Losing Legitimacy

Nov 11, 1999
Paperback
US $37.00
CAN $46.95
UK £21.99
ISBN: 9780813334516
ISBN-10: 0813334519
Published by Westview Press

Description

In the past fifty years, street crime rates in America have increased eightfold. These increases were historically patterned, were often very rapid, and had a disproportionate impact on African Americans. Much of the crime explosion took place in a space of just ten years beginning in the early 1960s. Common explanations based on biological impulses, psychological drives, or slow-moving social indicators cannot explain the speed or timing of these changes or their disproportionate impact on racial minorities. Using unique data that span half a century, Gary LaFree argues that social institutions are the key to understanding the U.S. crime wave. Crime increased along with growing political distrust, economic stress, and family disintegration. These changes were especially pronounced for racial minorities. American society responded by investing more in criminal justice, education, and welfare institutions. Stabilization of traditional social institutions and the effects of new institutional spending account for the modest crime declines of the 1990s.

Reviews

“LaFree has been persistent in confronting truly important questions, surely a quality to be admired.”
— American Journal of Sociology

“An important book that explores the relationship between street crime and various social institutions in the U.S.”
— Choice

“Using crime trends as his principal measure of social disruption, Gary LaFree links those trends to a wide variety of indicators of diminished legitimacy of social, political, and economic institutions. The volume is rich with indicators of long-term trends, and raises many important questions of the nature of those linkages to crime and how to re-establish institutional legitimacy.”
— Alfred Blumstein, H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University

“Blending his own substantial research with a synthesis of the research of a host of other scholars, LaFree has produced a carefully documented and well-written book that reveals the devastating truth about the causes and correlates of the rapid rise in crime in the 1960s and 1970s. It will be of major interest to criminological theorists, as well as to those interested in crime policy. In a word, this book is important.”
— Malcom Feeley, University of California at Berkeley, School of Law

“Losing Legitimacy is our gain. With great skill and care, Gary LaFree explains why the crime rate may be stable for some time but then shoot skyward. The key, according to Lafree, is changes in institutions—economic, family and political—that fundamentally reshape the opportunities available to citizens and how they think about them. Along the way, we learn much about what happened to U.S. society in the post-World War II period. Elegant and convincing, this is a truly must-read book for those interested in crime, both what produces it and how to control it.”
— Bert Useem, University of New Mexico

“With impeccable scholarship, Gary LaFree’s Losing Legitimacy documents the central role of political distrust, economic inequality, and family disintegration in the rate of crimes committed in the U.S. It is a truly important book.”
— Fred Harris, University of New Mexico

Selling Territory