Myth: Getting tough on crime reduces crime.

Fact: States with the toughest law enforcement have the most crime.



Summary

Hiring more police officers and throwing more people into prison does not reduce crime - in fact, those states which pursue this strategy tend to have the highest crime rates. And this is true internationally as well; the nations with the toughest approach to crime have the most of it. What are the real causes crime? Scholars lately have been drawn to two particular explanations: media violence and income inequality.



Argument

THE U.S. EVIDENCE

The statistics below show that spending more on police and prisons is correlated with a higher crime rate. Before examining these statistics, however, it is useful to keep a few points in mind. The first is that correlation is not causation -- just because a high crime rate accompanies a high police effort does not tell us which causes which. And, second, one may not cause the other at all. An example best illustrates this point: it could be said that the more birds fly south, the more trees change the color of their leaves. Although this is indeed a correlation, neither causes the other; the real cause is a third factor, the onset of autumn.

With these points in mind, let's review the possibilities:

1. A greater police effort creates more crime.

2. More crime calls for a greater police effort.

3. A third and unknown causal factor causes both to rise.

If the first scenario is true, then one could imagine a few possible explanations: police somehow antagonize the community, whether through police brutality or an "us vs. them" mentality; money is drained from needed social spending to fund the costs of a greater police presence; or higher levels of crime have always existed but it takes a greater police effort to expose it. The last point is quite doubtful, because almost all crime is reported by victims or witnesses, not discovered by police. These reports by citizens form our crime statistics. There is little reason to believe that people's decisions to report crime are based on the size of the police force.

If the second scenario is true, then one must ask why the greater police response isn't solving crime. For example, Florida's crime rate is three times higher than West Virginia's. It also spends three times more per capita trying to fight crime. Unfortunately, Florida's greater effort has been going on for decades, with no relative reduction in crime whatsoever. This would suggest that the effort is ineffective. Or if it is indeed effective (but is merely fighting a losing battle), then this takes us to the next point:

If the third scenario is true, then society's attention should not be focused on greater law enforcement, but on the identification of the social cause responsible for crime. If Florida reduced its police budget to West Virginia's level, crime could conceivably rise from three times worse to six times worse… which suggests that Florida's social problems must be even worse than current crime statistics would suggest.

What might these social causes be? Criminologists have put forward a variety of theories: drugs, poverty, America's greater access to guns, broken homes, lack of moral instruction, etc. The statistics do not show a strong correlation to any of these causes, however, and the ultimate cause of crime remains debatable. It may even be a combination of all of the above.

Be that as it may, two culprits have been receiving increasing attention by scholars lately. The first is media violence. Dr. Brandon Centerwall has produced one of the most famous studies, which found that the mere introduction of television into a region causes its crime rate to double as soon as the first television generation comes of age. (1) In a 22-year study of 800 children from grade 2 to early adulthood, Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann found that the best predictor of later aggression was a heavy childhood diet of TV violence -- more so than poverty, grades, a single parent in the home or exposure to real violence. (2)

The second is income inequality. Although absolute poverty levels do not correlate too significantly with the crime rate (see chart below), income inequality does, strangely enough. Two separate studies, one from Harvard, the other from Berkeley, compared state crime rates to their income inequality rates, and found that the states with the most inequality had the highest rates of homicide, violent crime and incarceration. The reason why is still being explored, but potential explanations include psychological reasons, and the fact that prices of needed goods and services are relative too, even in a rich country. (3)

Regardless of the cause, the following statistics show that getting tough on crime is not a successful policy. The charts below list each state in order of its crime rate and then lists its law-enforcement expenditures, prison population rate, poverty rate and high school dropout rate. The first chart gives the raw data. The second chart is the same as the first, except that it gives a state's ranking instead of the raw data. This is to help find the correlation between states. Further analysis of these charts follows below.

Column 1 - CRIME: Crime rate per 100,000 population. Includes murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft. (4)

Column 2 - POLICE: State and local police protection and correction-employment expenditures, in dollars per capita. (5)

Column 3 - PRISON: Number of Federal and State Prisoners per 100,000 of state population. (6)

Column 4 - POVERTY: State poverty rate. (7)

Column 5 - HS DROPOUTS: State high school dropout rate. Comprises percentage of current 16-19 year olds who are not in school and have not finished the 12^th grade or received a general equivalency degree. (8)

So crime is significantly correlated to police and corrections spending, incarceration rates and high-school dropout rates. Surprisingly enough, the correlation between poverty and crime is not too significant. However, as mentioned above, Harvard and Berkeley have found that income inequality correlates much more strongly with crime than poverty. In fact, these studies find that income inequality correlates with most of the nation's social problems.

THE INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE

The U.S. is the most violent society in the industrialized world, and probably the entire world as well. Although it doesn't have the most police per capita, the U.S. does have the toughest laws and punishments by far. The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, is becoming much less relevant as time passes; the U.S. has been following this "get tough" approach for decades, with no significant reduction of its violent crime rate.

All the following statistics are for 1991, and come from the international encyclopedia Where We Stand. (10)

Some may object that international comparisons are like apples and oranges. However, that objection misses the point: if the many social differences of these nations contribute to a lower crime rate, Americans should consider adopting these social policies for themselves. Almost universally, these other nations have abolished the death penalty, practice gun control, and feature less police brutality and more liberal courts. On a less crime-related basis, these other nations also have greater social benefits, less inequality of wealth, larger public sectors and more democratic participation.

Return to Overview

Endnotes:

1. Brandon S. Centerwall, "Exposure to Television as a Risk Factor for Violence", American Journal of Epidemiology, (Vol. 129, 1989), pp. 643-652.

2. Rowell Huesmann and Leonard Eron, eds., Television and the Aggressive Child: A Cross-National Comparison, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986).

3. Crime correlations with inequality found in George A. Kaplan and others, "Inequality in income and mortality in the United States: analysis of mortality and potential pathways," British Medical Journal, Vol. 312 (April 20, 1996), pgs. 999-1003. For a related study correlating inequality to mortality rates, see Bruce P. Kennedy and others, "Income distribution and mortality: cross sectional ecological study of the Robin Hood index in the United States," British Medical Journal, Vol. 312 (April 20, 1996), pgs. 1004-1007.

4. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, 1992.

5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Government Finances, series GF, No. 5, 1992.

6. Bureau of Justice Statistics, mid-year, 1993.

7. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P60-188, 1992.

8. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990 Census of Population, CPH-L-96.

9. Spearman correlation of ranks:

Crime/police:

p (chance that r=0 coincidentally) = 5.9865e-06
ts (t statistics) = 5.0872
df (degrees of freedom n-2) = 48
r (correlation) = 0.59186

Crime/prison:

p = 3.6456e-05
ts = 4.5513
df = 48
r = 0.54905

Crime/poverty:

p = 0.077641
ts = 1.8032
df = 48
r = 0.25187

Crime/HS dropout:

p = 0.00013006
ts = 4.1620
df = 48
r = 0.51496

10. Where We Stand, Michael Wolff, Peter Rutten & Albert F. Bayers III and the World Rank Research Team (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), pp. 289-297.

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