[dragonwriter]

> That was the theory pushed fairly successfully by many social reformers in the 60's and early 70's. The net result, or at least the concurrent event, was a massive crime wave.

It wasn't even a concurrent event, it was a preceding event -- the rising crime wave began roughly concurrent with the end of WWII, rose in a fairly smooth unbroken trend (With a few interruptions -- which started in the 1970s.) If any result in crime rates resulted from social reforms advocated in the 1960s and 1970s (which is questionable), its more like it was the interruptions in the long-running trend of increasing crime rates, not the increase that started more than a decade before the reforms were advocated.

Demographics in the key criminal age demographic -- both from the demobilizations after the WWII and Korea, and then the Baby Boom, is probably the key factor driving the increase (and subsequent decrease as that demographic bulge passed that age band.)