Randolph Roth, professor, history and sociology, is one of eight scholars from around the country invited by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to serve as a member of the NAS Roundtable on Understanding Crime Trends in America.

The roundtable, an ongoing collaboration among scholars and public officials, is intended to help frame a research agenda in this area and facilitate an ongoing dialogue among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. 

“The task that the NAS Roundtable is going to work on is explaining the decline in crime that has happened since the early 1990s throughout the affluent world, even in countries that didn’t put more people in prison, didn’t put more police on the streets, or face crippling debt crises,” Roth said.

“Time-honored explanations can’t make sense of the decline. But the timing of the decline may hold the key to explaining it.”

Roth and his colleagues have noted that it didn’t occur gradually in most nations, but suddenly. “The tipping point came for every nation between 1988 and 1992: the years when the Cold War ended. And the same was true of nations of the former Eastern bloc that made peaceful and successful transitions to democratic capitalism, such as Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

“We may be looking at a peace dividend we did not expect, and that is still hard to explain.”

The NAS Roundtable also will study biological explanations, such the decline in lead pollution, which has helped young people in the affluent world to develop healthier brains and may have improved their capacity for self-control.

“The task of the Roundtable is to test rival explanations as rigorously as possible against the evidence, to see which ones might best explain violence and help us develop ways to control it,” Roth said.

The group, with initial support from the National Institute of Justice, will meet twice annually for at least three years. They will explore myriad factors that might help explain the decline in crime rates that has occurred over the last 20 years.

They are expected to produce think-pieces, policy essays, and research designs that will lead to a better understanding of the crime problem in America.

The first session took place in June 2013.

Roth, a nationally-known expert on homicide in America, recently received a $40,000 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, which complements two National Science Foundation grants ($165K total) for his inter-disciplinary research on this troubling but important topic.

He is the author of the acclaimed book, American Homicide (The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2009), an interregional, internationally comparative study of homicide in the United States from colonial times to the present. It examines patterns of marital murder, romance murder, and other kinds of murder among adults in an effort to understand how and why the United States has become the world’s most homicidal affluent society.

American Homicide received the 2011 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology; the 2010 Allan Sharlin Memorial Prize from the Social Science History Association; and was named one of the Outstanding Academic Books of 2010 by Choice.

Roth is completing, Child Murder in America, a companion volume to American Homicide, a study of homicides of and by children from colonial times to the present. It will argue that the causes of murders of children are quite different from the causes of murder among adults.

Roth is co-founder and co-director of the Historical Violence Database. The HVD is a collaborative project to gather data on the history of violent crime and violent death (homicides, suicides, accidents, and casualties of war) from medieval times to the present and is supported by Ohio State’s Criminal Justice Research Center.