One of the things that's concerned me about the growing consensus around criminal justice reform is that it's happening on the cusp of recession, meaning that crime could again become such a contentious political issue as to halt reforms in their tracks. Fear of looking "soft on crime" has paralyzed our political conversation on how to deal with crime and prisons for so long that it seems like the current climate, where bi-partisan reforms in states are leading to a focus on reentry and reducing recidivism rather than punishment, and Jim Webb is drawing positive coverage for his commission, seems very fragile.
However, OMB head Peter Oszag wrote on Friday that despite the conventional wisdom, it's not clear that recessions always cause violent crime to rise:
For violent crime, especially for homicide rates, the research findings are more ambiguous. Indeed, some studies find that that homicides decline during recessions (see for example, Raphael and Winter-Ebmer, 2001). One reason may be that alcohol use tends to decline during recessions (another potentially surprising finding), and that the reduction in alcohol use reduces violent crime, as suggested in a 2008 paper by Garrett and Ott.
Such a potential link between economic downturns, alcohol, and crime highlights the fact that crime is not the only behavior that changes during recessions, and there are complicated interactions that can lead to what might appear to be counterintuitive results.
Property crimes, on the other hand, Orszag writes, tend to rise with unemployment, with a five percentage point increase in unemployment leading to a five percent increase in property crime rates. That isn't so much when you consider how large a five point increase in unemployment is. We'll see what happens, but it looks like there's some reason to believe that the recession won't necessarily lead to crime being revived as a political issue.
-- A. Serwer
