Neuroscience and Crime, written By Kadija Koita

Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City back in 1993, where he implicated a method to help crime decrease. Throughout his campaign, he wanted voters to ultimately be in safer area, because rape had risen and so did murder and robbery. Giuliani made a theory which was called the “broken windows”. This was an analogy in which if a window was broken and went unfixed, then sooner or later the rest of the windows would be broken. Which connects to the fact about if small criminal acts slip through, then more and more crimes will take place. Therefore we should snip the problem in the bud. After winning the election and continuing to use this method, in 1996, the New York Times had plunged for the third straight year. By 2010, violent crimes in New York had plunged seventy-five percent.

There was many more reasoning behind the decrease of violence, besides a change in political tactics. One of the tomes on criminology, were that when the economy is on a rise, then the crime is low, but when the economy is suffering then the crime rates rise again. Another time was based on demographics, which pertained to young men, that read, “As the number of young men increases, so does crime.” This was not the case for New York, because even though the number of men increased, crime rates still continued to decline. Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said, “If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule.”  Smith continued to make advances on the real problem and the real solution. He had a good way of categorizing epidemics in a way that each crime could fit into each. It was a very interesting way in the way that it made seem that the way things were spread was because of a certain type of thing.

In another article, “Causes of Crime - Social and Economic factors” there were epidemics about how economy problems were involved with crime, and it was. The University of Chicago's Department of Sociology, which was formed in 1892, did a focus on city problems and how they could lead to criminal behavior.
There was an overwhelming decrease in popular cities such as New York City when the economy was doing good. This shows that when people are doing good in their pockets, they won`t want to still from other people`s pocket.

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