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Critiquing the Crime Drop

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Re-Examining The Crime Drop

Part of the book series: Critical Criminological Perspectives ((CCRP))

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Abstract

This chapter introduces readers to a body of work developed by political scientists and known as ‘historical institutionalism’. The ideas developed by historical institutionalists, along with those developed by ‘constructivist institutionalists’ and comparative political historians, are used to critique some of the core assumptions made by those who have studied the crime drop thus far. I propose a new way of explaining the crime drop which draws on an understanding of political processes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As an example of this, as we shall see in Chap. 4, the Home Office encouraged car manufacturers into fitting alarms to cars. This also promoted the concept of ‘security ’ more generally (King 1989).

  2. 2.

    For example, Farrington and Jolliffe wrote, even as late as 2004, that ‘…most crimes tended to increase over time…’ (p. 25).

  3. 3.

    Another assumption, which I do not develop herein, is that each country is co-terminus, which is to say that no country deliberates interferes with the internal governance of another country. This is empirically unsustainable in the light of US drug policy in many Southern American countries such as Mexico or Columbia, for example. Similarly, there are supranational bodies (such as the EU) which have attempted to harmonise crime prevention policies (see Crawford 2009).

  4. 4.

    Furthermore, it remains the case that not all crimes have declined. Walby et al. (2016) make a compelling argument that violence has increased.

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  1. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Stephen Farrall

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Farrall, S. (2017). Critiquing the Crime Drop. In: Re-Examining The Crime Drop. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67654-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67654-8_2

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