*The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America*

That is a forthcoming book by Barry Latzer, it is very clear and well argued and I am happy to recommend it.  Here are a few bits from the book:

1. From the 1930s through the 1950s, black cirrhosis death rates were lower than those for whites.

2. For Miami, Haitians were 3.5 percent of the murder suspects when they were 14 percent of the city’s population, from a 1985-1995 study.

3. If you ignore levels, and just look at rates of change, crime rates in Canada track those in the United States to an astonishing degree.  How can that be?  If demographics or jobs were the main driving force, maybe, but they are not…

4. He criticizes lead-based theories on the grounds that they seem “…unable to explain why the affected populations had relatively high offending rates in the years just prior to the great crime decline.”

You can pre-order it here.