As we all know here, material conditions have progressively been getting worse and worse. Based on pretty much all political theory, crime rates should also be going up with worse material conditions. But they haven’t, in fact, crime rates have been going consistently down for the past 30 or so years. Why is that?
one thing is that a lot of crime is due to desperation or an attempt to get by in a society that has robbed the criminal of legitimate means. crimes of necessity and/or opportunity are what you are thinking of
but we live in a world where everything is a scam and we now have two generations who have a large number of people who see our country for that: one big corporate pyramid scheme
so for this new budding mass of the working class they have figured out a number of ways to scam the scam. we even get notice from the ruling class about this panic: “quiet quitting” where you take a paycheck and conserve energy to running a side hustle or the people who work multiple bullshit jobs remotely at the same exact time or just the sheer amount of people ive known to accept that stealing from your company is fine (literal company property or just good ole time theft)
and petty crime crimes of opportunity and necessity become less appealing, after all why risk imprisonment when you can run your own little scam and get one back over on our corporate masters without fear of losing your “freedom”
these are the “crimes” of the new generation who work from home. no-collar crime
I think that part of it is that the types of crimes people are committing have changed. Like you’re less likely to see younger people buying illegal drugs and far more likely to see them shoplifting. You would probably also see a lot of illegal gambling and other “internet crimes” among younger people that I highly doubt are being accurately recorded.
People are too tired and depressed to do crime
I think the explosion of surveillance probably has dampened things, like, it’s a lot easier to break in to places and do a robbery or whatever if there’s not 1000 cameras everywhere
Just guessing, but maybe crimes are measured differently now vs historically? Is the decline of crime rates uniform to all districts? Do less-economic crimes like murder get measured and recorded as accurately as someone stealing a loaf of bred to eat? Does access to things like credit cards defer crimes of necessity into debt and bankruptcy? Are the decline in material conditions uniformly distributed? In 1978, the federal government banned consumer uses of lead-based paint. Are crime rates going down because victims of lead paint are retiring from crime in mass?
How do you know crime rates would not go down faster if material conditions improved?
