I've always considered myself to be a reader. As a kid I would read under the covers with a flashlight. Through school I always enjoyed the books we were assigned to read; 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, The Scarlet Letter, Jonathan Livingston Seagull among many others.
Mostly I read mysteries, detective stories and the occasional biography. I've been a fan of Stephen King since I picked up Carrie, his first book. I have lots of other favorite authors and, of course, my favorite characters in their books.
I always go to my library's website and request any books that sound interesting or has been recommended to me. A few weeks ago, Lillian gave me (as she often does) the names of a couple of books that she had heard of. I'm probably the only person who has their library card number (all 14 digits) memorized. I've no idea what my license number is, or my bank account number, but I do know my library card number by heart.
The books that Lil recommended were Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I haven't even gotten to the second book yet, I am so fascinated by the first. Both books are somewhat similar; they give you a different way to look at the world around you.
Freakonomics is absolutely fascinating. The chapters have titles like;
What do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers have in common?
How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real estate agents?
Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
I was hooked just reading the introduction, part of which is:
Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.
The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly-a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile-and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All of the experts were saying so.
The cause was the so called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos.
In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the US attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. "The next crime wave will get so bad," he said, "that it will make 1995 look like the good old days."
Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. "We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around," Clinton said, "or our country is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities." The smart money was plainly on the criminals.
And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated - especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite.
The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to it's lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.
Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop - which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions - they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murder rates would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003.
These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better paying jobs that quelled crime - well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad.
These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to journalists' ears to the public's mind. In short, they became conventional wisdom.
There was only one problem: they weren't true.
There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey.
Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps it wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey's cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the US Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey's name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, it was far too late for Ms. McCorvey/Roe to have her abortion. She had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalized abortion and become a pro-life activist.)
So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?
As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have show that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade - poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get - were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.
It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk.
Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause? Zero.
I hope you found that part of their introduction as fascinating as I did. (The authors revisited this in a later chapter.) The book just gets better and really makes you look at things in a new and different way.
I'm sure you're tired of reading by now, so I'll leave you with this one thought. Get this book! Whether you borrow it from the library or you buy it from Amazon ($16.77) it is a MUST READ!
No comments:
Post a Comment