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The tremendous and highly complex industrial development which went on with ever‐accelerating rapidity during the latter half of the nineteenth century brought the USA face‐to‐face at the beginning of the twentieth century with the very serious social problem of crime. This article examines whether there was any relationship at all between crime, unemployment and sales of alcohol and, if there was a relationship, whether the two domains shared two, as opposed to only one dimension and what the pattern of relationships were relating variables in one domain with those in the other.

Theories of crime and delinquency tend to be discipline‐specific and are dominated by psychological, sociological, and economic approaches. The focus of this article will be on an economic approach to understanding criminal behavior and the design of effective policies for dealing with the problem of criminal activity. From an economic perspective, crime is rational behavior, a choice that is made by people in deciding how best to spend their time. In making the choice, individuals consider the benefits and costs of using their time in different ways: working legally, working illegally, or not working at all. This article examines the correlations between economic variables and a broad measure of crime, the property crime rate. The results reveal that even a very parsimonious model, which includes the poverty rate, gross domestic product, and drug seizures, can explain nearly 75 percent of the variation in the crime rate over an 18‐year period.