why crime rates go down,

    "Everyone talks about the weather," goes one old saying. But everyone talks about crime also. Now along come two books that gives us a new view on crime. Steve Levitt is a   journalist . Stephen J Dubner is an economist at the University of Chicago. Or mabe it's the reverse. But in any case they've co-authored two very interesting books.Both     
One's called Freakonomics. The other that came out in 2009 is called Superfreakonomics.Both talk about crime. First off why did crime rates start to skyrocket in the early l960' and keep on rising until the l990's when crime rates started to fall.?
     Crime rates, the authors say, shot up because of television. They started to fall and kept on falling because of abortion. "This is simply not true," said one police spokesperson when asked about Dubner and Leavittt's theory. The reason crime rates fell, he insisted, is because new policing methods drove crime rates down. Well okay, both theories may be true. But Dubner and Leavitt's theories are well worth looking at.
       These two men's theories don't give any comfort to right or left wingers on why crime rates go up or down. As far as televisiob goes, the authors point out that it doesn't matter what young peo[ple watch or watched from the l960's to the l990's.They could watch Happy Days,Mr. Rogers or Kojak. If they watched t.v. period they, or mostly young males became more criminally minded. So nearly all the talk about how bad t.v. was right. Television was bad for the very young.
    But the right wingers like present day Republicans or Stephen Harper's Conservatives loathe abortion. And they're dead wrong. Henry Morgenthaler, and his allies like Judy Rebick may be Canada's most effective crime fighters. But the left  or rather bleeding heart liberals, like yours truly, were wrong too.
    If we have better social programs they'll be less poverty,' I used to say. "And therefore there'll be less crime." Wrong, wrong,  and simply wrong. In the l960's and l970's all levels of government spent far far more money on welfare, unemployment insurance and social housing than they'd ever spent before - or since. Yet crimes like murder, robberies and homicide just kept rising. In the l990's all levels of government slasheAd many social programs to the bone and beyond. But starting in about 2000 crime rates started to fall. And they're still falling .
      So Vancouver used to have 30 or so murders a year. Now that number has fallen to 15 or 16. "Abortion  is the reason " Dubner and Leavitt would say, I think.Now I'll continue to support more generous social programs. As I've said I'm a bleeding heart liberal. But after reading Dubner and Leavitt's books I won't say anymore "better social programs will bring down crime." Now I know that that statement just isn't necessarily sio.