I think the crime rate in the last five years, in light of the economic downturn in this country, has defied what conventional criminological thinking would have suggested. At the onset of the recession, there was a great deal of discussion about the idea that we expected to see crime increase dramatically and that the 15-plus years of declining and low crime we had experienced would be over.
What we have generally seen is the opposite of that. We've seen a stable to, in some situations, declining crime rate. There certainly can be numerous examples to the counterpoint of that statement. That's a very broad statement. You can find sources out there that tend to cherry-pick and say, “Well, robbery in this community has gone up 15% in the last year”. It's not going to be a uniformly accurate statement, but in general, we've not seen the fallout and the consequences.
I would reiterate one of my opening comments. What we don't yet know are a couple of things. One, we don't yet know whether there has been a clear influence on citizen satisfaction, fear of crime, and perception of safety. Two, it may be too early to tell whether some of the initiatives and programs that have been cut, that might target youth, might possibly result—I don't think we know or have a preliminary indication—in a future generation of offenders who are not being pushed away from that poor choice. Once people start on that track, if we don't have the right interventions and early warning systems in place, it can very quickly get away from us. I don't think in the U.S. we can say that we are going to evade any problems with this particular economic downturn.