SOBRIETY, STABLE FAMILIES SEEM TO REDUCE CRIME

A seven-year decrease in crime across America is among the most remarkable
trends pleasing and puzzling Americans as they settle into 1999.

A gang of intriguing and enlightening theories -- some familiar and some
not -- are being offered as explanation.

It's important to remember that, encouraging as recent crime declines are,
we are still dealing with variations in what remain historically high rates
of crime.

Widely hailed recent figures, for example, show that the 1997 robbery rate
(185 per 100,000 population) is comparable to the rates of 1970-73. But it
is still more than three times the rate of 1960-63.

Between the early 1960s and early 1970s, something drastic and troubling
happened to America, as reflected in crime rates and many other measures of
social instability. The roots of the contemporary crime problem probably lie
in that turbulent era.

But the most discussed explanations for the crime decline of the 1990s focus
on recent developments: a strong economy, producing many more job
opportunities; more aggressive policing tactics; higher incarceration rates
and longer sentences for violent felons; a waning of the mid-1980s crack
cocaine epidemic, and an aging population with a smaller proportion of
crime-prone young males.

More fascinating and uncertain are suggestions that America is experiencing
real cultural transformation, including reversal or at least stabilization
of the social disintegration that may have helped inflame crime to begin
with. If such basic social healing is at work, and if it continues, the high
crime era may have reached a true turning point.

A recent U.S. Justice Department publication examines some of these
possibilities. Researcher Gary LaFree of the University of New Mexico argues
that the strength or weakness of social institutions has a profound effect
on crime rates. He shares data showing that robbery rates first reached
their peak levels at about the same time (around 1980) as the divorce rate.
America's divorce rate more than doubled from 1960 to 1980 and has declined
very gradually ever since.

Much the same could be said of single-parent families in general. Their
prevalence roughly tripled from 1960 to 1990 but has since stabilized.

It may not be wholly accidental that crime leveled off at approximately the
same time that the breakdown of traditional family structures stopped
increasing.

Robert Nash Parker of the University of California makes an even more
unusual connection. He suggests that a societywide decline in alcohol use
may be helping reduce crime rates.

The role of drunkenness and alcoholism in crime is notorious, especially in
domestic violence, which is itself another well-documented corollary of
criminality among the offspring who witness or suffer it. Overall alcohol
use has been declining for most of 20 years; it dropped 10 percent just
between 1990 and 1995.

We can't be sure that behavioral trends such as greater sobriety and family
stabilization are having a wholesome effect on crime rates. But such
speculations remind us that criminality is, at bottom, a state of mind -- a
toxic brew of hopelessness, anger, loneliness and self-loathing. The quality
of domestic life and the moral atmosphere of society surely contribute
something significant (if hard to measure) in producing, or preventing,
those painful, dangerous feelings.

If improvement in the underlying social environment is in fact part of the
happy mystery of crime's decline in the 1990s, we may ultimately enjoy more
impressive reductions than the best police and prison policies could ever
produce.