Dec 29, 2019 3 min read

A natural part of aging is remembering the good things about days gone by and jettisoning the bad.

So, for a lot of baby boomers who are now grandparents and – gulp – great-grandparents, it’s easy to look back on the 1960s as a luminous time when the Beatles were on the radio, Mickey Mantle was on baseball cards and “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza” were on television.

Of course, memory is selective, and the 1960s were also riven by the Vietnam War, urban riots and political assassinations. Less remembered now is how crime-infested the decade was.

How much so? In the 10 years between 1960 and 1970, violent crime skyrocketed 126%. It kept going in the 1970s, increasing by 64%. The rise in the number of teens and twentysomethings thanks to the baby boom has been fingered as a potential culprit, along with lead paint that covered the walls in homes and apartments, and air pollution. Whatever spurred the explosion in crime, it altered the politics of the country for the next couple of decades, as tough-on-crime rhetoric became a key way to winning votes, and prisons were built to accommodate more and more malefactors.

But a funny thing happened in the 1990s – crime started to drop. And it’s kept dropping for the last quarter-century. President Trump campaigned on a notion of stopping “American carnage,” but the reality is that the carnage started to decline around the time he was tying the knot with Marla Maples, and has been going down pretty much ever since.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of violent crime fell 71% between 1993 and 2018. The bureau reported that property crime went down by 69%. Interestingly, many surveys indicated that Americans thought crime was increasing between 2008 and 2016, when it was heading southward.

Pennsylvania, in fact, has lower crime rates than the rest of the United States. A report released in mid-December by the Department of Corrections outlined how crime has been going down in Pennsylvania for the last 20 years, and how between 2012 and 2018 crime rates and the prison population declined at the same time. In 2015, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down mandatory minimum sentences, and Corrections Secretary John Wetzel pointed out that the absence of mandatory minimum sentences “does not lead to an increase in crime.”

There is a cloud in this otherwise sunny picture, though – there have been upticks in murder and rape in Pennsylvania over the last couple of years, and that is in keeping with trends across the country.

Just as there are a passel of theories about why crime soared in the 1960s, there have been an abundance of theories about why crime has been going down over the last 30 years, including the aging of the baby boomers, the arrival of antidepressants and a decrease in alcohol consumption. Whatever the case, this is undeniably good news as we move into a new year and new decade.