Great Performance !

The story of abortion in Romania might seem an odd way to begin telling the story of American crime in the 1990s. But it’s not. In one important way, the Romanian abortion story is a reverse image of the American crime story. The point of overlap was on that Christmas Day of 1989, when Nicolae Ceaus¸escu learned the hard way—with a bullet to the head—that his abortion ban had much deeper implications than he knew.

On that day, crime was just about at its peak in the United States. In the previous fifteen years, violent crime had risen 80 percent. It was crime that led the nightly news and the national conversation.

When the crime rate began falling in the early 1990s, it did so with such speed and suddenness that it surprised everyone. It took some experts many years to even recognize that crime was falling, so confident had they been of its continuing rise. Long after crime had peaked, in fact, some of them continued to predict ever darker scenarios. But the evidence was irrefutable: the long and brutal spike in crime was mo
ving in the opposite direction, and it wouldn’t stop until the crime rate had fallen back to the levels of forty years earlier.

Now the experts hustled to explain their faulty forecasting. The criminologist James Alan Fox explained that his warning of a “bloodbath” was in fact an intentional overstatement. “I never said there would be blood flowing in the streets,” he said, “but I used strong terms like ‘bloodbath’ to get people’s attention. And it did. I don’t apologize for using alarmist terms.” (If Fox seems to be offering a distinction without a difference—“bloodbath” versus “blood flowing in the streets”—we should remember that even in retreat mode, experts can be self-serving.)

After the relief had settled in, after people remembered how to go about their lives without the pressing fear of crime, there arose a natural question: just where did all those criminals go?

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