Examine at least three significant changes in the crime rate
Since the 1960's the crime rate has continued to rise, resulting in an increase in the number of inmates in federal and state prisons. Because many crimes that occur in the USA go unreported, the crime rate statistics are restricted to those incidents that are actually reported to law enforcement and thus can only be considered an estimate. Firearms are the second leading cause of traumatic death related to a consumer product in the United States and are the second most frequent cause of death overall for Americans aged fifteen to twenty-four (Violence Policy Center, 1999). Since 1960, more than a million Americans have died in firearm suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries. In 2001 alone, 29,573 Americans died by gunfire: 16,869 in firearm suicides, 11,671 in firearm homicides, 802 in unintentional shootings,
For many years it has seen a steady increase, but has then rapidly declined. This means that blacks are now imprisoned at eight times the rate of whites. A decade later, this total jumped to 740 (K. But recently, teen violence has risen - murder arrests of teens jumped ninety-two percent since1985), during a period in which the teen population remained steady or declined. Since this legislation, the Unites States has witnessed a dramatic drop in criminal violence over the past decade. As more and more people were being incarcerated for non-violent offenses, African Americans and Latinos comprised a growing percentage of the people imprisoned. The perception that criminals are getting younger is backed up by statistics. Increasing incarceration rates for African Americans have been driven largely by increases in drug sentencing over the past two decades. In response to this development, people are committing fewer crimes and thus the crime rate is dropping. The violent-crime rate seems to rise and fall in tandem with the number of teens in the population. The homicide rate in the US has fallen forty-two percent since 1991. Many believe that violent crime is driven by the availability of guns, and that criminal violence in general may be reduced by limiting access to firearms. By the end of 1996, there were one hundred and ninety-three white American prison inmates per one hundred thousand whites, six hundred and eighty-eight Hispanic prison inmates per one hundred thousand Hispanics and one thousand five hundred and seventy-one African American prison inmates per one hundred thousand African-Americans (Sullivan, 2002). This is particularly significant when compared with the rest of the world - in eighteen of the twenty-five countries surveyed by the British Home Office, violent crime increased during the 1990's (Mauser, 2003).
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Acceptance Essays
