Friday charts: Violent crime up 50% among the elderly
Boomers and old Gen Xers haven't aged out of crime the way other generations did
Fordham law professor John Pfaff shared a striking chart on Twitter today. It shows the age curves for violent crime arrests in 1980, 1994 and 2019, derived from official federal data. I’ve reproduced it below in the house style, because here at The Why Axis we believe in the importance of maintaining a consistent visual brand identity.
There’s a lot of things to unpack here. The first, and most obvious, is that violent crime is primarily a young man’s game. Teens and twenty-somethings are much more likely to kill or assault someone than people in middle age or their golden years, and that’s always been true.
The second thing to note is that violent crime rates among teens and twenty-somethings were much, much higher in 1980 and 1994 than they are today. An 18-year-old in 1994 was roughly three times as likely to be arrested for violent crime as one in 2019. That’s a reflection of the massive overall crime reduction that’s happened in the United States since the early 1990s. The recent, well-publicized upticks in homicide in the past several years across the U.S. still don’t bring us anywhere close to those previous highs - violent crime is still at roughly half the rate it used to be, although the picture is different in some places.
The Sentencing Project’s Josh Rovner brings up another important finding: the age-crime curve is not only flattening, it’s shifting to the right. “The violent crime arrest rate used to peak at age 18,” he said. “Now it peaks somewhere around age 25.” It’s not immediately clear why this is happening. It could be that adolescents were more likely to be recruited into the violent illicit drug market in the 80s and 90s, according to the University of Chicago’s John Roman.
There’s also something really interesting happening at the far right side of the chart, among fifty-somethings and seniors. It gets washed out by the sky-high rates among young people in the 90s, so let’s zoom in to see it in isolation: