| Summary: | Part of a special issue on why crime is decreasing. The writer discusses the change in inner-city life in New York in the 1990s and looks at the relationship between drugs, crime, violence, and youth development. He draws on ethnographic research that was conducted in several neighborhoods in Brooklyn over the period 1987 to 1997. He argues that the reconfiguration of the drug market in the mid 1990s had a significant effect in reducing the level of violence in the neighborhoods. He concludes that the young people of the Brooklyn neighborhoods were at the forefront of the effort to change their lives, and in doing so, they proved that they were not powerless against a “crimonogenic” environment.
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