Reversal of misfortunes

From Crime in Europe and the United States: dissecting the ‘reversal of misfortunes’ by Paolo Buonanno, Francesco Drago, Roberto Galbiati,and Giulio Zanella. Abstract:

Contrary to common perceptions, today both property and violent crimes (with the exception of homicides) are more widespread in Europe than in the United States, while the opposite was true thirty years ago. We label this fact as the ‘reversal of misfortunes’. We investigate what accounts for the reversal by studying the causal impact of demographic changes, incarceration, abortion, unemployment and immigration on crime. For this we use time series data (1970–2008) from seven European countries and the United States. We find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime. Our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in Europe.

It has been my experiential perception that this, higher crime in Europe than in the US, has been true for a number of years now, though I have not seen the empirical evidence to support that. Interesting to see it here.

But there are always nuances.

My guess is that for the upper two and maybe three quintiles, crime rates between Europe and the US might actually be fairly similar, that most of the variance between the two occurs in the bottom two quintiles.

I suspect that is especially the case for homicide, which they note as the exception. But the US has a very specific homicide problem that it has not yet figured out how to tackle and which is, in fact, politically explosive - no one wants to touch it even though we should be focusing on it and addressing it. That is that half the homicides are committed in an urban environment by African-American males between the ages of 15 and 45. Without those 5,000 murders, the US is, I would wager, significantly safer than Europe even on the homicide measure.

War on Drugs was meant to address this problem, but did not. Because it is so fraught a topic, no one wants to talk about it and so the killings go on.

The abstract sheds light on trade-off choices. There are libraries of conflicting books and research about the relationship between crime and punishment. The US, for past thirty years, has had a much more punitive judicial system than Europe, and we have had, perhaps consequently, a faster and steeper fall in crime than Europe. At this point, Europe is kinder to its perpetrators than the US but it has higher crime as a consequence.

There is much to criticize in the US judicial system (particular the elements where we use the judicial system as a means of revenue generation) and there is an emerging bi-partisan effort to indeed reduce the most egregious features. But it is an interesting trade=-off that is hard to discuss and hard to achieve between mercy and safety. We have one set of outcomes. What are we willing to give (increasing mercy) when it seems clear that all we will get is increased suffering (increased crime).