Since the mid-1990's the crime rate throughout America have been declining at a high rate and the field of criminology apparently had no idea for why it was happening. The only thing experts knew was that the crime drop was unexpected, it was of a large scale ratio, and that it wasn't just across a single state or section of the country, but it was across the entire country as a whole. Statistics showed clearly the idea that crime rates would drop in the mid-90's was ridiculous and no one would have believed such a thing, especially due to the fact that in the 1980's crime rate was steadily increasing at a moderate rate. In hindsight, the data provided at the time showed that there was no patterns for any sort of thing to look like it could ever happen. Vanessa Barker even provides details in the article that showed that America at the time was known as a dangerous place and crime rates multiplied substantially in some cities in the 80's. So in question, what could lead the crime rate to drop suddenly without any apparent reasoning behind it at all?.
Research Methods for Crime Decline/Explanatory Factors.
Vanessa Barker describes throughout the article that the most commonly named factors that could attribute to this is of imprisonment, demography, policing, and economic growth. All of these factors show from their statistics that each could specifically apply to the decrease in their own way, for example in Policing, the departments created tactics to try and limit crime, one of which was the addition of newer technology to help map out hotspots where crime was at a higher rate than other locations. However, researchers still do not believe that these factors could be a one-hundred percent guarantee for why the rates were lowering. For each factor they state flaws within each one, as for imprisonment where they state that even though it may show an increase in density for prisons, it still doesn't change the fact that more crimes occur for people in the younger years of their lives, and those rates are much more difficult to alter only due to the imprisonment rate.