What happened to crime rates during the 1960s?
CHRISTOPHER JENCKS: Crime rates in the 1960s pretty clearly went up. It’s hard to be absolutely sure about this because the crime statistics on which we mostly rely come from the crimes that are reported to the police, and crime reporting rates are very uncertain. Many crimes are not reported and the police have all kinds of incentives to make crime statistics go up when they’re looking for new appropriations and things. But, we do have crime statistics of one kind that are pretty good, and those are murder rates, and they definitely went up a lot in the last 1960s. So, most people, I think, believe that there was a substantial surge in crime in the last 1960s. I think most people think of the 1960s as an era when people felt freer to do what they wanted. And for people who were prone to violence, that can mean that they became more violent. And certainly there’s a lot of evidence that there was an increase in violence in the last 1960s. And whether that was really related to the cultu
