By Anne-Marie Cusac.

• Position: Book review

In his essay in the collection Why Crime Rates Fall and Why They Don't (University of Chicago), editor Michael Tonry, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law, writes, "Almost no one except a handful of academic specialists seems to have noticed that crime rates are falling throughout the Western World. That is curious.

It should be seen everywhere as good news. Fewer people are victimized. Fewer are arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and punished. Hospital emergency rooms handle fewer intentional injuries. Insurance companies compensate fewer losses. Politicians have less incentive to propose and policymakers to adopt severe policies aimed at pleasing, placating, or pacifying an anxious public."

Tonry notes, "No one has a really good explanation for why crime rates are falling." This book explores some prevalent theories. One comes originally from Norbert Elias, who posited a "civilizing process" beginning in the European Middle Ages. As Tonry's essay in this volume demonstrates, the drop in the homicide rate over the centuries has been large--from twenty to one hundred per 100,000 in the late Middle Ages to one in 100,000 by the first decades of the twentieth century.

And the uptick in crime from the late 1960s through the early 1990s that led to stark tough-on-crime policies in the United States occurred across other Western countries, as well. Tonry writes that the source for the crime rise during this period appears to be the breakdown and reconstruction in social structures, including decolonization, the Vietnam War, the youth rebellion, political and civil rights movements, enormous economic changes, globalization, and other forces. As he puts it, "In retrospect, it was all too much to be absorbed in a short time. As Chinua Achebe described colonial Nigeria, Things Fall Apart (1958). Crime rates rose as did support in many countries for neoliberal and xenophobic political movements. That harsh crime policies emerged in some countries is not...