Teens need LESS time w/ their peers…they need to be w/ adults. Teens raising teens is not good.
Also, didn’t they try this w/ “midnight basketball” and crime rates went up??

to removing highly criminogenic environmental lead

Encouraging testing vitamin d levels for every youth would be good too. vitamindcouncil.org has studies that show the low rates of vitamin d in African American children (adults too) that lead to a wide range of behavioral and health problems.

to sending nurses to visit first-time mothers in need of coaching.

I’ve not seen where the state knows how to raise babies. Half of all formula in this country is paid for by taxpayers. How about eliminating state subsidies for formula and watch these moms breastfeed and how their parenting skills increase?

Anatid: A. Zarkov, crime is highest among low-SES folks. Blacks and Latinos make up a disproportionate amount of the low-income population, and whites and Asians make up a disproportionate amount of the high-income population.Here in the Pacific Northwest, there’s tons of gang activity, and plenty of it drug-related, but none of it marijuana-related. The supply is prevalent. Why would you deal with a sketchy gangster who charges high prices for Mexican gutterweed when you can just call up your buddy who knows a guy who’s heading to Mendocino or Humboldt soon?Unsure how much external validity this has to other drugs. Especially methamphetamine. Prolonged use of meth can result in psychosis, including violent psychosis, even in people who no predisposition towards psychosis.The data from Zurich and Vancouver on how the decriminalized safe zones for heroin use are still too young to indicate rigorously whether a steady supply of opiates reduces related violent crime.

However trials in Liverpool in the early 90s (shut down under pressure from the US state department) and Brighton most recently have been judged stunning successes in reducing street crime.

The estimate of the reduction in crime in Brighton (south of London on the coast) is that the average addict has reduced theft by 90%.

Costs £15,000 a year to maintain a heroin habit at street prices, which means stealing goods on the order of £45,000-£150,000. For heroin addicts on maintained doses, that has almost dropped to zero (being kicked off the programme is a major disincentive).

And the number of addicts who died during the trial was zero. Whereas normally you would have expected something like 15-20 (out of 1000).

mariner: Randy:Where do you get that idea?America’s Safest and Most Dangerous CitiesI notice that the very Southern Detroit, MI leads the list.Agreed. And urban renewal was one of the Great Society programs.

Did ‘Urban Renewal’ devastate the cities or did Civil Rights and desegregation?

Civil Rights allowed middle class blacks to move out to the suburbs.

you also had the Civil Rights riots, associated with outright violence against blacks by police, and by the assassination of Martin Luther King.

I think what happened to the American city in the 60s and 70s was the lid came off. You had formerly stuff that was kept in the ghetto by police state tactics spill over into the streets generally. It was no longer acceptable for urban police forces to treat blacks as they had.

You had soaring unemployment especially amongst working class men. ‘Life without Work’ is a pretty seering book.

You had floods of cheap guns. And South East Asian drugs. And returning Vets.

A big factor was probably the change in production technology for weapons. The rise and rise of the Saturday Night Special, and the ability to make cheap weapons like the MAC10 (consider the effort to make an Armalite out of stamped metal, vs. the craftsmanship of a Lee Enfield .303). Big fall in the costs of weaponry and the availability.

And you had heroin coming back with the vets from SE Asia, right into the inner city (think Frank Lucas and ‘American Gangster’). And behind it, in the late 80s, crack cocaine.

And of course most US cities built highways right through old neighbourhoods in the core, which both sucked middle class people out into the commuter belt, and crippled the local environment in the fragmented neighbourhoods left behind.

Perseus: Agreed, but it’s not surprising that a modern social engineer would denigrate those costs and ask us to think “about “crime” as something bad that happens to people, like auto accidents or air pollution or disease, rather than as something horrible that people do to each other.”

Last time I checked, auto accidents and air pollution were bad things that people do to other people.

You know cars have drivers and air pollution is created by human activity.

Last I checked.

BT: If the population of the US is around 300 million, that is less than 1.0% of the population. Is that really an outrageous number? How does it compare on a percentage basis with similarly industrialized countries? What percentage are illegal aliens? And as Clayton Cramer suggests, what percentage are mentally ill and should be in a different type of facility altogether?Hey I am all for some of the suggestions above regarding decriminalizing drugs, keeping recidivists in jail, etc. But the 2.4 million number does not strike me as excessive, at least at this point.

Hi

Britain (1/5th the population) has about 84,000 prisoners I believe.

http://www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/assets/documents/1000490A23102009_web_report.doc
So that would mean if the US was Britain, you would have 420,000 prisoners.

(all prisoners are prisoners of the same custodial service ie there is no state and federal distinction)

Britain has the highest incarceration rate in western Europe.

Eric: Just curious…if we normalize by race, how do prison and crime stats compare with Europe? That is, how much of the vast difference between the US and, say, Sweden, is related to our different demographics?

Bill

Americans are 8 times more likely to murder each other than English are.

And 4 times more likely to murder each other than most European countries. Even Finland, say, where gun ownership is as universal as the US.

White Americans are still at least 4 times as likely to kill each other as white Europeans.

The ‘murder belt’ in the US runs largely below the Mason-Dixon line and out into Arizona. The prevalence of murder there is something like 2:1 over the rest of the US, amongst white Americans.

The reason is unclear but is hypothesised to be something about the indentured-servant aristocrat culture that was imported from 17th and 18th century England (a place with crime rates far above current levels) and solidified in the ‘Scotch Irish’ culture of the Appalacians. Also perhaps in the inherent brutality of the slaveowning society, and then the Segregation Society and Jim Crow laws.

However one study I saw (Scientific American) suggested that murder amongst unrelated individuals is *not* higher in the South than in other parts of the US (presumably outside notoriously crime ridden cities like Phoenix– murder capital of the USA at one point).

So it is about a different cultural language. They showed some tests where experrimenters ‘brushed against’ southern white males and non-white males in the corridor. The southern white males were far more likely to take umbrage.

If you look at countries and murder rates, then AFAIK there is no other developed country with an American level of murder. You have to go to places like Brasil and South Africa (and Russia) to get to American levels.

Murder, along with road deaths, are the modern American plagues.

Bill: At the risk of revealing my ignorance: “highly criminogenic environmental lead”? What is that all about?

Bill

There is a wealth of scientific evidence that early exposure to lead causes hyperactivity as well as retards cognitive development.

The first work was done in the 1940s by an Australian doctor looking at children’s exposure to lead paint.

This work was ignored by medical science until basically the 1970s, when elevated blood levels in American inner city schoolchildren and mounting evidence finally led to restrictions on leaded paint, and a banning of lead as an automotive octane enhancer

This change coincides nicely with the drop in the US crime rate in the early 1990s ie 18 years after lead was phased out as an automotive octane enhancer.

In essence, we may have bred a generation of brain-damaged kids. Studies of young juvenille delinquents and prisoners shows a high incidence of ADHD and cognitive impairments of various forms.

The inventor of leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley, Chief Scientist at GM, was alsoo the inventor of the Freon CFC, which was shown to have devastating effects on th ozone layer, which are still manifest, especially in the Southern Hemisphere.

Your additional comment does little to alter my assessment, particularly when you write: “Reducing crime (and crime avoidance costs) is the primary benefit to be sought from criminal-justice programs, but not the only one.” Claiming that retribution or justice is “a benefit” to be sought from criminal justice programs may shock the consciences of many law professors and moral philosophers in the rarefied atmosphere of academia, but it doesn’t impress me. Even that claim is cheapened by your crassly utilitarian definition of benefit: “A “benefit” is simply a desired consequence, measured by someone’s willingness to pay for that consequence.”

One of the reasons that crimes against black people are underpunished, is that those crimes are committed mostly by black people.

When the black community demands that black criminals be punished more harshly, they will be. (Fat chance of that.)

“Freaking out” is not a mental health problem.

I assumed you understood that I was speaking colloquially. If you insist on being technical, the easiest fit is probably one of the Adjustment Disorders, code 309.X in your handy DSM, depending on the manifestation.

In other words, they really are mentally ill and really do need treatment. They do not just need an abortion.

jcm: But formurder, the USA crime rate are the same than in most Europe. BUt the UK and Ireland have higher rates than the USA.
What the USA needs its less laws , stop wasting resources incarcerating people for been naked in their own house or for “pain killer abuse” orusing steroids or for brookingother sillylaws with conducts that only hurt themselves

Most Recent Murder Rate per 100,000 of population:
USA 5.8 Ireland 1.59 United Kingdom 2.03

‘Nuff said!

Oren: With respect to mental health, I don’t think you can make that judgment in generality. For some women, an abortion might be less traumatic than carrying to term, for others not.

But it’s a, “Somebody inconvenient to me must die, or I’ll freak out” sort of trauma, so that’s definitely something that needs treatment. Sooner or later, they might find somebody a little bit older inconvenient.

More realistically, it’s a, “I got this doctor to claim I’d freak out if I had the kid, because putting it up for adoption would be kind of inconvenient.” sort of thing, much of the time.

I posted this note on my own blog yesterday.

While the logic of crime control ought to play a larger role than it now does in shaping enforcement and punishment, it is not the case that crime control is the sole legitimate purpose of the criminal justice system. As Donald Black shows in The Behavior of Law, it is very nearly a cross-cultural constant that the amount of punishment inflicted for a given offense tends to rise or fall with the social status of the victim. Thus a light punishment reflects, and reinforces, the low value the community assigns to the person on the receiving end of the crime, and by extension to other people of similar background. (One tragic fact about the American criminal justice system is that it has always under-punished crimes against black people, or committed in black neighborhoods; that, I claim, is one cause of the high crime rates that devastate the African-American community.)

Thus retribution is not some atavistic instinct; it reflects the social logic of status and punishment. The notion that the community owes it to the victim (and the victim’s family and neighbors) to punish the perpetrator – thus asserting in action that the victim was not one whose rights could be ignored with impunity – shocks the consciences of many law professors and moral philosophers, but it strikes me as almost self-evidently true.

The shift from weregild or private revenge to punishment by the state no doubt represents an important social advance. But it ought to be thought of as a bargain, with the state standing in for the Lord and saying to the victim and his family, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” That bargain, once made, must be kept. Otherwise we have the opening scene of The Godfather, where the undertaker goes to Don Corleone for the vengeance the state has failed to provide.

More generally, may I suggest that people who haven’t read anything more than a single blog post not leap to the conclusion that they can fill in my thoughts based on their stereotypes about pointy-headed liberal social engineers?

PatHMV:
…They may result in savings from reduced incarceration many years down the road, but TODAY they require additional funding.
…I’m not sure that there are any studies showing long-term success with a variety of programs …

Sorry, I wasn’t referring to his more rambling background intro contained in this post. The actual implementation is Hawaii’s H.O.P.E. project, a straightforward probation/parole policy that doesn’t require any outside prevention/paternalism efforts.

Link please. Prove there is or is not a drop in crime. Does anyone prove anything?

Nonsense! The building I lived in from when I was born until age 14 had a lead pipe supplying the water to the building. I drank the water every day for 14 years. I have a high IQ and got a law degree. Lead is a bogus boogey man.

Anatid @ 3:42 lists a number of correlates which ring true for those with personal experience. I’d only add “a complete lack of empathy for anyone or anything” and “poor to no impulse control.” Most of the criminals I knew, even the very successful ones, would shoplift a pack of gum at the same time they might have a thousand dollars in their pocket. By the time they were adults, they preferred being outlaws, even when the effort in being a crook exceeded that of being straight.

It has been suggested that the welfare programs started in the ’60′s, which rewarded single parents and added a bonus for multiple children contributed to the breakdown of the family group among populations traditionally at or below the poverty level. Another person noted that beginning about the same time, persons with mental and/or emotional disabilities – including substance abusers – began to be treated as medical problems, and no longer an issue for civil law. I suspect both theories are guilty as charged. But I don’t see a return to the days of alcoholics and the homeless being locked up, or of the mentally ill spending an adult lifetime inside an institution.

I agree with the many posters who think decriminalizing drugs would be a good start. if for no other reason than removing the huge cost of the drug for the user – who typically resorts to crime to sustain the habit – by having the government give drugs away for free might reduce crime by large numbers. There’s a huge and complex problem with drug enforcement, far too tough to simplify here, but taking the profit motive out of drug sales and the cost out of addiction/dependency would be a splendid beginning.

Long term solutions which seek to address living conditions, school opportunity and the like are very nice, and certainly can’t hurt, but one should be prepared to spend a ton of money and never know whether the initiative worked. The horizon is, as Pat pointed out, perhaps two decades. And, since one cannot isolate the effect of the school/lead removal/whatever, you’d be guessing even after 20 years, regardless of numbers that looked successful or not.

I’m with those who think crime is down because prison population is up. If we took all of the money and man-hours dedicated to chasing down drug dealers, users, etc and instead, concentrated on, say, robbery or burglary, we could appreciably reduce Part I crime. And have plenty of cash left over for those visiting nurses.

So, I suppose I think we have a bifurcated solution. Trying to address Anatid’s correlates while the susceptible pool is still very young is a great idea. Just don’t expect immediate, quantifiable results, and do expect to spend money. Once the offender population reaches some age, the likelihood of altering the aberrant behavior declines to nearly nil. At that point, public resources should be tasked at identifying, convicting and imprisoning those who break the law.

Agreed, but it’s not surprising that a modern social engineer would denigrate those costs and ask us to think “about “crime” as something bad that happens to people, like auto accidents or air pollution or disease, rather than as something horrible that people do to each other.”

“Freaking out” is not a mental health problem.

I assumed you understood that I was speaking colloquially. If you insist on being technical, the easiest fit is probably one of the Adjustment Disorders, code 309.X in your handy DSM, depending on the manifestation.

PatHMV: But there are in fact also a lot of kids on the cusp of either a life of crime or a life of relative productivity. There are proven, effective programs, alternatives to incarceration, which dramatically reduce the rate of recidivism compared to simple incarceration.

I was quite surprised, back in the 1990s, to see that unlike progressive California, those Neanderthals in Georgia were making extensive use of home arrest for first-time burglary convicts, to keep them integrated into the community, and employed. I’m one of those right-wing crazies that thinks that prison should be reserved for violent criminals, or those non-violent criminals who simply refuse to abide by the terms of non-prison supervision.

Inject some male proponents of the socialization argument with lots of estrogen and some female proponents of the socialization argument with lots of testosterone and see what happens.

Legalize victimless crimes.

You do all realize that when they say people are in jail for “drug crimes”, it means that was the most serious charge brought against them?

Here’s a discussion by a man who’s actually worked with a lot of those prisoners. (Albeit in England.)

If the mental health problem is “I’m freaking out because I cannot take care of a child”, then there’s clearly no need for any further treatment.

“Freaking out” is not a mental health problem. Especially since she does not need to take care of a child and can place the child for adoption.

If she is suffering actually mental illness over it, there is absolutely no reason to believe that she will instantly recover. Especially since a woman who is that stressed out by pregnancy will be stressed out by other events, even if she manages to avoid getting pregnant again.

That is, the problem is quite specifically that the pregnancy is overwhelming, an abortion is the entirety of the solution (probably combined with a contraceptive).

If she’s mentally ill, there’s no reason to believe that she would take a contraceptive. Indeed, there’s every reason to believe she could go on getting pregnant again and again and again and again. . . . I have myself read women’s accounts of their lives where they did exactly that.

But there are in fact also a lot of kids on the cusp of either a life of crime or a life of relative productivity. There are proven, effective programs, alternatives to incarceration, which dramatically reduce the rate of recidivism compared to simple incarceration. They’re not 100% of course, and some kids are going to become sociopaths anyway, but they’re nevertheless very effective. But they’re not cheap and, as I noted in my earlier comment, you have to spend a lot of money treating people who wouldn’t actually have become serious criminals in the end, anyway.

A. Zarkov: This data in this book (published in 1995) goes up to 1992, so it misses the significant declines over the last ten years. I think the reduced crime has a lot to do with putting criminals in jail and keeping them there.

Bernard Harcourt’s work argues that even a better fit for explaining the 1990s murder rate drop is the enormous increase in total institutionalization, as “get tough” policies sent mentally ill offenders to prison. Many of these offenders had long histories of relatively unsevere crimes.

A. Zarkov: This data in this book (published in 1995) goes up to 1992, so it misses the significant declines over the last ten years. I think the reduced crime has a lot to do with putting criminals in jail and keeping them there.

Bernard Harcourt’s work argues that even a better fit for explaining the 1990s murder rate drop is the enormous increase in total institutionalization, as “get tough” policies sent mentally ill offenders to prison.

PatHMV: Let’s make a note here, by the way, about the economics of prevention. Certainly the costs of, say, well-educating one teenager, no matter how expensive in terms of special tutors, etc., is cheaper than incarcerating that young man for 20 or 30 years after he’s robbed, hurt, or killed someone. BUT, the economic question to ask is how much it would cost to provide the same educational treatment to ALL of the kids in the “at-risk” population in order to prevent that one teenager from becoming a criminal.

You are assuming that providing those educational opportunities will prevent an at-risk teenager from becoming a criminal. The correlation doesn’t necessarily have a causal connection. I remember being quite surprised at how many convicted felons were elementary school dropouts. We have mandatory public schooling in the U.S.–and while some states (like Idaho) only require to attend until 16, I’m not aware that there are any that allow you to dropout so early.

There are probably family structure issues involved with such kids that no amount of educational opportunity is going to fix. My daughter is a social worker. She was very disappointed at how many teenage girls she was seeing in the mental hospital who attempted suicide because they were being pimped out by their parents to buy meth. And these are white kids with all the enormous advantages that being a member of the master race implies!

The book (which has a liberal tilt) Ethnicity, Race and Crime, Hawkings, editor, provides a collection of research reports on crime and race. The various chapters provide a wealth of crime data. In particular look at Fig. 8.1 (page 177) which displays murder arrest rate for blacks and whites from 1946 to 1990. The white and black curves track each other pretty well, with a ratio that varies between 8 and 10. We see that in 1946 the murder rates for both groups were higher than in 1990. This seemingly contradicts Kleiman’s assertion of a golden age of low crime in the past.

Local peaks in the black-white murder arrest rate occurred in 1956 (ratio= 16), and 1971 (ratio= 13.6). After 1975, the ratio remains nearly constant at about 8. Nineteen seventy one also corresponds to a near peak in the overall arrest rate for both groups, but still less than 1946. I suspect returning veterans from WWII had a lot to do with the increases we see after the war ended.

This data in this book (published in 1995) goes up to 1992, so it misses the significant declines over the last ten years. I think the reduced crime has a lot to do with putting criminals in jail and keeping them there. While it’s true that many people are in jail for drug offenses, I don’t think we should conclude that drug offenders are otherwise law abiding. Getting a conviction for a drug offense is pretty easy compared to other crimes. If we do away with our drug laws we will still have a lot of people in prison unless we just decide to go soft on crime again.

pmorem: For crimes with victims, there is another potential on-going cost.People generally like to feel safe and secure.Being a victim of crime or knowing one can reduce that feeling, potentially for the remainder of the person’s life.Seeing the perpetrator harshly punished may help to remedy the sense of loss.

Just to confirm, you are saying that the extent to which it is okay to punish a person depends on how much better it will make the victim feel?

No. I’m saying that a sense of vengeance is necessary to many people. If it is not addressed, there will be a cost. Kleiman misses that cost. I have experienced it first hand.

I have no mouth.

Seems to me that it ought to take 5 – 10 thousand dollars worth of damage before you spend a year plus in prison, lose your right to vote and to bear arms. Not to mention the job implications, etc.

The South has the highest rate of violent crime. What are they doing down there that causes them to be so violent?

Where do you get that idea?

America’s Safest and Most Dangerous Cities

I notice that the very Southern Detroit, MI leads the list.

One of the worst legacies of the 50s and 60s on our cities was urban renewal. It devastated our cities and worsened the lot of the poor.

Agreed. And urban renewal was one of the Great Society programs.

As to your point 1, I’m not sure that there are any studies showing long-term success with a variety of programs along the types described by Kleiman, mostly because it’s very difficult to obtain long-term funding for such.

Let’s make a note here, by the way, about the economics of prevention. Certainly the costs of, say, well-educating one teenager, no matter how expensive in terms of special tutors, etc., is cheaper than incarcerating that young man for 20 or 30 years after he’s robbed, hurt, or killed someone. BUT, the economic question to ask is how much it would cost to provide the same educational treatment to ALL of the kids in the “at-risk” population in order to prevent that one teenager from becoming a criminal. Accepting that perhaps 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated or serving probation or parole, that means that 8 out of 9 black men in the prime criminal age range are not criminals. Now let’s just hypothesize that it costs $5,000 in extra attention (education, coaching of new mothers, etc.) to prevent one potential criminal from becoming an actual criminal, while the costs of incarcerating that potential criminal would be $30,000. That’s a savings of $25,000 from the preventative medicine, right? Except it’s not. Because we don’t know which 1 of the 9 black men is going to turn out to be the criminal and which 8 would not become criminals anyway. So let’s say we can narrow the young black kids who have some risk of becoming criminals from 9 to 7. That means, that to prevent 1 criminal from emerging, we need to provide the preventative measures to 7 kids. At $5,000 per kid, that’s $35,000… which turns out to be more than our hypothetical incarceration cost of $30,000.

There’s more to the analysis than money, of course. We can’t measure lives, neither of the young man who could, with better parenting and better schooling could be kept from a life crime, nor of the innocent person who that criminal might harm or kill, in money. More effective education and improved parenting of these young kids would also result in additional economic benefits, by making more taxpayers rather than tax takers, as they say. I’m in no way saying that we shouldn’t consider implementing a number of Kleiman’s proposals. But it is not accurate to say that they come at no extra charge or can be done within existing budgets.