To speak about crime in this context, even critically, is to accept a classed definition. Wage theft, stock fraud, and tax evasion are serious crimes, and they escalated dramatically in this period, but those are not the traditional referents for the 1990s “crime wave” discourse, because we have come to see ruling-class violations as part of a system that encourages cheating and corner cutting rather than as individual acts of social antagonism.40 The crime wave refers to crimes that interest the police and prosecutors, which is to say crimes committed by working-class and poor people, which also increased during the period. Any serious analysis of this kind of crime puts labor conditions at the forefront rather than some individualist idea of criminal intent; there was never much mystery to the phenomenon from a sociological point of view. But administrations from Reagan through George Bush Jr. (at least) understood that, to avoid risking another wage-price spiral, they had to deal with crime as a problem of too many criminals rather than too few good jobs.