Age, Period and Cohort Differences Between the Homicide Trends of Canada and the United States

Generations, Cohorts, and Social Change’

Mateus Rennó Santos, Yunmei Lu and Rachel E Fairchild

The British Journal of Criminology, 2021, vol. 61, issue 2, 389-413

Abstract: A robust literature has investigated homicide trends in the United States since 1950. The prevalence of homicide in the country almost doubled in the 1960s, remained high until the 1990s and then declined precipitously. Surprisingly, Canada displayed the same trend. We decompose the age, period and cohort effects on the homicide trends of the United States and Canada since 1950, exploring shared effects in light of these countries’ historical and policy differences over the past seven decades. Our study reveals remarkably similar trends and effects in Canada as those previously documented for the United States, despite diverging approaches to criminal justice and to the use of incarceration since the 1950s. We explore these findings and expand on their implications.

Keywords: homicide trends; comparative criminology; comparative criminal justice; age; period and cohort effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azaa080 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:crimin:v:61:y:2021:i:2:p:389-413.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The British Journal of Criminology is currently edited by Eamonn Carrabine

More articles in The British Journal of Criminology from Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().