only great but it was really good. it was a great positive benefit who moved away from the gym --

jim crow system. they shed the backbreaking labor of the sharecroppers and to really inspired the great civil rights movement of the 60s, but there was also this high rate of interpersonal violence which was the negative side of the great migration and was transported north with the black population. by the way, this was a massive migration. in the 1960s, 60s, the estimate is about 800,000 african-americans moved out of the south to the north and to the west coast.

then in the next decade, a million and a half. this was quite a major migration. unfortunately, and there was a lot to look at and deal with this issue, unfortunately this does bring a great deal of violent crime to northern cities and is a big factor in the rise of violent crime. the other two big factors, and they relate to this in some way, were first demographics. the baby boom, as it's come to be known, cohort came of age, so to speak and reach their most criminal genic years in the

1960s and 1970s. those years are roughly 18 to late 20. for males, especially, this is when we expect in violent crime. so we have this demographic bulge after the war when the soldiers came home, given the prosperity of the country, we had many people marrying and having children, having families and these children, the baby boom generation, reached their most criminal genic years in the late 60s and early 70s. this was true for blacks and for whites. that alone would be enough to explain the violent crime amongst this group but something happened where crime became what

we might call a contagion, where young people tend to copy the behavior of other young people. so amongst this baby boomer group we have this crime contagion. this crime contagion grows like wildfire and reaches what we call a tipping point and just explodes. that brings us to the third factor. when the crime boom reaches the tipping point and explodes, the freedom of justice system can't cope. it swamped. it's the swamping of the system that provides the third major element in the great crime tsunami. what happened was police started

arresting fewer people. we know the numbers. we could see what we look at the , what we call the clearance rates, let's say arrest per complaint for each crime, we see the numbers actually go down in the late 60s while crime is5úz rising. then the conviction per case charge goes down in the prison commitments for conviction actually begin to diminish and the crime -- perfect conviction goes down. while crime is going up and we expect the system to respond to that by arresting more people and imprisoning more people and giving them longer sentence, the

opposite is happening. the system is caving. it's collapsing. it can't handle the sudden and massive increase of crime. the three factors, the migration of african-americans the poor and impoverished african-americans are engaging in crime in the northern cities, the baby boom and the collapse of the criminal justice system, all threecontribute to what became the great crime tsunami. >> i want to focus in on this question of norms and culture of violence that you mention. where does this come from? how can we understand that question. >> it's very important because we don't want to be understood as making biological argument for saying that some races are

more prone to crime than others. no one believes that. i certainly don't believe that. but what accounts for some group engaging in more crime than others? well it isn't a genetic or biological explanation so there must be some other explanation. that's where i think values and norms and what we call culture enters in. culture can be viewed as a distinctive group and some would say the behavior and i would include over a fairly long period of time, though it can't be something short run. when a group begins adhering certain values and leads to certain types of behaviors over a long period of time, we say that is the group culture.

as it happened in my research, i discovered something interesting. i'm probably not the first to discover it either. i found that a, four people monopolize violence crime. they do the overwhelming amount of violent crimes. however, some poor groups to more violent crime than other poor groups even though they are comparably poor. their adversity may be comparable but there crime rates are not. why should that be? why shouldn't we be able to measure and find a correlation between the depths of poverty or the depths of adversity and violent crime? usually we can.

that led me to conclude that there must be cultural differences between groups. apparently, this is a world wide phenomenon. i came across an article by criminologist and he was talking about afro caribbean's and asians in the u.k. and he said the asians are oddly treated in england. there victimized in terms of discrimination. they are relatively impoverished. their situation, in terms of adversity, is roughly comparable to the afro caribbean. but he added, the afro caribbean's have much higher homicide rates. that struck me as well this must be universal condition because i

found other examples as well in other places. it seems that some groups have seen similar adversities than do more violence than others. that's where i think culture must enter in. there must be something about the values of the group are the behaviors of the group over time that lead them to engage in more violent crime than other groups. now i'm only interested in violent crime but there could be other behaviors as well that are distinctive for some groups. i'm sure there are. i'm only interested in the violent crime. >> when you think about this in the united states contacts, when you're looking at it in the south where you see the start a great migration in the outflow, where does the silent culture come from in the united states? can we begin to trace that? >> that is fascinating.

i came across a book by fisher called albion seeds. he was the ancient roman name for what was called the united kingdom. this book traces the migration from england to the united states in largely the 18th century. fisher points out that some of the migrants from england, especially from a distinctive part of england, the portion between scotland and england, were a very aggressive group of people. that was unlike their) from other part of england. turns out that the very aggressive group from their borderlands between england and scotland ended up coming roughly to the area around pennsylvania

and migrated south to georgia. the other groups, the puritans tended to migrate to new england. he went on to describe the norms and values and behaviors of this group that came from the borderland and ended up in the south. low and behold, it turns out they were a rather violent lot. they were very sensitive to insult. they tended to take the law into their own hands they imposed retribution on those viewed as outlaws and deserving of punishment. they engaged in a lot of lynching, self-imposed justice

and this became, and so fisher claimed the southern culture of violence. this group in the south and developed in the south among white southerners. it's my hypothesis that this is the origin of the southern culture of violence. i should explain that this involves generally interpersonal conflict where people have disputes, either long-running grudges or just sudden disputes arising out of perceived insult. these disputes are often resolved violently. this became a way of behaving in

the south for, it seems one or two centuries or more. in fact it was written in the late 19th century which i came across that compared the murder rate in the south and the murder rate in new england, linda has been true and persistently true that new england's murder rate are much lower than that of the southern states. something accounts for so it is my argument that this is the origin of the southern culture of violence. it sometimes referred to as an honor culture, sam, which sounds a little exaggerated or old-fashioned. what they mean is that people are easily offended, they are very sensitive to slights and

indignity and they are willing to resort to violence to defend their quote honor. this culture of honor develops in the south. it's my contention that african-americans who were enslaved in the south and liberated but remained in the south, because we have to remember 90% of the african-american population lived in the south throughout the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th century. the great migration begins roughly turn-of-the-century, but really accelerates in the 1920s and in the 1940s. the worst provided job opportunities. it's my contention that in the late 19th century, african-american develop because of the influence of their white

neighbors this honor culture. this culture of violence, and it's my claim that because of the jim crow system, because of the racist practices in the country, because blacks were not permitted to advance to middle class until really late in the 20th century, this cultural violence is perpetuated throughout the 20th century in the lower income african-american neighborhoods. that's why will we have the disgrace of these groups through the northern cities we have this transportation of violence with that group. >> now one of the other things mentioned when talking about the culture of the south, and i'll read from a section you quote,

in such regions where the state has little power to come, the state has little power to control the south, the individuals how to take upon themselves. what you mean by that. >> in the south, especially in the rural areas they have no policing. that's why i noticed most of the lynchings took place in rural areas, never in cities, cities, because there were no police. so, if you have an area where there are no police, you have a much greater likelihood of people taking the law into their own hands. lynchings. so this is what happened in the south. they remained largely rural.

cities were never as big as they were in the northeast. the immigrants from your europe who packed into those cities seldom went south. the south remained isolated and largely rural. this really fed into this culture of taking the lawn to your own hands, engaging in violence to respond to insult, perceived or real, and indignities. that's by this honor culture, this culture of violence takes root more in the south. >> they discussed a book called ghetto side where she argued that there was basically, this cultural state indifference in the african-american community. do we see something similar driving the culture in this time.

where really the state neglects the african-american community and that also contributes to this where the state has abandoned you. >> i read the book. it's a fine book, very interesting. i noticed that she touches on victimization without looking at the offenders and i think you need to look at both sides of the story. i've heard it said, and i suppose suppose there is in one sense and under policing in black communities, but of course also there is the claim that there is the over policing in black communities. is this responsible for people taking the law into their own hands? i'm not fully persuaded. i think it's more likely, simply

that that's the traditional way handling things. if you are insulted, if you're offended you take care of it and you resort to violence. young men are often members of gang so you have quarrels between gangs. this is just an extension of that kind of interpersonal violence. i don't think this is a matter of lack of policing, to to tell you the truth, i think it's just that that's the way things are done and they've always been done that way. i wasn't in full agreement with her.i wasn't in full agreement

with the point she made. where police made more arrests of homicide of perpetrators, and it used to be much higher for homicide, the arrest rate that is, black crime didn't go down. in fact, it went up. i'm not persuaded that more aggressive policing would really change this culture of violence. can i go off on another issue, slightly different but related? what will change is culture. what does change is culture. i think once people advanced to

the middle class this changes the culture, because once you move to the middle class, and this applies to any group whether it's african-americans or white ethnic groups, it doesn't matter. once people moved to the middle class they develop very strong disincentives to personal violence for obvious reasons. you can use your lose your family and your job. you'd probably mumble it and end up in prison as well. there's very good reason not to engage in violence if you're in the middle class. now by contrast, if you are young single male and you don't seem to have a lot of lucrative opportunities ahead of you, then you don't have a lot of

disincentive to violence. that's why it's the young low income male that's most likely to engage in the violence and most likely to accept and be a part of this culture. so i think the cure, if you will, for this culture of violence is the movement to the middle class. by the way, this is, this is not just speculation on my part. when i studied the earlier part, the part that's not quite yet in print, the pre-1940s time period, i saw very high crime rates among mexicans who had come to the united states in the 1920s and southern italians who came between 191910. what happened with these groups?

the italians melted in the great melting pot, they melted in and moved to the middle class. they moved up the social economic ladder and they shed their involvement with violent crime. this all also happen to the irish who had very high rates of violence in the 19th century. once they were able to move to the middle class, their culture of violence is abandoned because it would ill serve them now and so they simply stop engaging in violent crime. i firmly believe that as we

dismantle racist practices in this country, and we have gone a long way toward doing so already, and as we continue to do so and african-americans become more middle-class, this discussion that we have about high rates of african-american violent crime will simply not be made any longer. it will be something out of history. >> let's actually get into why crime tumbles, because as you note in the 19 '90s we see a decline in crime. what are the factors that lead to this dramatic change? >> it was sudden and dramatic, as sudden and dramatic as the rising crime. crime actually begins to fall in the early 1980s and i think that happens because the baby boom generation which was a

major player in the crime rise began to age out. aging out, as you well know is a well-known phenomenon among criminologists. since young men, roughly 18 to late 20s or perhaps early 30s at the most engage in those violent crimes, as they age and move into middle 30s and beyond, they begin to retire from violent crime so what happens is the baby boom generation begins to age out and my hypothesis is that what continues to happen, crime would continue but for a new

phenomenon that really threw a monkeywrench into the whole crime reduction and that was crack cocaine. so crack cocaine becomes the new contagion. it takes place in the late 1980s, rightfully 19871988, continues to the early 1990s and when the crack cocaine epidemic and's, 1993 to 1994 the crime rate continue to fall and they keep on falling. we have a new crime crop. a new low. for low crime. >> now you say that we have this mini bubble created by the crack cocaine, why doesn't this take us scrap skyrocketing again?

what disrupts this tran? >> why doesn't continue, that's what's fascinating. this is another contagion another phenomenon where young people who tend to copy one another's behavior, we know this, we know they are very influenced by their peers, the young people who tend to copy one another's behaviors begin with this contagion relating to cocaine use. even though, intellectually they may know that cocaine use is so disruptive, the addict in, the disease the likelihood of being arrested, the shootings that take place among cocaine gangs

all of these negatives are perhaps intellectually known to the young people but it doesn't matter because everyone's doing it. it's cool it's copied. therefore it becomes a contagion. it reaches a tipping point now this cocaine business is responsible for a major spike in crime. why? because first of all the people who become addicted to cocaine in the crack form where you have , by a cooking process little pellets of cocaine, it's cocaine mixed with other things, but it's essentially cocaine. these little pellets, when heated, give off give off a vapor and the vapor, if inhaled

gives the euphoria that the creek cocaine user craves. this euphoria, which is extremely intense wears off in maybe ten minutes or so. then there is a craving for another. now if you're poor and crack cocaine caught on in the poor neighborhoods because it was sold in small inexpensive amounts. it was sold for two dollars, five dollars, $20 at the most. poor people could afford it and they become hooked. so if you're poor and you need, you have this craving for more cocaine, how are you going to get it? you can you can see where were going with this. the males started engaging in robberies, violent crime aft

larceny, the females were led to violence and did things like nonviolent theft, prostitution, whatever they needed to do to raise the money for more cocaine. so the cocaine epidemic really stimulates robbery robberies, assaults and muggings. the other thing it causes our murders and aggravated assault. why? because the distribution gang, the organized gang that distribute the cocaine begin to compete with one another for turf or territory. obviously they can't go to the law. they can't complain complain

that this other gang is imposing on my territory and i want a court order to make him stop. this is not going to work with illegal substances. by the way we saw the same phenomenon in the 1920s in the prohibition era. we saw the alcohol gangs do the same thing. they started killing one another in territorial type competitions. these murders and assaults, when the the murder was ineffective and they didn't kill the guy but just seriously wounded him, really spiked the murder rate. i should say, also by the way, they are young people and well off. they had guns that they obtained illegally. this was a deadly combination. you could see why this caused crime to go through the roof. why you had a major spike in crime in the late '80s. also in the early '90s, and that really snuffs out the nations decline that have begun

in the late '80s. so what happened with it? by the early '90s, i guess because law-enforcement had toughened up and people were dying from the cocaine use, they were overdosing and it is after all, a very potent drug, they were getting other diseases from the use of the drug, you could get mental diseases and heart diseases, all sorts of disorders could arise out of cocaine. many were now being arrested the criminal justice system had toughened up since the 60s and many were arrested and sent to prison. many were shot, wounded wounded or killed because of the cocaine

war and suddenly cocaine become uncool. it became the realization that suddenly struck them they realized it was a path of destruction. as they say, they always knew it, i think, but now i believe we had a contagion had a contagion in risk first. a positive contagion where youth began to copy the abandonment of cocaine. now this is not just speculation on my part. in fact, there was a study in manhattan where the urine tested the people who were arrested and they found out, of course what their age was and they determined through urine testing what drugs they were using if any. what they found was that those who are older had been using

heroin which was the drug of choice before cocaine. those who were younger had been using cocaine and past a certain year the cocaine use dropped automatically. even by by people who were arrested. so we know that the cocaine use was declining dramatically in 1993 and 1994. that's exactly when the crime spike begins. >> now explaining the crime is one of the most popular criminology pastimes. two of those popular explanations, the ones we hear most often in the media are the hypothesis that legal abortion made played an important role in bringing crime down and the use of leaded gasoline brings the

crime rate down. what you think about these theories? >> i don't think they're correct. there's quantitative evidence for both of the researchers that leaded gasoline study and others in the abortion study are very able account attrition's and and they did their studies very carefully. the problem, and there have been criticisms that i've seen, especially of the abortion study and apparently good criticism because he had to backtrack on some things, but i think there's a bigger problem. the argument is this, abortion wasn't legal until the mid- 1970s and when it became legal in the mid- 1970s a lot of

unwanted babies were never born because women aborted. now there's a premise here and the premises that have these unwanted babies been born and had they lived and had they reached the criminal years of 18 or late 20s it's more likely that they would have engaged in criminal activity. so since they were aborted and didn't live there were fewer people to engage in crime. that's the abortion theory in a nutshell. so if abortion becomes illegal in the mid- 70s and you add roughly 18 years to that time, that corresponds beautifully with the mid- 1990s when crime falls. hence the abortion explanation. the only trouble with that is

that same cohort of people with lots of abortions reducing this population also lived through the period of the cocaine crime rise and in fact the same younger cohort was responsible for the crime rise. so i don't really understand how could it be that the same generation the same cohort short of the people who were unwanted and aborted can engage in lots of crime in the late '80s and early '90s and be responsible for the crime rise and for the crime decline. the same criticism applies to the leaded gasoline study, the same cohort, by the way this

involves the clean air act which was also passed in the 1970s which forced the removal of lead from gasoline which was a great health benefit to everybody, well it turns out that led in the bloodstream is associated with aggressive behavior and maybe even with crime so the argument, similar to the abortion argument is that if you have people who have led in their bloodstream, they will in gauge and less crime so add 18 years to the clean air act and you have a drop in crime, but again, unfortunately the same people who were blessed with less lead in their bloodstream also were putting cocaine in their bloodstream and engaging in a lot of violent crime in the late '80s, early '90s. i think these two theories, the

lead and the abortion theories, are probably interesting but flawed. provocative and flawed. >> looking forward to today, we have seen the headlines coming out of chicago and d.c. and malarkey. it's a popular pastime to suggest that this crime trough that were in during may be at an end. what you think about that? >> it may be. we don't know. criminologists are cautious because we know that there has to be a tran. we need a multi-year development. we can't go by one-year spikes because those may just be one year phenomenons. when i looked at the latest homicide figures for the ten biggest cities in the country, i looked back to 2010.

i figured let's at least look at the last five years or six years. the last five because we didn't have any data past 2015, of course. when i looked at the last five years i didn't find that crime was higher, it was lower or at least homicide was. so we need a tran before were going to conclude that it's over. alternatively i would want to see some of the signals, the red flags, the kind of phenomena we saw at least in earlier periods when crime rose. i don't only look at the figures for one year or two years or three years, the crime figures,

i want to see some of the other red flags as well and i don't see them. for instance, do we have a demographic that's indicating we are getting more young people or more people in the heim high crime years? no, we don't. in fact the population is aging. older people are not a crown crime threat. not a violent crime threat anyway. >> so i don't see the demographic factor, and if you recall in the late 60s, the demographics was huge. are we seeing a migration or immigration of groups with high rates of interpersonal violence like on a culture or something along those lines. no, i don't see that. yes there is still the illegal migration, the mexicans and yes they do tend to have high crime

rates, but it seems to be manageable. i don't see anything growing way out of proportion and becoming unmanageable, at least so far and i think were reaching a political consensus that the border really does have to be closed off. we can't keep on with the situation where people can enter the united states illegally. i think both the left and the right, the democrats and the republicans, are reaching a consensus on that. >> i don't see the immigration migration of high crime groups. those immigrants who are coming in to the country, let's say the asian population or the eastern european population have rather low crime rates so if anything

they are contributing to stability crime rates and not threatening to raise those rates. certainly the criminal justice system has been strengthened and toughened, although i think we are also reaching consensus that it's too punitive and needs to be relaxed a bit and made less punitive, so taken all in all, i don't see a lot of red flags so does that mean that these bikes are not -- these bikes are not part of the high crime right? no i would not say that because i remember reading an essay by

daniel bell who was one of the leading intellectuals of the 60s and he wrote a wonderful little essay explaining why early 1960s there was no crime problem, any serious nature in the united states. he said yeah we have some gang problem but that's not to be taken seriously. there may be a black crime problem but it's not racial or genetic so not to worry. there may be a problem with organized crime but that doesn't really threaten the average person so all in all, there's not a crime problem. a few years later we had the huge crime tsunami and it was massive, and obviously he didn't see it coming. i figure if one of the leading intellectuals can blunder that way, i better be more cautious, so i won't say no, absolutely

not we won't have a crime rise. what i will say is we need to be vigilant. >> now one thing you talked about earlier is that sentencing in the '90s, building the capacity really helped bring the crime rate down. obviously they are releasing their recommendations now. what do you see as the potential impact of this. where is this going to take our violent crime question first of all, i noticed, having read several books now on the mass incarceration and i wonder if it's really mass since it only affected one half of 1% of the

higher american population, but in any event, i noticed in all these books, there's no discussion of crime it's as if incarceration just happens, that we engaged in this massive lockup of people but there was no crime involved i'm amazed at some of these books. i think they are only telling half the story yes there was a huge increase in our incarceration rate. there's no question about that. although, we do need to look not only at incarceration rates but also at the time served for crime. that's in some way a better indicator of our incarceration system in any event, this massive buildup in our imprisonment system definitely

had a positive impact in terms of crime reduction. just from the standpoint of keeping people who are in prison from praying against innocent victims just from that standpoint alone, never mind deterrence, but just the fact that you protect the population by locking people up if there are thousands and thousands of people locked up and they've done very violent crime and repeat them as soon as they get out, that alone has a protective and beneficial impact. almost all of the studies that have looked at the relationship between incarceration and crime have found that there is definitely a positive relationship between incarceration and the decline of

crime now, what risk then do we face if we make the system less punitive? my answer is it depends on what we do and how we do it. if we are going to reduce the incarceration of serious offenders, people who do violent crime, and after all, well over half the people in prison have committed violent crime and only about 15% of those in prison have done drug crime and roughly three quarters of that population have been drug traffickers, so it's a myth that some kid doing marijuana and smoking a cigarette serves a

long prison sentence. that's just not true. everything depends on how we do it if we have reforms such as, for instance reducing the isolation of young prisoners, keeping keeping young prisoners from being placed in isolation for fairly long periods of time, i don't see this as a wrist. i think this is a beneficial thing to do. there are a lot of harm that could come from placing young people in isolation for long periods of time. i don't have any problem with that sort of reform. but if were going to establish reform that don't impose long enough sentences on people who have done serious crime of either violence or nonviolence, burglary, for instance is a very

serious property crime and so is arson ian and graham larson. those folks need to be locked up so if were going to engage in reform that make the system much less punitive for people who really deserve the punishment, i think that would be an error and i think weakening the criminal justice system in that way could be a problem. there is a theory about violent crime cycles. it was developed by someone named eric who is no longer with us. his theory was this he said that when you have a relaxation of

social control and he didn't define what this meant exactly, but i take this to include the criminal justice systems potency, at least part of that equation, when you have a relaxation of social control, after a leg. of years you will get an increase in crime, especially violent crime then of course there will be a lot of pressure to reactivate social control, to control this violence once these controls are put in place, again, this would include a toughening and hardening of the criminal justice system, then you will get a reduction in violent crime, and the cycle will then continue after the reduction, there will be pressures. we are seeing those pressers now

in our own time. there will be pressures to reduce those social controls and then you will get, after a leg, an increase in violence. so, we may be looking at that type of situation. we are reducing the social control and running the risk of a new increase in violence. >> incredibly important perspective for anyone who is asking how we are going to balance the need with justice for the needs of public safety. this has been an incredible book, the rise and fall of violent crime in america. a must read for anyone who wants to understand how american crime has developed, what our history is in some perspective on where were going. thank you so much for taking time today. >> sam, it was a a pleasure. thank you so much.

>> that was afterwards, book tvs signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction and fiction books are interviewed. watch watch past afterword programs online at book tv.org. >> good evening, i'm bradley ram the co-owner of politics and prose along with my wife melissa muscatine. on behalf of the entire staff, welcome. we have just a few administrative notes and now would be a good time to turn off your cell phones or anything that might make a noise during tonight's presentation. when we get to the q&a part of the session, we do have book tv here this evening so it's especially important that if you

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compact enough for a busy reader and they said enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. his work certainly fits that mold. he's managed in 154 pages of text not only to capture the extraordinary life but to boy in on the significance. in the cold war group and cold war groups and the intelligible miss of ronald reagan's mind. jake brought to the task a long career in journalism