THE GOOD NEWS IS THE GOOD NEWS IS RIGHT

Now the question is whether the drop will continue or whether it will be reversed (a similar drop in the crime rate in the early Reagan years was reversed by the crack epidemic of the late 1980s). No one can be sure of the answer, of course. But there is some reason to be optimistic. When statistics came out for 1994 and 1995, it was often noted that one-third of the national decrease in crimes occurred in New York City. But the successful techniques of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioners are no secret and are being replicated elsewhere. Other cities are using computers to deploy large numbers of cops to drug-market and high-crime spots and are enforcing the rules against small offenses and disorderliness. Evidence from the preliminary 1996 figures confirms these things are happening. New York City is no longer alone. Crime is down 12 percent in Los Angeles, 11 percent in Miami, 10 percent in Baltimore, 15 percent in Boston, 11 percent in Birmingham, and 14 percent in Pittsburgh/

To be sure, we should take seriously the warnings of John DiIulio that a generation of superpredators is about to hit the streets. But we should also remember that the 1990s decrease in crime results not from demographic factors, which no one can change, but from public policies and police procedures, which anyone can copy.

In welfare we see a similar pattern. From January 1994 to May 1997, welfare rolls declined from 5.05 million households to 3.87 million households — a 23 percent drop. In some quarters this has been attributed to the robust economy. But previous growth periods have not been accompanied by drops in welfare rolls. Welfare rolls, like crime rates, more than tripled from 1965 to 1975, rising from 1 million households to 3.5 million. From 1975 until 1990, welfare plateaued, with caseloads rising only slightly during recessions and dropping only slightly during growth spurts. Then welfare increased sharply from 1990 to 1994.

Now the welfare rolls are below the 1990 figures and declining faster than ever before in history. As with crime, there is some reason to believe that the drop in pathology will continue. For one thing, in May 1997 the 1996 welfare-reform law was just going into effect; states were only beginning their reforms free of the supervision of Donna Shalala’s Health and Human Services Department. And the fact that progress was highly uneven among the states suggests that more progress is possible. Wisconsin is the leader here: Gov. Tommy Thompson has been shrewdly and aggressively reforming welfare for 10 years, and in the spring of 1997 Wisconsin’s welfare rolls were down 52 percent from 1994. Welfare rolls also declined 48 percent in Oregon, 44 percent in Tennessee, 41 percent in Oklahoma, 47 percent in Indiana, and 37 percent in Massachusetts.

My guess is that not so long from now, and without much regard for who wins the next few elections, crime rates and welfare rolls are going to look a lot more like 1965 than 1975. Why? Because we as a country, in large part through governmental action but initially in our own individual behavior and values, are de-sanctioning behaviors to which we as a country, in large part through governmental action but initially in our own individual behavior and values, gave sanction from 1965 to 1975.

Crime was sanctioned by an America that, in the wake of the civil-rights revolution, was ready to forgive disadvantaged criminals. You had a politician as responsible as Hubert Humphrey saying that if he were a ghetto youth, he would riot too. And even as crime rates rose, the number of people in prison fell from 1961 to 1968; it was not much above the 1961 level in 1975. Consider what this statistic means. Not just a few liberal elite leaders in Washington, but decision-makers around the country — prosecutors, judges, jurors, state legislators — were imprisoning fewer criminals. In retrospect, these decisions operated as a sanction for crime, a way for society to say that people, especially the poor and those discriminated against, are going to commit crimes and there is not much to be done about it.

By the early 1970s that attitude had changed, among most ordinary people if not in the liberal elite. Since decision-making in criminal justice has remained mostly decentralized, the elite was not able to hold prison populations down, and today there are four times as many prisoners as there were in 1975. That helped stop the rise in crime rates. They declined when leading political figures — Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, big-city mayors like Giuliani in the mid-1990s — began articulately to withdraw sanction from crime. There seems to be a pattern here: When the elites and the people both sanctioned crime, crime rates shot up; when the elites but not the people sanctioned crime, crime rates plateaued; when the elites and the people together de-sanctioned crime, crime rates fell.

Similarly with welfare. In the middle 1960s, even as the economy was growing robustly, the country started sanctioning welfare dependency. New York mayor John Lindsay’s welfare commissioner Mitchell Ginsberg announced that the city would not check the eligibility of any applicant for welfare: Anybody could get on the rolls. Society was actively sanctioning welfare; it was saying, This is what we expect people to do. Welfare rolls tripled in the subsequent 10 years. By the late 1970s, voters were fed up and started voting against government spending and taxes. But the elites continued to sanction welfare dependency through the 1990s. As was true with crime, when the elite and the people sanctioned welfare dependency, the welfare rolls exploded. When the elites but not the people sanctioned it, the rolls plateaued. When the elite withdrew their sanction, the welfare rolls dropped.

This notion of sanction gives a plausible explanation for trends that economic and demographic factors utterly fail to explain. There was no economic or demographic reason why crime rates and welfare rolls should have tripled from 1965 to 1975; these were mostly years of economic growth, and while the demographic groups most prone to commit crime and to go on welfare did increase, they did not triple in size. Nor can these trends be explained as a response to virulent racial discrimination; it was a time when civil- rights acts were passed, public accommodations, workplaces, and schools were conspicuously desegregated, and racial quotas and preferences were instituted. During the years of plateau from 1975 to the early 1990s, neither crime nor the size of welfare rolls was particularly responsive to the business cycle. And if the sharp drop in crime rates and welfare rolls of the 1990s occurred in years of economic growth, crime and welfare rates changed only marginally in previous growth years. Crime and welfare rates did not change because incomes changed; they changed because minds changed.

And not necessarily the minds of our most visible leaders. Richard Nixon, preaching law and order, was president during most of the years when crime rates and welfare rolls tripled; Bill Clinton, always ready to feel anyone’s pain, has been president during most of the happy years of the 1990s when crime rates and welfare rolls have fallen. These two presidents were stragglers, not leaders, in the movement of ideas.

Playing more of a leading role were strategically placed politicians who finally moved the fulcrum point of elite opinion where the fulcrum point of popular opinion had long been. On crime, this meant Rudolph Giuliani and other big-city mayors, who replaced apologists for criminal behavior like Detroit’s Coleman Young and critics of police brutality who seemed indifferent to victims of crime, like New York’s David Dinkins. On welfare, the initial impetus was given by governors, most but not all of them Republicans. But governors’ reforms were obstructed by the Department of Health and Human Services — Bush’s and Reagan’s as well as Clinton’s. Then came the election of the Republican Congress in 1994. I think it is significant that the welfare rolls started falling, just as interest rates did, in November 1994; welfare mothers may be just as sensitive to political trends as bond-traders. The passage of the 1996 welfare-reform act, followed by the reelection of a Republican Congress, sent an unmistakable signal through the country that the entitlement to welfare was gone and would never return.

So we may — I repeat, may — be on the verge of decreases in crime and welfare as sharp as the increases in 1965-75. The result will not be nirvana: We are making more progress in curbing lower-class vices than in strengthening middle-class virtues. But the possibility of such progress, and the progress that has already occurred, should hearten those who are busy lamenting the less-than-perfect performance of this Republican Congress or that Republican officeholder. The fact is that in the past few years some Republican politicians (and a few Democrats) have done things that have not just changed the letter of some laws but have improved the quality and character of the entire society in important ways. If Republicans had not won control of Congress in 1994 and had not pushed welfare reform in 1996, if Giuliani had not been elected mayor in 1993 and had not brought William Bratton’s reforms to the Police Department, welfare dependency and crime rates would not have fallen as much as they have — perhaps would not have changed much at all. These Republican victories made a difference in how Americans live. It is not often given to a political party to have such success. It should be appreciated. ,

Michael Barone is senior staff editor at Reader’s Digest and coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.