I promise I'm not stalking Matt Yglesis these days, but he just happens to have written on some interesting topics lately. On Tuesday he ran an interview with Jennifer Doleac, an expert in how to reduce crime. The fascinating thing about this is that from 100,000 feet it seems like an intractable problem. Nothing works. But it turns out that lots of things work, and they're all things we're familiar with. We just have to do them. Unfortunately, as you've guessed, there are lots of people who don't want to bother. They figure it's cheaper and easier to just toss lots of criminals into prison and give them ever longer sentences. After all, if you're cooped up in a cell at San Quentin, you're not on the street robbing little old ladies.
I'll get back to all that in a bit. First, though, some context. As we all know, crime in the US has fallen precipitously since 1991. It is now about half the number it was in the peak year of 1991:
But the number of police officers has increased. So if crime is down but cops are up, that means each cop has a lot less crime to worry about:
The number of cops per crime has nearly tripled over the past 40 years and the number of crimes has about halved. What's more, the decline of lead poisoned teenagers has produced kids who are fundamentally less vicious than they used to be. As a result, policing is safer today than it's ever been before:
This is background, partly to show that many of the suggestions to follow are quite feasible. My list of things we can do is paraphrased from Matt's interview with Doleac, and I was surprised to see that I was familiar with all of them but one (#6). Let's go through them.
- Lead has reduced crime a lot over the past 30 years—and we could reduce crime even more by getting rid of more lead. This costs money, but we know how to do it.
Investing in removing lead from such sources as topsoil, paint in older homes, and drinking water...would likely yield large reductions in violent crime in the future. There would be other benefits too, such as increases in cognitive function and academic achievement, reductions in mortality, and increases in fertility.
.
Lead remediation is costly. But violent crime is costly, too. Stephen Billings and Kevin Schnepel consider the effects of lead remediation on house prices. They estimate that each $1 spent on lead remediation generates $2.60 in benefits. [But there are other benefits] such as a reduction in the social costs to potential crime victims and a reduction in the level of law enforcement that would be required if criminal behavior falls. For this reason, the benefits of lead remediation are likely much larger than what Billings and Schnepel estimate. - As you saw in the second chart, we have lots more sworn police officers per criminal incident than in the past. All by itself this should make policing more efficient. Throw in technology like Compstat and it makes added policing even more efficient.
One of the classic ways to increase the probability of getting caught is to put more police on the streets. There are these experiments with hotspot policing where you put out a cop on this street corner, but not on another street corner. It turns out crime goes down on the street corner where the cop is standing.
- Whatever you think of it, we have a lot more camera surveillance in public places than we used to. Especially when paired up with facial recognition, this is a powerful investigative tool that wasn't available even 10 years ago.
Putting CCTV cameras in subways for instance is effective, putting cameras everywhere. It's like the London, UK model of lots of cameras everywhere
- It is now routine to take DNA samples not just from convicts, but from anyone who's been merely arrested. This has built up a tremendous collection of DNA samples that can be compared to suspects in both violent and property crimes.
[In Denmark's DNA program] we see recidivism fall by about 40%. So it's just a huge reduction in the likelihood that you commit another crime in the future.... Surveillance tech, putting cameras everywhere, is pretty invasive and so we might worry about that more. But if it's effective. We might be willing to make that adjustment, right?
- It's common to go easy on probation violators because the penalties for violations are relatively severe and don't seem justified. A better solution is to mandate short but sure punishments (perhaps a day or weekend in jail) for things like alcohol or drug use. The "sure" part makes it clear to probationers that they will be punished. The "short" part ensures that they won't lose their jobs or otherwise have their lives ruined because of a minor violation.
There are a bunch of innovations in the supervision space. Especially for people who have criminal behavior that is a function of their drug or alcohol use. You can kind of ramp up the testing for that and have more certainty of consequences, so you do need to do these drug tests daily or every other day or wear a blood alcohol content monitor or something, and then if you are drinking when you shouldn't be you immediately go to jail for a night and that works. You see a dramatic reduction in drug and alcohol use and a reduction in criminal behavior because people know that there will be consequences for breaking those rules.
- It turns out that large employers are generally willing to hire non-violent ex-cons. But what they want is a large insurance policy—say, $1 million or so—to protect them from liability if an ex-con injures a customer or fellow employee on the job.
[A research group] partnered with some researchers to run an experiment to see what would convince the employers to be open to hiring people with criminal records....And so they tried a whole bunch of different stuff like maybe wage subsidies right? So the employment platform will pay half the wage....The treatment that seemed most effective — all of these things were effective to some degree — but the most effective one was providing insurance up to a maximum of $1 million. So covering the liability risk.
.
And that's way higher than current programs that exist in the government that will cover $5,000. That covers you for things like property theft. It turns out employers don't care about property theft. That's not what they're worried about, they're worried about the assault on the customer or fellow employee and so the million-dollar coverage takes care of that and so that had a huge effect.
- In the US we hand down massively long sentences compared to most other countries. We could cut sentences in half across the board and benefit practically everyone. First are the criminals, who would spend less time in prison. Second is the public budget for incarceration, which could be cut nearly in half. Third, a shorter sentence makes it less likely that a convict will spend enough time locked up to learn the ropes and become a career criminal.
If they're thinking about what the expected cost of committing a crime is — including that punishment — then making the punishment worse and worse, longer and longer prison sentences, should deter people from committing a crime. And so we now have a lot of evidence that’s like, that doesn't work very well.
.
Other countries now routinely use electronic monitoring for instance instead of short prison sentences and they get big returns from that. Do we see recidivism drop dramatically in those countries?...And it turns out yeah, so it becomes an empirical question but the empirical answer in the countries that do it says it’s a total win. And so we should do it more in the U.S. - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy may sound like a little too much woo, but it works well if it's conducted by a good therapist. And that's the rub: there just aren't enough good CBT therapists to scale this up. I wonder if this is something that AI might help with. Not now, but maybe in a couple of years.
There have been nice randomized trials in schools with higher-risk students and with kids who are actually in juvenile detention facilities and enrolling them in this CBT program reduced recidivism, reduced future arrests, reduced violent arrests, and increased school engagement all of these good things. And then the question becomes can we scale this? And I think efforts to scale it have not worked as well partly because you have to dig deeper into your applicant pool of potential leaders of these therapy programs. So the leaders of those programs aren't as good as the ones you had before.
So that's it. Some of these are aimed at preventing initial crimes while others are aimed at keeping probationers from breaking the law again after they're let out. As the list makes clear, these are all straightforward and technically feasible and we have pilot studies and multi-country comparisons for all of them. The problem is that some are expensive (#1, #5); some have big constituencies that oppose them (#7); some are complicated and a pain in the ass to set up (#5); some produce moral objections (#3); some are relatively unknown (#6); and others have problems scaling up (#8).
So it's no picnic. But it's far from impossible either. It would require us to get serious about solving the crime problem, but it wouldn't require any kind of technological or criminological breakthrough. When can we get started?
I heard an argument once that the reason we tend to skew towards slow enforcement and long sentences is that the enforcement side of it (along with prosecution) is usually handled and paid for at the city-level, while imprisonment is done at the state level. That means cities can try and "pass the buck" for crime suppression up to the state with the strategy - whereas if they had to pay for prisons themselves, they'd be much more keen on enforcement that saves money.
We also need this just to clear enough cases at all - especially murder cases with firearms, which can be notoriously difficult to clear and uncover.
A long time ago -probably in the early to mid-70s, I read an article that kind of combined points 5 and 7. A number of studies - showed that severity of punishment was not as strongly corelated to reducing recidivism as speed and certainty of punishment. So that kind of predicted what happened in 5 on probation violations - short but quickly applied punishment reduces recidivism. But that early study showed that shorter but more swiftly delivered and certain punishments did the same for the actual crimes.
Facial recognition is still a bit dubious given reports of how it has more trouble with dark skinned people. Needs serious work, I think.
I majored in criminology in the 70’s and this is what we were taught. I think it’s true to an extent but the other thing we were taught was that recidivism goes way down around the age of 35. What I learned in working in Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles in the mid-70’s was that a lot of youth crime was a result of lack of impulse control. So speed/certainty of punishment wouldn’t affect those crimes. But it stands to reason that as we age and our brains mature we gain a bit of impulse control and at that point start thinking more about the consequences of our actions and thus speed/certainty of punishment become a major factor in our decision making.
Shouldn’t police officer fatalities be normalized to the population of police officers?
Yes it should, but the difference will just be a steeper decrease.
Law enforcement is not a particularly dangerous career nowadays. According to the BLS, the most dangerous occupations are agriculture, logging, mining, and construction. Not law enforcement.
and the highest cause of death had been car accidents basically forever, only surpassed by COVID the last couple years
Police officer fatality statistics seem problematic to me. Who is counted? I usually use the “Officer Down Memorial Page”:
https://www.odmp.org/
But it lists all officers who died in the line of duty including heart attacks and traffic accidents. So far this year in New York State it lists 3 fatalities, all of whom died of 9/11 related illnesses. How would you count that in fatality statistics? In 2021 there were more Covid related deaths than all other reasons combined.
That depends on what you're looking for. Normalizing the number of police officer fatalities to the general population tells us whether the proportion of cop killers in the general population is rising or falling. Normalizing to the population of police officers tells us whether the danger of being a cop is rising or falling.
Re 3, Mr Drum, have you done your daily toe-touches? …
IMO with lead abatement we are well past the point where there is much more to be gained there, and where the lead abatement procedures themselves are not without some pretty big consequences.
One of the big things people have been doing all over the country (all over the world really) is replacing old wooden window with vinyl windows. One of the arguments for doing this is that old windows often have lead paint, which is true.
But man, those new windows are VERY expensive and VERY VERY ugly. There are few things more upsetting to me than seeing a beautiful old house with flat, dead-eyed vinyl windows. And the irony here is that vinyl itself is known to leach lead. This whole thing really is just a great big sop the the vinyl industry and the window manufacturers who are making bank on these horrible windows.
And for lead abatement on wooden trim in your home, well the city of New York will come in and tear out all that century old woodwork and land fill it and replace it with ticky tacky composite garbage for free.
Oh but think of the children! Give me a break. The few 10ths of a percent in crime reduction these massive efforts might theoretically give are not worth the price in the permanent uglification of our cities and neighborhoods.
Everything I've seen on the subjects additional lead remediation—especially soil—would be a real difference-maker and would very easily pay for itself in terms of reduced prison costs, crimes losses, lost productivity, etc. It's not negligible.
Reducing the terror and abusiveness of incarceration in the US did not make the list. Some, too many, believe abuse of convicts equals justice but the more misery created in jails leads to increased recidivism and more violent crimes.
Counseling is a real problem. Despite the popularity of some therapies with the bourgeoisie to increase career and earnings potential, or quitting smoking, treating the incarcerated and the mentally ill homeless does not appear to be widely practiced and unsavory to the industry. Perhaps treating Americans who most need therapy is also not as financially rewarding.
State legislators, many of whom are reactionary, prefer long prison sentences and building more prisons. They are also inclined to shirk custodial responsibility of the people they have condemned to long stays in hell holes, which is also popular with many constituents - until the prison budgets and suits for lack of medical care need to be financed. These advocates of the carceral state will vehemently oppose adopting more humanitarian methods to house and care for law breakers, producing a violent state of nature in the prisons they have filled with the largest prison population in the world.
I strongly agree. Norway has had good success and a very low recidivism rate by treating their prisoners as humans who need to learn non-criminal behavior rather than animals who need to be punished. The prisons are comfortable, the food is good, and the guards model socially desirable behavior by, for instance, being polite to the prisoners. There's more to it, of course, but that's the bare bones. The result is that they manage to rehabilitate many of their prisoners rather than just hardening them.
I have a hard time imagining Yglesias getting on a phone call or a video chat to "interview" someone, I have a very easy time imagining him getting on a phone call or video chat to awkwardly monologue his way through a very uncomfortable conversation.
There’s a story today about Amazon stealing from its customers by tricking them into getting a prime membership then making it hard to cancel. This type of property crime isn’t counted. Pandemic fraud cost a lot too. Not in the stats.
https://apnews.com/article/pandemic-fraud-waste-billions-small-business-labor-fb1d9a9eb24857efbe4611344311ae78
Property crime has changed. No need to mug someone (unless your part of the useless homeless). It’s more sophisticated now. Less violence, more money stolen. Progress!
Where I live the summer shooting season is in full swing. It’s mostly black teenagers. Maybe it is less than in 1990, but you surely want to avoid street or park parties with black folks and be home before sundown. To hell with these criminals.
"Putting CCTV cameras in subways for instance is effective, putting cameras everywhere. It's like the London, UK model of lots of cameras everywhere"
What are the metrics for "effective" ? I don't sense that my UK family would agree that its been effective in any way.
I was surprised that the podcast did not describe the lead connection to crime more fully. There was only a brief sentence near the end. Yet, youth crime rates have fallen by 95%-- in some of the series youth crime has fallen nearly 100% -- over the last few decades in parallel with lower infant lead levels. It certainly makes you wonder whether anything else is needed but still lower lead levels for lower crime rates.
Another surprise was that genetics was only considered in terms of CODIS (i.e., as a genetic fingerprint). I am sure many many people would be very interested in a prisoner GWAS. What are the variants that predispose people to crime (especially once lead is removed)? If these variants could be found, then it becomes plausible that genetic selection of embryos could be tried with potentially very powerful and permanent effects on crime rates.
I am also unclear why the entire podcast focused on generic labels of prisoners without considering specific genotypes. I have had my full genome sequenced and I have received profound insights into who I am as a person as a result. In the era of precision medicine one might have guessed that we would also have precision prison management. The hundreds of polygenic scores that were reported for my genome included many instances where applying normalizing assumptions within the context of a mass institution (like a school or prison) would be highly counterproductive. The podcast seemed to indicate that the strategy used was to randomly try things and see what was effective. With full genome polygenic scores you would know what would be effective before even trying it.
Finally, I found it interesting that no mention was made of the approaching approval of Lecanemab for Alzheimer's disease. The dominant AD in my family has increased criminogenic risk in distant relatives. Lecanemab will have a curative effect of the mild cognitive impairment that likely would have pushed family towards criminal behaviors. Interestingly, glucocorticoids that Kevin is taking also have a known risk for increased dementia risk.
Pingback: Weekend link dump for June 25 – Off the Kuff