Crime is a choice.

Very interesting research being reported in More Pregnancy, Less Crime by Alex Tabarrok. The original research is Family Formation and Crime by Maxim Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose. From the Abstract.

While economists typically study the effects of punishments and taxes on crime and drug use, sociologists have emphasized transformative “turning points” which reduce deviant behavior by strengthening social bonds. We use administrative data from Washington State to perform a large-scale study of childbirth and marriage as turning points. Our eventstudy analysis indicates that pregnancy triggers sharp declines in crime rivaling any known intervention. For mothers, criminal offending drops precipitously in the first few months of pregnancy, stabilizing at half of pre-pregnancy levels three years after the birth. Men show a smaller, but still important, 25 percent decline beginning at the onset of pregnancy, although domestic violence arrests spike for fathers immediately after the birth. A design using stillbirths as counterfactuals suggests a causal role for children. In contrast, marriage is a stopping point, marking the completion of a roughly 50 percent decline in offending for both men and women. The data present a unique opportunity to test the implications of a dynamic rational addiction model, which suggests forward-looking behavior among married and unmarried mothers.

Of course, this is a restatement of a typical cultural trope/tradition of women civilizing men. But there clearly is more to it than that. Women are civilizing themselves through pregnancy, which isn't quite the same thing.

The raw charts are dramatic. For women:

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Basically a fifty percent drop in crime for women and 25% for men purely based on pregnancy. Particularly for those already with a disposition towards committing crime. The comments raise points that complicate the analysis somewhat, particularly regarding threshold effects, role of testosterone, marriage versus pregnancy, etc.

To me the striking thing is that we have gone through 20-40 years of sociological and psychological research with stunning findings, most of which is later found not to be true. Meanwhile, the old tried and tested folk wisdom and bourgeoise values and behaviors keep being found to have major positive outcomes with large effect sizes.

The other striking thing is Tabarrok's conclusion, one shared by most non-academics but roundly denied by social justice postmodernists.

First, these results show that crime isn’t simply a product of family background, poverty and neglect. Crime is a choice.