Crime and Punishment

Like most Americans, I've spent the last few days thinking long and hard about violence in America, especially for the strange mix of factors that result in our multifaceted form of state-sponsored and state-condoned violence. I do not wish George Zimmerman ill will, and part of me is happy that he does not have to visit the hell of American prisons. As Ta-Nehisi Coats so eloquently explains, the injustice of Trayvon Martin's murder has less to do with a not guilty verdict and much more to do with a systematic assault on a broad segment of Americans:

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

[...]

We have spent much of this year outlining the ways in which American policy has placed black people outside of the law. We are now being told that after having pursued such policies for 200 years, after codifying violence in slavery, after a people conceived in mass rape, after permitting the disenfranchisement of black people through violence, after Draft riots, after white-lines, white leagues, and red shirts, after terrorism, after standing aside for the better reduction of Rosewood and the improvement of Tulsa, after the coup d'etat in Wilmington, after Airport Homes and Cicero, after Ossian Sweet, after Arthur Lee McDuffie, after Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpers, after Kathryn Johnston and the Danziger Bridge, that there are no ill effects, that we are pure, that we are just, that we are clean. Our sense of self is incredible. We believe ourselves to have inherited all of Jefferson's love of freedom, but none of his affection for white supremacy.
 
You should not be troubled that George Zimmerman "got away" with the killing of Trayvon Martin, you should be troubled that you live in a country that ensures that Trayvon Martin will happen. Trayvon Martin is happening again in Florida. Right now.

Ta-Nehisi's post is just beautiful. Everyone should read it. Even better, it leads us in a much more important and serious direction. Injustice in America is broad and systematic. Its malfunction is emblematic of flaws existing throughout American society today. It shows up in the shooting of teenagers, in pop culture conceptions of black crime, and most importantly, in the mass incarceration of young black men. The scale of this, intentionally silent form of oppression is shocking. Adam Gopnik provides the statistics in The New Yorker:

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

If we wish to better understand these problems, the best place to turn is William Stuntz's posthumously published masterpiece, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Stuntz forcefully explains that the fundamental problem with the criminal justice system is that it is no longer democratic. Policing and jurisprudence have become entirely divorced from the communities that actually need these services. This is why you have Stop Snitching campaigns and the like, since the relationship is fully adversarial. People from one community are exercising their political/social power over another, to the detriment of all involved. You fix this problem by getting the community more involved with its own criminal justice system and external actors more involved with the community.

I do understand that drive for national unity, but it's important to recognize diversity too. No one says a white person from the suburbs can't be a cop. But who are we kidding? A deficit of white police officers, white lawyers and white judges from the suburbs is not exactly a problem facing urban/ ethnic communities.

The opposite is true. We have people who act like police work is like soldiering because they come from outside the community with hostile attitudes. Even worse, they're entering these communities with military style tactics and weaponry to engage in some bizarre form of urban warfare. And we see the effects. Black people, usually from urban areas, are punished, brutally, at rates astronomically higher than whites that commit similar crimes. No doubt that it's easier from a white cop to empathize with a drunk white teenager than a black one found in a similar situation.

Justice Stevens talks about the effectiveness of community-driven police work in his review of Stuntz's book, where he compares the different policing provided to European immigrants as opposed to those received by African Americans moving north.

Stuntz believes that two enormous migrations that led to crime waves largely define the history of crime and punishment in the United States. The first occurred during the seventy years preceding World War I when over 30 million Europeans came to America and settled primarily in cities in the industrial Northeast. The second occurred during the first two thirds of the twentieth century when seven million blacks left the rural South and moved into the same cities. To put simply Stuntz’s description of the central difference between those two migrations: during the European migration, urban politics soon produced local police forces made up of officers who were similar to and resided among the residents of the areas they were protecting—Irish-Americans trusted Irish cops from the neighborhood to treat them fairly—whereas during the black migration, the white majorities living in suburban areas selected the prosecutors and police officers who enforced the law in black urban neighborhoods.

During the Gilded Age, crime was not controlled chiefly through punishment, but rather through local democracy and the network of relationships that supported it:

Police officers sometimes lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled, and had political ties to those neighborhoods through the ward bosses who represented their cities’ political machines. Those patrols happened on foot: officers, those whom they targeted, and those whom they served knew one another. Cops, crime victims, criminals, and the jurors who judged them—these were not wholly distinct communities; they overlapped, and the overlaps could be large.

Going back to these more democratic forms of justice will be difficult, but its not impossible. There are already movement in place with a strong determination to return democracy back to the lives of ordinary Americans. Like most movements, we won't see results right away, but efforts over the last two years have seen the formation of grassroots institution like Occupy matched with an unheralded distaste for American government.

Even better, we already have good evidence of how effective community-driven policing can become, thanks to New York. While there are still serious problems with things like stop and frisk, New York's increased police presence throughout the city have led to the largest drop in crime in American history. This has been accomplished without particularly meaningful changes in social or economic factors. New York's racial composition, poverty and even drug use has not changed substantially over the last twenty years, yet the city is now as safe as just about any other place in America. Most importantly, New York's incarceration rate has not really changed at all over the last twenty years. Prevention has meant focusing on misdemeanors instead of felonies, and it's doing a great job of keeping people out of prisons.

The most important lesson from Trayvon Martin's murder is that it does not have to be this way. We do not have to live in a society where state violence is the norm. America is unique both in its level of violent crime and its level of incarceration. It seems odd to think that stronger democratic institutions can address these issues simultaneously, but evidence from places like Jersey in the Channel Islands show that this is actually the case. Almost all of America's major public institutions are due for a good shaking. We know the way forward, the only job now is to act.

Lead and Crime

Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones has stirred up a bit of a storm with his most recent article on how exposure to lead was the leading cause of the high crime rates in the late 70's, 80's and early 90's. As he writes,

Needless to say, not every child exposed to lead is destined for a life of crime. Everyone over the age of 40 was probably exposed to too much lead during childhood, and most of us suffered nothing more than a few points of IQ loss. But there were plenty of kids already on the margin, and millions of those kids were pushed over the edge from being merely slow or disruptive to becoming part of a nationwide epidemic of violent crime. Once you understand that, it all becomes blindingly obvious. Of course massive lead exposure among children of the postwar era led to larger numbers of violent criminals in the '60s and beyond. And of course when that lead was removed in the '70s and '80s, the children of that generation lost those artificially heightened violent tendencies.

This argument is supported Karl Smith, and I am a particularly big fan of his work over at Modeled Behavior. Drum elaborates on his simple rule of thumb for understanding epidemic-like phenomena in economics. "If it spreads along lines of communication, [...] the cause is information," Drum writes. "Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule."

Despite my high opinion of Smith in particular, I remain skeptical about Occam's Razor-style arguments applied to social phenomena. People and societies are just too damn complex to have one factor explain something like crime rates. When looking at crime, it's clear that also sorts of factors, including policing, drug laws, the state of the economy and the availability of family planning, contribute. Some obviously play a stronger role than others, but all should be included in an explanation of an effect. Economic models are supposed to parsimonious, but under-fitting (including too few variables) is just as big as a problem as over-fitting (including too many). 

This is a criticism that Drum himself is willing to acknowledge, in part. While some of the pull-out text in the article states that as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the last half century can be explained by lead, this can easily be misinterpreted. As Drum writes, "Even if the 90 percent number is correct, it doesn't imply that lead is responsible for 90 percent of all crime. It only implies that it's responsible for 90 percent of the postwar rise of crime above its natural level, which is determined by a variety of other factors. Later, the drop in lead emissions was responsible for 90 percent of the decline of crime back to its natural level."

In other words, there is a least a substantial portion of the crime rate that could not be explained by lead alone, and Drum is only trying to explain the "crime bubble" that occurred in the US at the end of the 20th century. While this is still a more reasonable suggestion, it turns out that there's a lot of questions concerning the statistical treatments of lead and crime that remain unsolved. Take crime among 14-17 year-olds, for example.

As Steve Sailer explains the preceding chart,*

When looking at the crime fall in the 1990s, this study appears to have the same flaw that dragged down Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory -- a failure to look carefully at crime rates by age cohort, combined with an intoxication with analyzing complex state-level data that leads to a failure to do simple national-level reality checks. (She was clearly influenced by Levitt, so this shortcoming is not surprising.) Wolpaw Reyes simply assumes a 22 year lag between lead poisoning around the time of birth and the violent crime rate. But, we can easily look at more detailed data for different age cohorts, which shows that the crime decline of the 1990s began among older individuals, not among the younger people supposedly benefiting from lower lead or higher abortion.

If you assume a 22 year lag to violent crime, then this graph looks great because the murder rate started to fall after about 1991.

But, that's the same mistake Levitt made way back in 1999: he forgot to look at the crime rates among narrower age cohorts. For the 17-and-under crowd, the two worst years were 1993-94. In other words, they were born when lead pollution had already fallen by almost half (just as they were born when legal abortion was close to its peak, which is a problem for Levitt's theory).

That said, I could find very little stuff out there refuting this theory, other than Sailer's criticism of the statistics. Instead, I mostly found articles supporting it. Discovery wrote about it back in 2008, and The Washington Post covered all of this back in 2007. While not quite as bullish on the crime-lead link as Drum, they nonetheless reach the same conclusion: although we do not fully understand the mechanism for this, there is obviously a strong correlation between lead exposure and crime rates.

Even if Drum is overreaching here, I'm willing to forgive him since the general message is right: lead is really bad for you. And it might take a bit of an overreaction before anything is done to clear up the many lead-contaminated sites left all over the US. As Deborah Blum points out in the Knight Journalism Blog at MIT, that's the most important point that needs to be made:

In other words, it's not that tetraethyl lead is some special form of the poison - the point is that lead exposure in any form is dangerous. And that's the real message here. The connection with crime remains somewhat complicated but there's nothing complicated about the fact that lead, in all its forms, remains one of the most troubling of all industrial exposures. And whether Drum gets it perfect here or not, he does get the main point right. We need to keep reminding ourselves - and our government - that we all benefit by, as they say, getting the lead out.

Call it a useful misconception, even if you remain a skeptic.

* Those familiar with Sailer's work would point out that his disagreement is at least partially motivated by a very specific ideological disposition. Like Charles Murray, Sailer consistently argues that different races experience different levels well-being and achievement for primarily genetic reasons. This blog does not agree with that position, and the reference to Steve Sailer's article is to illustrate the statistical issues at stake in this debate, nothing more.