In American policy conversations about crime there are, unfortunately, rarely more than two sides.
One side, commonly associated with the left, says that worries about crime are at best overblown and at worse racist. Crime is a symptom of poverty and will go away on its own when a more economically just society is achieved.
The other side, commonly associated with the right, says that crime is a social disease, a symptom of moral decay and cultural rot. Crime must be suppressed by a strong hand and deterred by severe punishment.
In this way, crime has become just one more round of ammunition in an ongoing culture war. But it's worth taking far more seriously. In the US, unique among rich nations, violent crime is so common that it is essentially a life milestone. Being victimized in this way is traumatic and causes long-term mental and physical harms. Crime disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable. It harms economic growth and destroys wealth. And it's the proximate cause (though perhaps not the final cause) of mass incarceration.
The US is crime-ridden
In this series, I'll frequently use murder rates as a proxy for crime rates. This is a common practice among researchers who study crime, since definitions and reporting rates for crime vary widely across countries and regions. Homicide reporting is not perfect, but it's hard enough to hide a body that murder rates are one of the best indices we have for underlying rates of violent crime. In the US, as the FBI's crime statistics show, murder rates correlate well with both violent crime and property crime.
In general, rich countries have low crime rates. Nearly every country with a GDP per capita over $40,000 has a homicide rate of 3 or less per 100,000. The exception, of course, is the United States, with a 2019 homicide rate of 5.4, which is about four and a half times the rich-country average.
Note that both the X-axis and the Y-axis on this graph are logged: the murder rate in the US is between three and ten times the rate in rich countries like France, Japan, England, Australia, or Belgium.
Regional differences in crime mean that some Americans are born into settings that are themselves ten times as violent as the already-high national average. In neighborhoods like Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago, the homicide rate is roughly twice as high as it is in Venezuela or El Salvador, two of the most violent countries on the planet.
Lots of things tend to improve, in general, as people and countries get richer. Infant mortality goes down; infrastructure becomes sturdier and more reliable. But this hasn't happened with crime in the US, even as the country has gotten steadily richer over time, so reason #1 to care about crime is that this is not a problem that appears likely to solve itself. Americans die by violence at nearly eight times the rate of the Spanish, despite being fifty percent richer per capita.
Violent crime is a life milestone in the US
Official crime rates are one way of measuring crime, but a slightly more accurate measure is the crime victimization rate. This is measured in the U.S. by the National Crime Victimization Survey, which takes a representative sample of the population and asks about their experience of crime.
According to the NCVS, the violent crime victimization rate for people aged 12 and over has held roughly steady at roughly 2 per every 100 people per year for the past two decades following a precipitous decline during the 1990s.
A 2% annual victimization rate may not seem like much, but it stacks up year-on-year, and suggests that the 50-year victimization rate, if crime rates don't drop further, is 100% on average. The average American can thus expect to be the victim of at least one violent crime in any given fifty-year period. So it's not a surprise that people can be preoccupied with crime; they live their lives knowing that it's virtually guaranteed they'll be the victim of violence by the time they retire.
Crime disproportionately affects the poor and marginalized
Of course, the 2% statistic is an average, and it obscures a fundamental reality about crime: its burden falls mainly on the already disadvantaged. Crime victimization rates are roughly similar across self-reported racial groups, though black people are about 15% more likely to be victims of violent crime than whites. Much larger differences in victimization appear between economic groups, as the NCVS stats illustrate: people living in households making less than $25,000 per year are about twice as likely to be victims of crime as those in more well-off households.
Children who are victims of abuse or trauma are more likely to be revictimized as adults. Transgender people and people with disabilities are each four times as likely to experience violent crime as their cisgender and able-bodied counterparts. The burden of crime, like that of other social disparities that our society justly seeks to remediate, falls most heavily on those most in need of society's protection.
Crime destroys wealth and hurts economic growth
Future posts in this series will discuss the ways in which poverty might cause crime, but there is a growing body of evidence that crime, to some extent, can also cause poverty. Transnational research efforts have found negative effects on economic growth and commercial property values, but the best-quality research comes out of Mexico, where researchers have used clever, easily understood methods to tease out estimates of the degree to which violence causes risk aversion, reduces youth education and employment, and lowers housing prices.
This last item is particularly relevant to the U.S., where home ownership constitutes a huge portion of middle-class wealth. A violent robbery doesn't only steal from its immediate victim; it also steals from everyone with an economic stake in the neighborhood where it happens — steals wealth from their pockets and opportunity from their children. Even in poor, violent neighborhoods like Englewood, as many as a quarter of homes are owner-occupied. Neighborhood crime robs homeowners of the chance to build wealth and, moreover, robs cities of the property tax revenue that could be reinvested in the infrastructure of those very same neighborhoods. In many communities, the reduced economic opportunity caused by violent crime is part of what traps residents in a grinding cycle of yet more crime and poverty.
Crime causes mass incarceration
Among the many factors resulting in the fact that the US has the largest ???? prison population in the world are three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, plea bargaining, and corruption. But, fundamentally, what causes incarceration is crime.
The real causes, you may object—depending on your political views—are structural racism, the deterioriation of the two-parent family, a stingy welfare state, or a lax attitude to enforcement. But even if one or many of these factors proves to be the final cause of crime, crime itself is the proximate cause of incarceration. No matter the reason that people end up committing a crime in the first place, it's crime — of some sort, at some point — that typically lands them in jail. If we can successfully reduce crime, whether we do it by instituting a universal basic income or creating a national police force, we can reduce the number of people in jail.
This remains true even if you narrowly restrict the definition of crime and take the threat of false conviction into account. That is, it is neither the criminalization of simple drug possession nor a corrupt prosecutorial system that accounts for high incarceration rates.
Using figures from the Prison Policy Initiative, it's easy to see that, even if we instantly decriminalized car theft, fraud, weapons possession, and property crime, America's prisons and jails would still retain more than a third of their inmates: around 700,000 of America's 1.8 million prisoners are locked up because of convictions for violent offenses like murder, rape, and robbery. In this world, America would still have more than double the incarceration rate of Germany (where, I assure you, theft and fraud remain illegal). Is this an incarcerated population composed of framed and wrongfully accused people? Not according to the Georgia Innocence Project, which estimates that 4-6% of the incarcerated are actually innocent.
Crime is traumatizing
Being robbed is scary and being beaten up is painful. But these are not just transitory unpleasant experiences like a bad breakup or a fender bender. Violent crime victimization is traumatic. Experiencing violence knocks your life off track, makes it hard to sleep, makes it hard to trust your neighbors or feel safe walking home at night. And it generates many of the clinical sequelae that American society has, quite rightly, begun to take more seriously during the past few decades.
Though causal data is hard to come by (you cannot randomly assign people to experience crime), descriptive data about the symptoms experienced by crime victims is stark. Violent crime seems to cause depression, and adolescents who experience violent crime are more likely, compared to similar people who have not, to go on to have depression as adults. Those who have experienced violence are likely to experience PTSD, and, in particular, are more likely to have PTSD than those who have experienced to nonviolent traumatic events such as natural disasters.
Coming up
Empirical research on crime has been going on for more than a century. The last few decades, in particular, have seen an efflorescence of careful, high-quality causal analyses. There are real experts on crime who draw defensible conclusions and make testable predictions, as well as people and institutions who spend all of their time thinking up ways to make policy around crime.
Yet, surprisingly, there are few comprehensive summaries of what this large, interdisciplinary body of research has found. Because neither side in America's ongoing culture war rarely takes crime seriously enough to offer anything more than vibes-based hot takes, even the best-quality evidence is often simply loaded into a partisan machine gun and fired at the enemy. And the most careful academic researchers, locked in a publish-or-perish cycle of death, are rarely incentivized to produce work that looks at the big picture.
That picture appears bad enough to warrant a first-principles approach. As I'll argue in future posts, many of the evidence-based policies endorsed by even the most objective commentators — putting more police on the street, for instance — would not do much on their own to bring US crime down to European levels. This comparison may seem strange: indeed, the US is very different from countries with lower crime. But crime is important enough to think beyond what can be done on the margin. The question I want to ask here is not "what can be done to bring down US crime rates?" but rather "how can we turn the US into a country with less crime?"
In the series of posts that will follow this one, I'll explore the causes of and solutions to crime of the scale that we see in the United States: the potential public safety benefits of reducing poverty or increasing policing, the importance of lead, alcohol, and pollution, the impact of social norms and culture, and the effects of what occurs in early childhood and during gestation. This series will take a fundamentally empirical, first principles-based approach, making use of the voluminous academic literature on this topic but starting, so to speak, from the top.
Based on this research, I'll ultimately try to offer solutions that it's at least plausible to imagine being implemented in a near-future version of the U.S. Crucially, these solutions are not intended to make a difference on the margin — to reduce crime by 5% or 10%, on average. Instead, I want to think more expansively about changes that can bring crime down in a big way, for good.