CRIME: LAW AND ORDER

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What makes these numbers important, not just encouraging, is that they extend what is plainly a sustained retreat from the crack-fueled crime wave of the late 1980s. According to the FBI, violent crimes started to decline in 1993. As always with crime, an area of famously wiggly trend lines, the downward curve is not to be found everywhere. Minneapolis, Minnesota, for instance, is still puzzling over why in 1995 homicides climbed more than 56% over the preceding year. Even with the downward trend, crime rates remain bloodcurdlingly high, especially when compared to the relatively peaceable kingdom of, say, 1965. (Murder victims per 100,000 then: 5.1. In 1994: 9.) And there are widespread predictions that another tidal wave will break as soon as the milk-toothed children of the '90s crowd into their saw-toothed teens. Whoever called economics the dismal science must not have heard about criminology.

For all that, even the experts in bad behavior are intrigued. Something is happening here. The question is, Why? The lineup of contributing factors includes most of the usual suspects: a decline in the proportion of young males in the general population, the leveling off of crack cocaine use, a moderate unemployment rate and tougher sentencing that gets more felons off the street and keeps them off longer.

Certainly demographics is part of it. Very simply, there are fewer people in the most crime-prone category, which is males from the ages of 15 to 29. The crime spree that began in the 1960s was largely the work of baby boomers as they moved into those years. The same boomers are tipping into their 50s, an age when you're just right for fly fishing but not much good with a semiautomatic. The bad news, however, is that today's smaller cohort of teenagers is more prone to crime than its elders were at the same age. Among 14- to 17-year-olds, for instance, murder rates skyrocketed over the past decade.

The trade in crack cocaine also appears to have changed. Perhaps it has lost its cachet. "As with any drug epidemic, the attractiveness of the drug begins to wear off, partly because users see so many of their friends dead," says James Q. Wilson, the UCLA professor who is one of the nation's most prominent thinkers on crime. That's important, because crack was the great impetus to crime in the late 1980s as brash new dealers muscled in. Another theory is that the trade has simply stabilized into a "mature market," as they say in the business schools, with surviving distributors less likely to clash over territory.

As for prison populations, those have more than doubled in the past 15 years. Most criminologists believe that a relatively small population of repeat felons is responsible for a disproportionate share of crime. Lock away the most energetic thieves and killers, and you make a serious dent in their business. "Most prisoners are violent or repeat offenders," says William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education and drug czar. "Prisons do cut crime." Last week Bennett's Council on Crime in America, a commission he co-heads with Griffin Bell, who was Attorney General under Jimmy Carter, issued a report warning that violent crime is still higher than police records indicate because so much of it goes unreported. They urged even more aggressive jailings.