5 - Patterns in Adult Homicide: 1980–1995

Summary

There is a prediction implicit in any discussion of age structure and crime. It is that the generation that made the crime wave can break it, too.

Landon Y. Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation

adult homicide rates have fallen continuously for over twenty years. Although it has not gone completely unnoticed, the decline in adult homicide has not figured prominently in recent scholarly attention devoted to violent-crime trends in the United States, which has been dominated by the issue of youth violence. The result is that little is known about patterns of adult violence – a notable exception being domestic or “intimate partner” violence – and we have neither the theory nor requisite research for understanding the decline in adult homicide, including the drop in intimate partner killings. That would not be a big problem for homicide research if adults contributed little to the overall homicide rate. Yet persons 25 years old or older make up over 60 percent of all homicide victims and nearly one-half of the offenders. Moreover, with the aging of the baby boomers, adults are not only the largest but also the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1996a, p. 24, Table 23). An accurate, comprehensive, and policy-relevant portrayal of the recent violence – the goal of this volume – must, therefore, include a description of the patterns among adults, and should offer some assessment of alternative explanations for the two-decade-long decline in adult homicide.