Research indicates that environmental cleanup may do more than repressive laws and tough policing to reduce crime. Republicans are not interested.
Here’s a really interesting article from this morning’s Washington Post. It seems an economist who studies crime statistics has concluded that the crime waves of the 1970s and 80s were caused largely by lead poisoning of young children twenty years earlier. The decrease in crime since that time is because we cleaned up the lead, starting in the early 1970s. This correlation is supported by data from eight other countries, going back into the nineteenth century.
This guy’s research is not the only evidence pointing to a connection between lead poisoning and criminality; the article quotes the editor of Environmental Research, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, to the effect that
There is a strong literature on lead and sociopathic behavior among adolescents and young adults with a previous history of lead exposure.
This connection does not appear to controversial among scientists familiar with the facts. A casual search turns up dozens of references to peer-reviewed articles. For example, here is an article on lead poisoning and crime, written by the researcher who first identified lead as a cause of cognitive deficits in children.
Lead is a neurotoxin, affecting the central nervous system (not to mention the kidneys, blood and other organs). We have known about its dangers for a long time. In spite of that, automakers put it into gasoline to reduce engine knock and paint manufacturers added it to paints to resist moisture and increase durability. It has now been removed from these and other products. In fact, the removal of lead from gasoline and paint was one of the biggest environmental success stories of the twentieth century, along with DDT and CFCs. The mean blood level of the American population fell 75% after it was phased out of gasoline.
What are we doing? And what are we prepared to do about it?
The dangers of lead and other pollutants tend to be expressed in the abstract language of blood levels among millions of people, some unspecified spread of symptoms such as learning disabilities, or the numbers of deaths or hospitalizations annually. The human reality tends to disappear behind the numbers. So we can admit, in general terms, that we are "poisoning" the planet, or ourselves, without thinking of what that really means.
So here’s a demonstration, of the most chilling sort. Pollution is not just creating illness, but also criminals. What else are we doing to ourselves, to other living things, and to the planet? Well, we know some of the story, but this article suggests that there’s a lot more that we don’t. Clearly, we need to be alert to these kinds of issues, and to be ready to change our behavior when the evidence points to the need.
Facts be damned
Unfortunately, our political system is dominated by people who have no intention of doing any such thing. Just look at Bush’s record on science, for example. Or look at Rudy Giuliani’s response to this research, for another. The Washington Post article tweaks Giuliani for claiming all the credit for New York’s decline in crime, when the bulk of the change, according to this research, would have happened regardless of who was mayor or what type of policing was done.
Clearly, the article’s author is no fan of Giuliani. But it’s sadly typical to see how Giuliani and his surrogates respond to the research, declining to respond on the one hand, and calling it "absurd" on the other. It reminds me of the derision that greeted Bill Clinton’s 1994 anti-crime proposals, which included midnight basketball and other efforts to address the causes of crime. The same opportunistic nonsense is appearing in response to the Washington Post article; a particularly incoherent example is here.
Lots of Republican academics and politicians, Giuliani included, have made their careers as crime fighters. But a serious crime fighter is not going to turn their back on any research, knowledge or policies that show promise. Giuliani, sadly, seems to belong to the camp that disregard findings that don’t advance them toward power. Others, like John DiIulio, author of the "superpredator" theory of dangerous young black males, have had the intellectual honesty to repudiate mistaken ideas in the face of evidence. But the punitive laws passed by State and Federal politicians, based on these discredited theories, are still on the books. They will stay there until someone – presumably someone with more intellectual integrity than today’s rightists and Republicans – corrects them.