Homocide Rate in the United States

Over the course of the 1990s, the rate of murders in the US declined. In 1990, for example, according to FBI crime statistics, the murder rate per 100,000 persons in the population works out to 9.3. However, by 1999, that rate was 5.7 murders per 100,000. Those are the figures that come out of a calculation if the 1999 rate represents a 39% decline from 1990. Also, the 5.7 per 100,000 figure represents a return to the levels of 1966 (McCaghy, et al. 126).

There is a lot of television news coverage devoted to violent crimes in the US. The high public profile of murders might ordinarily be expected to deaden the sensitivity to murder. That makes the 1990-1999 decline all the more dramatic. Experts disagree, however, about what caused the decline in the homicide rate. Basically there are two general ways of explaining it. One has to do mainly with economics, and the other has to do mainly with changes in the composition of the culture and the value systems of the country. Within

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always enable everybody to participate in the benefits of society. Durkheim's term for lack of unity or social disarray is anomie, or individual failure to integrate with the highly demanding power and structure of industrial society (Durkheim 258). In Durkheim's theory, anomie is dysfunctional, and such elements "tend to become institutionalised or resolved" (Swingewood 233). In other words, the system absorbs dysfunction, and adapts it to general social functioning. The trouble with the functionalist idea that the system is all powerful is that there are casualties, including murders, along the way. That is why the idea of anomie is so important. Everything that McCaghy, et al., say about the socioeconomic demographics of homicide points to the importance of anomie in pathological behavior. Consider the statement that many murders "occur over trivial matters" (128). People living in poverty may lack material advantages or any sense that the social system regards them with dignity. That is a perfect condition for insisting on making honor or respect or some equally intangible notion a prime feature of personality. Suppose X perceives that Y has "disrespected" his honor for some reason or other. X may feel no obligation to respe
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