The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,72

respectable and underclass lifestyles just when the new antiestablishment forces were pushing in the wrong direction. They could count on even less protection from the criminal justice system than white Americans because of the combination of old racism among the police and the new indulgence by the judicial system toward crime, of which they were disproportionately the victims.126 Mistrust of the criminal justice system turned into cynicism and sometimes paranoia, making self-help justice seem the only alternative.127

On top of these strikes came a feature of African American family life first pointed out by the sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his famous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, for which he was initially vilified but eventually vindicated.128 A large proportion (today a majority) of black children are born out of wedlock, and many grow up without fathers. This trend, already visible in the early 1960s, may have been multiplied by the sexual revolution and yet again by perverse welfare incentives that encouraged young women to “marry the state” instead of the fathers of their children.129 Though I am skeptical of theories of parental influence that say that fatherless boys grow up violent because they lack a role model or paternal discipline (Moynihan himself, for example, grew up without a father), widespread fatherlessness can lead to violence for a different reason.130 All those young men who aren’t bringing up their children are hanging out with one another competing for dominance instead. The mixture was as combustible in the inner city as it had been in the cowboy saloons and mining camps of the Wild West, this time not because there were no women around but because the women lacked the bargaining power to force the men into a civilized lifestyle.

RECIVILIZATION IN THE 1990s

It would be a mistake to think of the 1960s crime boom as undoing the decline of violence in the West, or as a sign that historical trends in violence are cyclical, yo-yoing up and down from one era to the next. The annual homicide rate in the United States at its recent worst—10.2 per 100,000 in 1980—was a quarter of the rate for Western Europe in 1450, a tenth of the rate of the traditional Inuit, and a fiftieth of the average rate in nonstate societies (see figure 3–4).

And even that number turned out to be a high-water mark, not a regular occurrence or a sign of things to come. In 1992 a strange thing happened. The homicide rate went down by almost 10 percent from the year before, and it continued to sink for another seven years, hitting 5.7 in 1999, the lowest it had been since 1966.131 Even more shockingly, the rate stayed put for another seven years and then drooped even further, from 5.7 in 2006 to 4.8 in 2010. The upper line in figure 3–18 plots the American homicide trend since 1950, including the new lowland we have reached in the 21st century.

The graph also shows the trend for Canada since 1961. Canadians kill at less than a third of the rate of Americans, partly because in the 19th century the Mounties got to the western frontier before the settlers and spared them from having to cultivate a violent code of honor. Despite this difference, the ups and downs of the Canadian homicide rate parallel those of their neighbor to the south (with a correlation coefficient between 1961 and 2009 of 0.85), and it sank almost as much in the 1990s: 35 percent, compared to the American decline of 42 percent.132

The parallel trajectory of Canada and the United States is one of many surprises in the great crime decline of the 1990s. The two countries differed in their economic trends and in their policies of criminal justice, yet they enjoyed similar drops in violence. So did most of the countries of Western Europe.133 Figure 3–19 plots the homicide rates of five major European countries over the past century, showing the historical trajectory we have been tracking: a long-term decline that lasted until the 1960s, an uptick that began in that tumultuous decade, and the recent return to more peaceable rates. Every major Western European country showed a decline, and though it looked for a while as if England and Ireland would be the exceptions, in the 2000s their rates dropped as well.

FIGURE 3–18. Homicide rates in the United States, 1950–2010, and Canada, 1961–2009

Sources: Data for United States are from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports 1950–2010: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009;