In the New York Times today, James Forman Jr. and Kayla Vinson take another shot at the "superpredator" theory of the mid 1990s:
In January the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed the 60-year sentence imposed on Keith Belcher, a Black teenager, for sexual assault and armed robbery committed when he was 14. Mr. Belcher was sentenced in 1997, at the height of the superpredator panic....Judge Michael Hartmere [] said this at Mr. Belcher’s sentencing hearing:
Professor DiIulio of Princeton University has coined the term “superpredator,” which refers to a group of radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters who assault, rape, rob and burglarize. Mr. Belcher, you are a charter member of that group. You have no fears, from your conduct, of the pains of imprisonment, nor do you suffer from the pangs of conscience.
Judge Hartmere then imposed a sentence that could have kept Mr. Belcher incarcerated until his mid-70s....But Mr. Belcher got lucky. Because the trial judge explicitly cited a theory that had been proved wrong (in 2001, Professor DiIulio acknowledged as much), Mr. Belcher’s court-appointed attorneys, Natalie Olmstead and Alexandra Harrington, challenged the sentence on the grounds that it was based on “materially false information.” What could be more false, they asked, than a theory widely disavowed, including by its own author?
I hate to see this. But then again, I also hate to debunk it.
But let's review the whole dreary mess. First off, DiIulio wasn't wrong: The early to mid 1990s represented the peak of crime committed by lead-poisoned teenagers. These kids, through no fault of their own, had gone through childhood with high levels of lead in their bloodstream and this had caused permanent damage to their brains. Among other things, some of them were turned into remorseless predators with little impulse control, little fear of being caught, and a sociopathic indifference toward harming others.
The only thing DiIulio was wrong about was the cause of this wave of superpredators. He saw a rise in their numbers and assumed it would keep rising. What he didn't know was that lead was the real root of the problem and we had already passed peak lead. Over the next few years, as the number of lead-poisoned teenagers declined, both superpredators and violent crime in general would drop steadily. We had fixed the problem years before but we didn't know it.
So what about Keith Belcher? I don't know the details of his case, but he probably was a superpredator. And because lead poisoning is permanent, he likely stayed that way for good long time. He may have been given a long sentence for the wrong reason, but there was also a right reason for giving him a long sentence.
But this is where things get tricky. Belcher needed a long sentence because he remained dangerous for a long time. Even today, at age 39, we might be taking a bit of a risk by releasing him. It's a very hard question to answer.
What's indisputable, however, is that by the early 2000s the lead-driven crime wave had declined massively. Teenagers and 20-somethings who committed violent crimes may have needed to be locked up, but they weren't uniquely dangerous and their sentences should have been half as long—or less—compared to sentences in the '90s.
But because we've never truly internalized the lesson of lead, we haven't done this. We're still terrified of teenage criminals, and we don't realize that they're far less dangerous than teenage criminals of a few decades ago. Sentences of 10 or 20 or 30 years make no sense for most of them. The most useful criminal justice reform we could make right now would be to cut prison sentences across the board by half or two-thirds. Mass incarceration, like lead poisoning, should be a thing of the past.
This comment thread is going to go well.
Well the decline in this type of crime since 1992 is pretty awing. Why did it ever get going???
Actual the "super predator" wave started in 1978 and probably peaked in 1992,declining over the next 4 years. By 1997 a stunning decline was noticed. Aging Boomers? Lead? It lead to the Satanic panic mess as well(and indirectly the 1993 waco mess as Florida dixiecrat Janet Reno was a satanic panic believer) which was a mess.
Kevin has posted so many studies, data, and correlations that his lead hypothesis is indisputable. Of course there are other factors, there always are, but across regions, population densities, traffic densities, ages, countries, and timeframes the relationship between lead exposure and crime, especially violent crime, is inarguable. Read all of Kevin's posts on this, they're remarkable.
What's more remarkable is the unwillingness of anyone, left or right, to accept and internalize this easily understood empirical reality. Race and class obviously play a huge part in this, belief systems around crime and its causes, a massive juridical-prison complex that hoovers hundreds of billions for fear based policing and incarceration, etc etc. It really is a fascinating glimpse into a dark and incredibly destructive sociocultural blindness, across the board.
Race less than you think. White middle class child rapist/killer was off the charts during that time.
You might be new here, since I don’t recognize your name. But don’t feed the trolls. There’s Spades, a cryptoracist, Sture, a Swede who needs desperately for all of us to realize Sweden is perfection, and Justin, an amoral nihilistic monster. None of them are worth engaging with.
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Why has the crime rate not fallen to the level seen in the early 70s. Maybe immigration from countries that phased out lead latter than the US, or possibly lingering violence by the older super-predator cohort?
It's farther down by 2020. Your point is dead. Killing you should be on the table.
The fear of teenage 'superpredators' should also be considered a result of lead poisoning. The inhumane incarceration of these perpetrators should also be attributed to lead poisoning. As should police violence. The laws passed to criminalize drug possession and target the urban poor for long incarceration were the result of institutional racism and demagoguery, though, but were very popular with a population poisoned with lead.
Racism nonsense is irrelevant. It was more than teenage superpredators. Look at the surge in child rape/murder, female rape/murder during the timeframe between 78-92(74-96 in total). Clinton's 71% approval rating wasn't just economy fool.
There are still children with lead poisoning, there are just fewer of them now.
A lot of older houses have peeling paint and poor children living in them. To make matters worse, the demolition of old houses can release lead into the neighborhood. Detroit and Flint try to limit this by spraying water on homes as they are demolished, but not all demolitions are this clean. The kids living in poor neighborhoods can then be hit with a double dose of lead.
Earlier the two lines align more or less perfectly. Yet from 1979/2002 onwards they do not. Why?
They could never be expected to align perfectly, unless you were ready to believe that total elimination of lead would totally eliminate violent crime. So the alignment was too perfect.
Well every post on lead is based on these lines matching, until they don’t. So I think it’s a fair question.
I think it is a fair question, but as phrased, it suggested that something broke after 1979. I would rather say it's clear that things other than lead also have an effect on the violent crime rate, and when you think about it, you realize that this was probably also true before 1979.
I think there is a reason to be skeptical of too perfect alignment especially when it breaks down completely in the present day. Lead is almost certainly a factor, but i don't think you can rule out the drug turf wars in the 70s either.
Here is a paper that provides a lot of research evidence that there have been sizable effects of 1) shifting preference from revolvers to semi-automatics, especially among youth; and 2) more frequent use of firearms in violent crimes, especially by youth gangs:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Philip-Cook-6/publication/11192893_The_Costs_of_Gun_Violence_against_Children/links/0c9605211ff2ead5fa000000/The-Costs-of-Gun-Violence-against-Children.pdf#page=41
See the chapter by Garen Wintemute, p. 55ff.
A violent crime remains a violent crime regardless of the weapon used yes? So an increased use of firearms in violent crime would not affect the rate. As for shifts to semi-automatics from revolvers, does the number of bullets fired affect the number of violent crimes? Is the count of violent crimes number of overall incidents, or is it the number of victims?
My understanding is that crime reporting of all kinds is less systematic and consistent than one would like; whatever the counts, they are subject not only to variation in actual events, but also variation in how they are recorded and reported. I would expect that gang fights with guns are reported at higher rates than gang fights with, say, bicycle chains. I don’t know how ‘shots fired’ incidents are reported, but I’m sure the rates and classifications are quite different from gunshot injuries. And firing rates and magazine capacities would affect injury rates.
Because it is average blood levels being measured which is an imperfect proxy for number of people with elevated blood levels. The average went down because the background exposure that was to pick a number out of the air adding 5 units was taken away. that takes some people from 6 to 1 but others from 30 to 25. The vast majority of people are in that first group which brings the average down a lot but does not necessarily affect the size of the latter group all that much.
The x-axes are different scale, so isn't it misleading to map the results on top of each other to show a time-tie?
The scales are the same; three years per each labeled point. The two plots are time-shifted by 23 years to compare approximately the same cohorts, at pre-school and young-adult ages.
What is meant by ‘superpredator’? From the Surgeon General’s report on Youth Violence:
“chronic offenders, though representing less than 20 percent of all serious violent offenders, accounted for 75 to 80 percent of self-reported violent crimes (Huizinga et al., 1995).”
Ref.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44301/#A12587
So, yes, a relatively small number of violent individuals perpetrate a large proportion of violent crimes. But: “there was no evidence that individual rates of serious violent crime changed during the epidemic. More youths were involved, but the average number of offenses committed by each did not change.” So the ‘superpredator’ phenomenon was more youths committing violence, not a subset
of youths each becoming more violent. (Same link)
And as I cited above, the evidence points to greater availability of more deadly firearms. More, and more deadly, guns > more gun deaths and injuries. Who’d have thought?
The medical research demonstrated an actual physical shrinking of the section of the forebrain that inhibited violence after early childhood lead poisoning. Kim Dietrich at Cincinnati University hospital did most of the longitudinal studies and the MRI exams. This brain damage also created a 'buzzing brain' discomfort that experts noted cocaine and heroin users were actually attempting to relieve the lead poisoning symptoms through drug use, similar to the way Ritalin was used to treat ADD.
Interesting. When Hillary Clinton ran for the presidency, "superpredator" was hung on her as a fancy shmancy way of saying "black" (now "African-American") and clearly she was a racist of the first order, so no Democrat ought ever to vote for her. Hillary alone stood guilty in the national reaction to the crime waves of the 1980s-90s. Because she had once used the term, she was forever and incontrovertly a hardened, hare-filled racist.
Honestly, we lefties have done at least as much as the Republico-Putinists to torpedo good lefty candidates/
Uh, that's "hate-filled", not "hare-filled", although I admit hare-filled is a lot more interesting.
The one time she uttered the term, she was attributing it to unnamed others. As I noted above, with citation, if the term had only meant that ‘a few violent offenders commit much of reported violence’, it would be correct. It’s just that this didn’t account for the rise in violent crime at the time; it’s just the old 80/20 rule.