skyrocketed in the late 60s and really became a major concern for the entire nation for the next several decades, two and half decades really. so i felt given the significance of violent crime, the postwar period, a major work on that needed to be done. >> host: you do something unique in this book. most people in the talk about violent crime they start in the 60s and 70s. you start your story in 19 forties. what made you decide that you wanted to take a longer perspective on violent crime? >> guest: actually when i wrote the manuscript i went back even further than that, but they only decided to publish the period from the 1940s on. the. , the memory of people who are still alive.

but i feel that to really understand violent crime and most major phenomenon, one has to go back in time and see how things developed. that is is true with crime as well. i have learned that crime has its ups and downs and there are good reasons for it. without a historical perspective , one just cannot really fully grasp that. as you all know many criminological studies are cross-sectional analysis and they will study may be one year's worth of crying. these have great value, i'm not knocking them, they're very significant but they do not give you a broader perspective and that is why he wrote this book.

>> host: 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 what kind of crime are we talking about? >> guest: the criminologist define it essentially is for different crimes. murder, but of course that could be treated as a manslaughter if there is certain elements of the crime present or not present. so together we might refer to those as criminal homicide, so that is one crime. then rape of courses considered a violent crime. assault is the third one and usually we are interested in what most states call aggravated assault where you have a serious a bodily injury. that would be the third, robbery is the final one. although robbery is somewhat of a hybrid because there is a

property motivation that is theft motivation and it is a combination really of the 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 criminologist don't include kidnapping because there are so few instances of it. they don't include arson because it is mainly a property crime with people destroying the property to collect on insurance or something area. >> host: so let's get into it. in the 1960s and 70s we see a huge spike in crime. we call it a crime tsunami. what drives this increase? >> guest: i think this is probably the biggest sustained increase in violent crime in the

country's history. i know that it fits that description at least going back to the late 19th century. i did not delve into that earlier. so much so i am not as confident and i say probably the worst in american history. but it probably is. why did it happen? i think there were three major factors and one could always point to some subsidiary but it is usually good to pick three. first, you have a major migration of a high crime culture that is a group of people who engage in violent crime at very high rates. this case with african americans

who migrated to the cities of the north as part of the great migration. now it has to be understood that most of this crime is intramural, that is is in this case black on black crime. it arises first in the south were of course african-americans have been in sway and where they were obviously treated very badly because of the jim crow races system that developed in our history. african-americans in the south, in part influenced by whites in the south develop a culture of violence in dealing with personal insults, personal disagreements, arguments, and quarrels. the use of violence was common

in the south and was common among whites and blacks. this resort to violence to resolve interpersonal conflict essentially migrated north with the african-american population. now the great migration was not only great but it was really good, it was a great positive benefit to african-americans who moved away from the jim crow system, who made tremendous gains in terms of income and work opportunities, who shed the backbreaking labor of the sharecroppers in the south, and who really inspired the great civil rights movement of the

60s. but, there is also this high rates of interpersonal violence which was if you will the negative side of the great migration and was transferred or 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. also to the west coast. in the next decade in the 70s 1,000,000 and a half. half. this was quite a major migration. so unfortunately, and there's a lot of reluctance to deal with this issue, understandably it is very sensitive. 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 ways were first demographic. the baby boom as it has come to be known cohort came of age so to speak, they reach their years in the late 60s and in the 1970s. so those years are roughly 18 to late 20s. for males especially this is when we expect peaks and violence and violent crime. so i hope course as it is well known we had the 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 reach their most criminal agenda years in the late 60s and early 70s, this was true for blacks and whites. now that alone would not 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 the development of this crime contagion. this contagion really grows like wildfire and reaches what we call a tipping point in which it

explodes. that brings us to the third factor, when the crime bill reaches the tipping point and explodes, the criminal justice system is caught flat-footed. it cannot cope. it is swamped. it is the swapping of the system that provides the third major elements in the great crime soon on me. what happened the police started arresting fewer people, we know the numbers, we could see when we look at what we call the clearance rates, let's say arrest per complaints for each crime, we see the numbers actually go down in the late 60s while crime is rising. then the conviction per case

charged go down in the prison commitments per conviction actually begin to diminish, and the crime served per conviction goes down. so while crime is going up and we would expect the system to respond to that by arresting more people and imprisoning more people, giving them longer sentences. the opposite is happening, this system in the system another words is caving, it's collapsing. it cannot handle the sudden and massive increase in crime. so the three factors, migration of african-americans, who, the poor ones i should add. the impoverished african-americans are engaging in high levels of crime in the northern cities, the baby boom

and the collapse of the criminal justice system all three contribute to what became the great crime phenomenon. >> i want to focus in on this question of norms and culture of violence that you mentioned. where does this come from? how should we understand this. >> guest: it's very important because we don't want to be understood as making a biological argument or a genetic argument arguing that some races are more prone to crime than others, no one believed that, i surely don't believe that. so what then accounts for some group engaging in more crime? well, if it is not a genetic or biological explanation that there must be some other explanation. that is where i think values and norms what we call culture

enters it. culture can be viewed as the values and norms of a distinctive group and somewhat add the behaviors of that group. i would include over a fairly long. of time though it can't be something short run, when a group begins adhering certain values and reach certain types of behaviors over a long period of time, we say that is the groups culture. as it happened in the course of my research i discovered something quite interesting and i'm probably not the first to discover it either. i found that a, poor people monopolize violent crime, that is they do the overwhelming amount of violent crime.

however, some poor groups do more violent crime than other poor groups. even though they are comparably poor, their adversities may be comparable but there crime rates are not. so this intrigued me, 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? but usually we cannot. so that led me to conclude that there must be cultural differences between the groups. apparently this is a worldwide phenomenon. i came came across an article by an english criminologist he was talking about afro caribbean's and asians in the u.k., and england. he said, the asians really are

very badly treated in england, they are victimized in terms of discrimination, they are relatively impoverished in their situation in terms of adversity is roughly comparable to the afro caribbean. then he added the afro caribbean's have a much higher homicide commission rates. so it struck me, well this must be universal condition because i found other examples in other places so that it seems some groups facing similar adversity simply do more violence than others. that is where i think culture must enter inches there there must be something about the values of the group, the behaviors of the group over time that lead them to engage in more

violent crime than other groups. now i am only interested in violent crime but there could be other behaviors as well that are distinctive for some groups. i'm sure there are. but i am only interested in the violent crime. >> host: we think about this culture in the united states context when you're looking at it in the south where you see the start of a great migration and the outflow, or does the silent culture come from in the united states, can you begin to trace that? >> guest: it's fascinating. i came across a book by fisher called albion -- he was the ancient roman name for what is now called the united kingdom. this book traces the migration from england to the united states and largely the 18th

century, fisher points out that some of the migrants from england, the immigrants from england, especially from a distinctive part distinctive part of england, the portion between scotland and england were a very aggressive group of people. unlike their brother from other parts of england. it turns out the very aggressive group from these a borderlands between england and upland ended up coming to the appellation area around pennsylvania and then migrating south to georgia. whereas the other groups, the puritans as we know them tended to migrate to new england. he went on to describe the norms and values and behaviors of this

group that came from the border lands and ended up in the south. low and behold it turns out they were ever rather violent lot and they were very sensitive to insults, they tended to take the law into their own hand to impose retribution on those viewed as outlaws and deserving of punishment. so they engaged in a lot of lynching that was self-imposed justice, this became it appears and so fisher claimed the southern culture, the southern culture islands, and this it seems grew in the south and developed in the south among white southerners.

so it is my hypothesis that this is the origin of the southern culture of violence and i should explain that this involved generally interpersonal conflict where people have disputes either long running grudges, or just sudden disputes arising out of perceived insults. these disputes are often resolved violently. this became a way of behaving in the south, for it seems at least one if not two centuries or more. in fact there is once written in the late 19th century which i came across which compared the murder rates in the south and the murder rates in new england. it has been true and persistently true that new

england's murder rates are much lower than murder rates in the southern states. so something accounts for that. it is my argument that this is the origin of the southern culture of violence. it is sometimes referred to as an honor culture which sounds a little exaggerated or old-fashioned, what they mean is that people are easily offended, they are very sensitive to indignities on they are willing to resort to violence to defend their honor. so this culture of honor develops in the south and it is 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 20 century. the great migration begins roughly at the turn-of-the-century. it really accelerates in the 1920s and 1940s. with the wars that provided job opportunities. it is my contention that the late 19th century african-american essentially developed because of the influence of their white neighbors this honor culture, this culture of violence and it is 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 the middle class until really late in the 20th century, this

culture of violence is perpetuated throughout the 20th century in the lower income african-american community. so that is why when we have the migration of this group to the northern cities that is why we have this transportation of violence with that group. >> host: one of the things you mentioned when talking about the culture of the south and i will be from the section. in such regions where the state often has little power to command compliance with the law and citizens have to create their own system of order, this means the rule for doing this is the role for retaliation. we talked more about the relative lack of state control in the south might have contributed to this question. >> guest: this is very important. in the south, south, especially in the rural areas you really had no policing.

that is why i noticed most of the lynchings that took place in the 19th century took place in rural areas and never in cities. there were no police. so if you have an area where there is no police, you have a much greater likelihood of people taking the law into their own hands and lynchings. so this is what happened in the south. the south remains largely rural, big cities were never as big as they were in the northeast, the immigration, the immigrants from europe who packed into the cities seldom one south so the south remained isolated and largely rural, and this really fed into this culture of taking the law into your own hand, engaging in violence to respond

to insults perceived or real and indignity. that is why this honor culture, this culture of violence takes root more in the south. >> recently the los angeles time reporter talked about ghetto side where she argued that there is basically even up to today this culture of state indifference to violence in the african-american community. to think we see something similar driving the culture of this time period, where really this statement of the african-american community also contributes this cultural retribution, this need to act where the state has abandoned you? >> guest: yes. i read a fine book, very interesting. i notice she focuses most contemporary books do on black victimization or victimization without looking

at the offenders, i think you need to look at both sides of the story. i have heard it said and i suppose there is in one sense and under policing in black communities. but of course there is also the claim that there is an over policing in black community. is this responsible for people taking their lawn to their own hands? i'm not fully persuaded. i think it is more likely simply that that is the traditional way of handling things. if you are insulted or offended you take care of business. you resort to violence. often times young men are members of gangs so you have quarrels between gangs and this

is just an extension of that kind of interpersonal violence. i do not think this is a matter of a lack of policing to tell you the truth. i think it is just that it is the way things are done. they have always been done that way. so i was not in full agreement with leavy's point more pov, however however she says her name, spelled leo vy. i was not an sole agreement with her point. in fact, i note where please made more arrest of laissez homicide perpetrators and the clearance rates used to be much higher for that, black crime did not down, in fact it went up.

so i am not persuaded that more aggressive policing with respect to very serious assault of crime would really change this culture of violence. so can i go over on another issue slightly different but a related issue? so what will change his culture what does change this is culture. i think once people advanced to the middle class this change is culture. because once you moved to the middle class and this applies to any group whether it is african-american, white ethnic groups, it does not matter. once people moved to the middle class they develop very strong

disincentive to violence. for obvious reasons, you would you would lose your family, your job, you'd be a pariah in your community, you would probably and up in prison as well. so they're very good reasons not to engage in violence if you are in the middle class. by contrast if you are a young, single male and you don't seem to have a lot of lucrative opportunities ahead of you then you do not have a lot of disincentive to violence. that is why it is the young low income man all that is most likely to engage in the violence and to accept and be a part of this culture of crime. so i think the cure if you will

for this culture of violence is the movement to the middle class. by the way, this, this is not just speculation on my part. when i studied the earlier period, the part that is not quite yet imprint, the pre-1940s. i saw very high crime rates among mexicans who had come to the united states in 1920 and southern italians who came to the united states who came between 191910. what happened with these groups especially the italians, course they melted in the great melting pot is actually valid, they melted in, they moved to the middle class, they moved up the socioeconomic ladder and of course they shed their involvement with violent crime, this also happened by the way to the irish who had very high

rates of violent crime in the 19th century. once once they are able to move to the middle class there culture violences is abandoned. it would actually be destructive. so they simply stop engaging in violent crimes. i firmly believe that as we dismantle our racist practices in this country and we have gone a long way toward doing so already, as we continue to do so. >> ..

and i think that happens because the baby boom generation that was major part of players here than the crime rise began to age out. as you know very well it is a well-known phenomenon since young men since roughly as we

said eight team to let's say late 20s or early 30s of the most engage in violent crime as they move to the middle 30s and beyond they begin to retire from violent crime so they begin to age out. i will continue to happen. crime will have continued to fall davis and the crime reduction development said takes place in the late 1980s and

continues to the early 1990s and when the epidemic ends, 1993, 94 the crime rates continue to fall and keep on falling and we have a new crying trough and low period. >> host: now why doesn't this take us skyrocketing again? >> guest: in the late '80s, early '90s crime spiked. why doesn't it continue? this is another phenomenon where people tend to copy one

another's behavior. they tend to copy one another's behavior and begin with this contagion even though intellectually they may know that it is so destructive, the addiction and the disease and likelihood of being arrested and the shootings that take place, all of these are perhaps intellectually known to people but it doesn't matter because it is cool and copy it and it reaches a tipping point. now this is this is responsible

for a major spike in crime. why? because the people that become addicted where you have quite the process a little pellets of cocaine, its cocaine mixed with it's cocaine mixed with other things but it's essentially cocaine, these little pellets give off a vapor and it is inhaled and gives the euphoria that the cocaine user created and it wears off in ten minutes or so.

it was sold for $2, $20,000 so people could afford it and then they become out. if you are poor and you have a craving for more, how are you going to get it? they started engaging in violent crime and that is of course our semi. the females have things like nonviolent theft of prostitution, whatever they need to do to raise the money suet stimulates and the other thing that causes are murders and

aggregators because the organized game begin to compete with one another for territory. they can't complain this other game is imposing on my territory, i want a court order to make them stop. the same phenomenon in the prohibition era, the alcohol games started killing each other in territorial competition so these murders and assaults

really spiked the rate and i should say these were young people that were well armed so this is a deadly combination and you could see why it caused crime and that that really snaps out the trough and the decline that had become. by the early '90s i guess because law enforcement of conduct and it is a very potent

drug because they were getting other diseases, you could get all sorts of pharmacological disorders that could arise out of cocaine because many were now being arrested, the criminal justice system had toughened up in the 60s and many were arrested and sent off to prison. many were shot, wounded or killed because the cocaine more. so it became the realization that struck them that this was a path obstruction. they always knew that but now we

have a positive contagion where they begin to copy the abandonment of cocaine. this isn't just speculation on my part in fact it was a study in manhattan where the tested of the people arrested and they found at the age and what they found was those who were older had been using heroin before the choice came in. those who were younger had been using cocaine and past a certain year it's dot dramatically even by people arrested so we know that the cocaine use was

declining dramatically 1993, 94, and that's when the crime spike begins. >> host: it's probably one of the most popular pastimes and two of those explanations are the hypothesis legal abortion played into the reduction in the use of gasoline brings the crime rate down. what do you think about these theories? >> the art in treating? >> guest: steve is a copy in the abortion study that's very

able and dated her studies very carefully. there have been criticisms but i think there is a bigger problem. abortion wasn't legal until the mid-1970s and when it became legal in the mid-1970s come a lot of the unwanted babies were not born because the women aboard. there is a premise that had they been born and had they reached the years it's more likely they

would have engaged in criminal activity so there were fewer people to engage. if it becomes legal in the 70s and you add roughly eight teen years that corresponds when crime falls. the only trouble is the same cohort of people with lots of abortion reducing it in the period of the cocaine rise in fact the same younger covert risk as possible so i don't

understand how it could be the same generation sure if the people can engage in a lot of crime and be responsible for the crime rise. it applies to the leaded gasoline study, the same cohort that involves the clean air act was that was passed in the 1970s which forced the removal from gasoline which was of course a great health benefit to everybody. it turns out it is associated with aggressive behavior and media timothy crime so the

argument is if you have people that have less lead in their bloodstream they will engage in less crime so adding 18 years to the clean air act and you have it (-open-paren i'm begin the people that were blessed with less blood in their bloodstream are also putting cocaine in their bloodstream and engaging in a lot of violent crime in the 80s and early '90s so i think that these theories are probably interesting but flawed. >> host: we've seen the headlines out of chicago and milwaukee it is a popular pastime to suggest that it may be at an end. what do you think about the

arguments? >> guest: the criminologists are cautious because we know one has to see a trend. we can't provide a one-year spikes. when i look at the figures for the ten biggest cities in the country i look back to 2010. when i look at the last five years i didn't find that it was higher or lower so we need a

trend before we are going to conclude that it is over. alternatively, i would like to see some of the signals that we saw when the crime rose so i don't only look at the figures for one-year or two-year or three years, i want to see some of the other red flags. for instance do we have a demographic indicating that we are getting more people in the crying year's? no. they are aging.

in the demographics of this huge. so are we seeing a migration or immigration with high rates of interpersonal violence know i don't see that. yes there's still a migration candidate who tend to have higher crime rates but it seems to be manageable and i don't see anything growing out of proportion becoming unmanageable and we are reaching a political consensus that does have to be closed off. we can't keep on with a

situation they can enter legally and i think both the left and the right are reaching a consensus so i don't see the immigration migration of high crime groups and those immigrants who are coming to the country let's say the asian population or the eastern european population have rather low crime rates so they are not threatening to raise the rate and certainly the criminal justice system has been strengthened and tough although i think we are also reaching a consensus that it is punitive and needs to be relaxed a bit.

so taken all in all i don't see a lot of red flags so does that mean that they are not a harbinger i wouldn't be so foolish enough to say that because i remember reading an essay who was one of the leading intellectuals in the 60s and he wrote a wonderful essay explaining why in the early 1960s there was no crime problem of any serious nature in the united states have a but with a bit of a problem that's not to be taken seriously and it may be a black crime problem but

it is interracial or genetics so not to worry. there may be a problem with organized crime but that doesn't threaten the average person. a few years later we had a huge crimes in tsunami so i figure if one of the leading intellectuals can go that way i'd better be more cautious. but i would say is we need to be vigilant. hispanic one thing you talked about earlier is the reform in the '90s and the justice seldom seldom give ecosystem building its capacity helped bring the crime rate down. obviously now with the federal

task force releasing their recommendations, what do you see as the potential impact of this and where will this take the violent crime? >> i noticed having read several books now on the mass incarceration as it is called even though it affects one half of the entire population but in any event, there's no discussion of crime. it is as if it just happened if we engaged in this massive flock of people who but there was no crime involved. there was a huge increase in our

incarceration rate no question about that although we need to look not only at the incarceration rate we need to look at the time served for crime. that is in some ways a better indicator of our incarceration. the massive buildup in our imprisonment system in my view have a positive impact in terms of crime reduction. just from the standpoint of keeping people in prison and just from that standpoint alone nevermind the turned up the fact you keep protecting the

population by locking people up if there are thousands and thousands of people locked up and they've been very violent crimes done very violent crimes and repeat them as soon as they get out. in the incarceration and crime that have found a positive relationship on incarceration and crime. now, what risk to the face if we face if we make the system less punitive? my answer is that depends on 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 people in prison have created a violent crime, and only about 15% of those in prison have done drugs kind and roughly three quarters of the population have been drug traffickers so it is a myth to say some kids smoking marijuana and of serving a long prison sentence. that is just not true. so everything depends on how we do it. if we have reforms such as reducing the isolation of young prisoners being placed in isolation for fairly long periods of time, i don't see this as a risk i think it is a beneficial thing to do and does

a lot of harm that could come so i don't have any problem with that sort of reform but if we are going to establish reform that don't pose a long enough sentence on people who done serious crime of either violence or from a burglary for instance, a very serious property crime, grand larceny is a serious crime and arson is a serious crime, those folks need to be locked up, too so if we are going to engage in reforms that make the system much less punitive for people who really deserve the

punishment. weakening the criminal justice system in that way could be a problem. there is a theory about violent crime cycles developed by a crying historian who unfortunately is no longer with us and his theory was he said when you have a relaxation of social control, and he didn't define what this is meant exactly that i take this to include the criminal justice system's potency at least as a part of that when you have a relaxation of social control, after a lagging period you will get an increase in crime

especially violent crime and then there will be a lot of pressure to reactivate social controls and once they are put in place then you will get a reduction and the cycle will then continue. after the reduction takes place, there will be pressures and we are seeing them now in our own time. there will be pressures to reduce the social controls and then you will get an increase in violence again. so we may be looking at that situation now where we are reducing the social controls and maybe running the risk of the new increased.

hispanic incredibly important perspective to balance the need of justice to the public safety. thank you so much for taking the time today. >> guest co. it was a pleasure. thank you. >> that was "after words," signature program which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed. watch past programs on linux booktv.org. we want to introduce you to the university of wisconsin professor. what do you do here?

you also write books how not to be wrong is the name of it. you write mathematics isn't settled. what do you mean? >> guest: i mean, you know, i thought math was certainly come in formulaic but said one plus one equals two at all times. >> guest: that is settled that there is more than that. it is a process that's many thousands of-years-old. there's never been a civilization then without music or math it's one of the basic things we do that in many ways we are still wrestling with the questions that are confusing. we've expanded the circle of knowledge that there's more that we don't know.