What happened to crime in America in the 1960s?
ELIOTT CURRIE: Crime rates went up very dramatically in the 1960s. They had been quite low during the Second World War, during the 1950s and up through the middle 1960s, and then pretty much skyrocketed. So much so, particularly for violent crimes and for stranger-to-stranger crimes, that we had a President, Richard Nixon, who pretty much got elected on a platform of the need to cut crime in the streets. What caused the sharp increase in crime during the 1960s is a pretty complicated set of events. Some people think that it’s fairly peculiar that crime went up in the ’60s because after all we were an affluent society with prosperity booming all around. The economy was doing very well. And while all this was true, there were other things happening at the same time beneath it. We had people flooding into the cities, mostly people who had been agricultural workers, who were now casualties of the mechanization of agriculture, particularly in the South. They were now coming up to the cities
