Revisiting Violent Crime Trends in the United States from 1960 to 2015: A New Approach to Understand Cohort Effects on Crime

• In Event: Evolving Crime Trends, Patterns, and Measurements

Abstract

Cohort is an important concept for understanding temporal social change such as crime trend fluctuations throughout different historical periods. However, prior studies on cohort effects focused on cohort differences averaged across ages and neglected the intra-cohort life-course dynamics. Drawing on the life course perspective and the literature on social change and crime, the current study suggests that cohort effects can be considered as an interaction between individuals’ aging processes and social structure change. Applying the age-period-cohort-interaction model developed by Luo and Hodge (2019; Luo 2015), we analyze arrest data of violent offenses (homicide, assault and robbery) from 1960 to 2014 and estimate two types of cohort effects: inter-cohort variation and intra-cohort life course dynamics. Consistent with the prior studies, our results suggest that a portion of crime trend fluctuations is uniquely attributed to cohort replacement. More importantly, our analysis of intra-cohort life course dynamics reveals that some cohorts’ higher than average arrest rates are mainly driven by arrests at young ages. This finding casts doubts on the long-held assumption in the literature that cohort effect is constant across life course and provides new insights for understanding violent crime trends of the past several decades.

Authors

• Yunmei Lu, University of South Florida

• Liyng Luo, Pennsylvania State University