CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 38

This essay is about crime and punishment, but it has nothing to do with the novel Crime and Punishment by 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Rather it is based on the 2007 book FREEDOMNOMICS: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t by American economist Dr. John R. Lott.

A fundamental tenet of economics is that if something is made more expensive, people will do less of it and conversely, if cheaper, more of it. There is no earthly reason this principle should not apply to crime and punishment. The more certain and harsher the punishment, the less likely the crime will be committed and vice-versa. An example from professional baseball is that the American League has more hit batsmen that the National League, but this only occurred after 1973. Why? The answer is that was the year the American League went to designated hitters for the pitchers. When the American League pitchers had no fear of being hit with a baseball being thrown by the opposing pitchers, they started throwing more beanballs. Of course there were some constraints – the pitcher might be confronted by the hit batsman using his bat to treat the pitcher’s head as a baseball and the pitcher’s team-mates might take exception to being served up a bean ball in retaliation for the pitcher on his team beaning an opposing player. Still, the direct jeopardy to the pitcher was removed.

Speaking of baseball, why are there no women players in the major leagues in this the 21st century? Surely a woman Olympian track star such as Marion Jones-Thomson, a dual citizen of the USA and Belize, could compete with men. And she would be right at home in the steroid milieu of professional baseball.

Violent crime in the United States increased from 1960 to 1991 by an astonishing 372%, well outstripping the population gain. Then just when some academics had predicted even more accelerated rates of additional violent crime, a strange thing happened. The rate of violent crime dropped by 33% from 1991 to 2000 and a similar pattern occurred in Canada. Why the rate of violent crime decreased after 1991 is the subject of this essay.

In their 2005 book FREAKONOMICS (see my essay: FREAKONOMICS – WHAT IS THAT?), Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner theorized that the drop in the violent crime rate after 1991 was largely due to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. They posited that many of the abortions after 1973 were performed on young intercity unmarried minority women. Had these unwanted babies been born, by 1991 a disproportion of them would become young violent criminals. This thesis is disputed by John Lott who offers his own views on the reasons for the decrease in violent crimes.

If, as Dr. Lott asserts, abortion and affirmative action policies increased crime, then what decreased it in the 1990’s? There are a number causative factors; one of the main ones could be the U.S. Supreme Court decision to rescind the death penalty ban in 1976. Although ¾ of the states re-imposed the death penalty soon after the Supreme Court ruling, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that significant numbers of criminals started being executed.

Yes, I know that it is a mantra (Hinduism: A word or formula to be recited or sung - from the Sanskrit word for speech) of the left that the death penalty does not deter murderers. That has long been said, is still being said, and will be said in the future. But what is the truth of it? Capital punishment clearly increases the risk to murderers, but is it a deterrent? It is singular is it not that when criminals are convicted of murder, their lawyers, with the concurrence of the convicted, go to great effort in the sentencing phase of the trial to get long term confinement in prison rather than a death sentence?

One of the most dangerous widespread jobs is that of police officer. In 2005 of the nearly 700,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States, 55 were murdered on the job and 67 were killed accidentally. This murder rate is one in 12,500 and one in 5,600 including accidentally deaths. A variety of steps are taken to reduce this risk such as the wearing of bullet-proof vests, development of special procedures in approaching stopped cars, and sometimes waiting for backup even if it increases the chance of the suspect escaping. Police officers undertake these and other measures to avoid or mitigate the risks of their profession. This self preservation rule applies to criminals just like everyone else – it is human nature. The risk of execution for a violent criminal is greater than the risk of a police officer being killed. In 2005 there were about 16,700 murders in the United States and 60 executions which gives a rate of one execution for every 278 murders. In 2005 criminals were approximarely 20 times more likely to be executed than policemen were to be deliberately or accidentally killed.

A New York Times study of murder rates in 1998 compared states with and without the death penalty. The Times concluded tendentiously and, as it turned out, with dispositive paralogism, that capital punishment was ineffective in reducing crime, noting that 10 out of 12 states without capital punishment had homicide rates below the national average while ½ the states with capital punishment had homicide rates above the national average. This overly simplistic study was disingenuous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, but seems to be de rigueur for social issue stories by the NYT. The 12 states with the death penalty have long had low murder rates due to factors unrelated to the death penalty. When the death penalty was suspended in the interval of 1968-1976 those 12 states still had murder rates lower than most other states. More definitive is that by 1998 the states that reinstituted the death penalty had a 38% larger drop in murder rates than states that didn’t. During the 1968-1976 period when executions were proscribed, murder rates generally skyrocketed in the United States.

After 1976 a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Isaac Ehrlich, began studying the death penalty issue and concluded that each execution deterred as many as 20 to 24 murders. The liberal academics, which include most academics, found his results anathema. Those outraged academicians condemned his work and he was denied tenure at the University of Chicago. He even had difficulty finding employment at other universities. However his work sparked new research into the effectiveness of the death penalty. This research was conducted in the 1990’s as violent crime was plummeting and executions were rising. Between 1991-2000 there were, on average, 9100 fewer murders per year while the number of executions per year rose by 70. Those new studies resurrected Ehrlich’s earlier conclusion that the death penalty significantly deters murder. The consensus of the newer studies estimated that each execution saved the lives of 15 to 18 potential murder victims. I would propose that if executions were carried out say within 5 minutes of guilty verdicts being rendered (more reasonably, make that six months) instead of the 12 to 20 years delay we now have, capital punishment would be even more of a deterrent because a specific violent crime would be more easily correlated with a specific execution in the minds of criminals. Not every type of murderer is deterred by the death penalty of course, serial killers for example and other psychopathic degenerates who seem to enjoy killing.

Incarcerations increased in this country during the 1990’s while crime rates decreased. Is that so surprising? Apparently it is to those criminologists who don’t believe people respond to incentives and to writers of the New York Times. Those deluded souls somehow doubt that locking up criminals deter crime, yet many studies indicate that the more certain the punishment, the fewer the crimes committed. The arrest rate of criminals is one of the most important factors in reducing every type of crime. During the 1990’s, increases in the arrest rate account for 16% to 18% of the drop in the murder rate. Conviction rates explain another 12% of the drop.

The right-to-carry concealed hand gun laws have increased over the past 20 years, adding 30 states and bring the total right-to-carry states to 40 by 2007. Is this a deterrent to crime? There are over 4,000,000 concealed hand gun permits in the country today. It is interesting to note that not one state that has passed right-to-carry laws has ever rescinded that right. This would indicate to me that, at the very least, no bad outcomes have resulted from these laws.

Texas passed a right-to-carry concealed hand gun law, taking effect in January 1996. You have heard the clichés about there are lies, there are damnable lies, and then there are statistics; and statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics, and so on. Statistics, if used honestly and properly, provide useful data, however, if misused, statistics can lead to downright false conclusions. Here is an example from Texas: At the end of 1997 a staff writer for the Dallas Morning News wrote a front page story about the first two years of the right-to-carry law in Texas. He pointed out that at the end of the 1st year (1996) there were 114,500 permit holders who were charged with 431 felonies or misdemeanors during that year. At the end of the 2nd year there were 161,702 permit holders charged with 666 felonies or misdemeanors – a 54.5% increase ([666-431]/431 = 54.5%). He quoted opponents of the concealed carry law saying the numbers prove the need for increasing restrictions on handgun permits.

Consider what those data actually show. At the start of the 1st year (1996) there were, apodictically, zero permit holders; at the start of the 2nd year there were 114,500 permit holders. I do not know what the distribution of permits was on a month-to-month basis, but surely a more valid comparison would be to take the average number of permit holders during 1996 ([0 + 114,500]/2 = 57,250) and during 1997 ([114,500 + 161,702]/2 = 138,101). Using the data in a statistically more meaningful and logical way would yield a normalized decrease in the rate of crimes committed during the 2nd year (431/57,250 = .7528% [1st year] & 666/138,101 = .4823% [2nd year]; then ([.7528%-.4823%)]/.7528% = 35.9%). Of course there were more felonies/misdemeanors during the second year – there were more permit holders on a month-to-month basis, but if the number of permit holders is normalized, the rate of crimes committed by permit holders decreased by 35.9% in the second year. The clueless Dallas Morning News writer, Scott Parks, should have taken an elementary course in probability and statistics before he wrote his article. If I had been in a letter-to-the-editor writing mode at that time I would have set the DMN straight. Nevertheless I kept the article for future comment, as, for example, now.

While the use of concealed hand guns allows people to protect themselves from criminals, there are potential drawbacks of increasing the number of gun carriers. People can accidentally shoot themselves or others or they may use their guns irresponsibly. The pertinent question is: do they save more innocent lives than they put at risk? Most legal gun owners pose few risks to themselves or other law abiding people. They are overwhelmingly conscientious and careful people by nature, unlike criminals who generally obtain their guns illegally.

The finding of the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual survey that has been conduction since 1973, was that having a gun is the most effective deterrent to being victimized by violent criminals. During the 1990’s, assault victims who used a gun for self-protection were injured 3.6% of the time; 5.4% of those who ran or drove away were injured; 13.6% of those who threatened the attacker without a weapon were injured; and those who undertook no self-protection fared the worst, they were injured 55.2% of the time. Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of peaceful resistance may have worked against British imperialists who could be embarrassed by public opinion, but criminals require more forceful opposition.

Economists Stephen Bronars and Lott found significant evidence that criminals move out of areas where concealed handguns are legalized. Their study analyzed counties that border each other on opposite sides of a state line. In such cases, counties in states that adopt right-to-carry laws see a drop in violent crime that was about four times larger than the simultaneous increase in violent crime in the adjacent counties without such laws. However violent some criminals are, they are not necessarily self-destructively stupid. At least some of them are smart enough to leave towns where they risk being confronted by law abiding citizens carrying concealed handguns.

According to Dr. Lott, overall, there are three crime fighting techniques: increased use of the death penalty; rising arrest and conviction rates; and the passage of right-to-carry laws which collectively account for 50% to 60% of the drop in murder rates in the 1990’s. Although Dr. Lott does not think so, I believe that abortion is also a contributing factor in the reduction of violent crime, even though I can not quantify it.

Gender and age are important factors in crime statistics and despite the risk of sounding politically incorrect, it must be said that race is also. African-Americans are the most likely perpetrators of crime as well as the most common victims. The national murder rate was 5.6 per 100,000 people in 2002, while the rate for African-American males between the ages of 17 to 25 was 78 per 100,000 or 14 times the national rate. It should also be noted that young African-Americans males (17 to 25 years old) committed murder at a much higher rate than African-Americans in general which was 24.1 per 100,000 in 2002. Murderers overwhelmingly kill people of their own race. Of the African-Americans who are murdered, 91% are by other African-Americans; and 84% of white murder victims are murdered by other whites.


Gun control advocates predicted that when the federal assault-weapons ban expired on September 13, 2004, 10 years after taking effect, gun crimes would surge out of control. Among those advocates were Sarah Brady who said the ban’s termination would effectively “arm our kids with Uzis and AK-47s” and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) who ratcheted up the rhetoric, labeling the banned guns “the weapon of choice for terrorists.” The gun control advocates warned that only states with their own assault-weapons bans would escape the coming bloodbath. So what actually happened? FBI statistics showed that nationally the murder rate fell by 3% in 2004, the first drop since 2000, with firearms deaths dropping by 4.4%. Even more confounding for the gun control advocates, after the ban expired, the monthly murder rate plummeted 14% during September through December.

The murder rate for the seven states with their own assault-weapons ban declined by 2% in the same time period that the 43 states without a ban experienced a 3.4% decline in their murder rate. One can not claim with a great degree of certainty that these murder rate reductions were due wholly or partially to the assault-weapons ban or lack thereof, but it does seem clear that the ban did nothing to reduce crime. The “gun grabbers” have not proven their case.