the mid-1960s, and peaked in 1974 with 10.2 homicides per 100,000—compared to 4.7 in 1961.
In 1993, the homicide rate was 10 per 100,000.
Crimes against property have grown 259 percent over the past 30 years, but violent crimes have increased 560 percent.
The poor are two to three times more likely to be victims of violent crimes than those above the poverty level.
There are many theorists who take an opposing viewpoint to the above scenario. Instead, they believe that economically depressed areas are breeding grounds for crime because of a variety of factors. They claim that economically depressed neighborhoods have few investors willing to invest first in a crime-ridden, low-income family neighborhood. Further, many juveniles and teenagers have only criminals as their role models, from numbers runners to drug dealers. Finally, these juveniles and teenagers are typically undereducated and have few marketable skills because of living in such an economically deprived environment. A new study which has been conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) argues that crime is directly related to falling real wages. Following are just a few of the studies disclosed by the NBER study that argues rising crime rates are directly related to the decline in real wages:
The number of those in prison—the vast majority of whom are men under the age of 34—has risen from 200,000 in 1970 to more than a million today.
While wages for skilled workers began rising in the late 1970s, real wages plummeted for young men, who tend to be low-skilled.
Since the mid-70s, real wages for full-time male workers 16 to 24 years of age have dropped more
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