Jeanne Clery Act Analysis Proposal
While it has become increasingly important to have a college education in the United States over the past few decades, it has also become increasingly important to ensure that college campuses are safe for students to attend. Until the 1990s, there had been no requirement for any campus to report crime statistics (Home, n.d.). As a result, students were subjecting themselves to live and learn in an environment about which they had no information to determine its safety, making themselves vulnerable to the dangers of an unknown and unsafe atmosphere.
Jeanne Clery was a 19-year-old student living in a dormitory at Lehigh University. In April of 1986, she was raped and murdered in her dorm room by a student…show more content… Attending college is a major life decision, and in many cases students are leaving everything they know, including their families, to live in a completely new and unknown environment. If campuses are not required to report criminal statistics, not only will students be in the dark as to what kind of environment they are about to immerse themselves in, but campuses themselves will have little incentive to do anything to reduce violent occurrences. A campus which is required to report criminal statistics is much more likely to take action to increase the safety of students. Transparency of campus crime empowers students to make a well-informed decision, alerting them of potential danger. This consequently increases a campus’s motivation to reduce crime in order to see a rise in student enrollment.
Before the Clery Act was introduced, less than seven percent of higher-education institutions produced a public statistical crime report, and reports that were made public were difficult for students to access. Scarily enough, federal law even required that campus police records were kept private. Since the Act’s passing, between the years of 1994 and 2004, violent crime on campus dropped by nine percent, property crime dropped by thirty percent, and the starting pay rate for campus police even increased by five percent (Carter, Sloan, & Fisher,