Alternatives II: Social Action
excerpted from the book
Crime and Punishment in America
Why solutions to America's
most stubborn social crisis have not worked - and what will
by Elliott Currie
Henry Holt, 1998, paper
p114
... there is now overwhelming evidence that inequality, extreme
poverty, and social exclusion matter profoundly in shaping a society's
experience of violent crime. And they matter, in good part, precisely
because of their impact on the close-in institutions of family
and community. We do not know all that we need to know about these
connections, but a consistent picture emerges from the accumulated
research. And it is a picture that most of us, on reflection,
would not find very surprising. On the face of it, the argument
that social factors are unimportant in explaining crime is an
improbable one. Most people, after all, understand viscerally
that some places are more dangerous than others and that this
has to do, in part, with the social conditions within them. If
they travel, they know that some cities are more dangerous than
others; that walking the streets of Washington, D.C., at night
is not the same sort of experience as walking the streets of Copenhagen,
or even Toronto. At home, most Americans would prefer that their
car break down, if it must, in a leafy middle-class suburb than
in the heart of the urban ghetto.
Nevertheless, a small but influential
handful of social scientists and pundits still insist that social
and economic differences have little or nothing to do with crime
rates-and that, accordingly, expanding opportunities and providing
better supports for the vulnerable won't make any difference.
p115
Around the world, the countries with relatively low levels of
violent crime tend to be not only among the most prosperous but
also those where prosperity has become most general, most evenly
distributed throughout the population. The countries where violent
crime is an endemic problem are those in which prosperity, to
the extent that it is achieved at all, is confined to some sectors
of the population and denied to others. That includes a number
of less developed countries in Latin America, Africa, and the
Caribbean (and parts of the former Soviet bloc) and one country
in the developed world-the United States.
p117
What Americans have difficulty comprehending is that in more advanced
countries, death by deliberate violence is a very rare phenomenon-sufficiently
rare that it does not appear in statistics of the leading causes
of death. In the United States, homicide is the third leading
cause of death for black men of all ages, fifth for Hispanic men,
and seventh for Asian men. Astonishingly, homicide even ranks
among the top ten causes of death for both black and Asian women.
The composition of deadly violence is different as well. Homicide
in the United States is much more likely to involve strangers
than it is in other countries. In Sweden, for example, homicide
is not only low by our standards-averaging considerably less than
2 per 100,000 per year for decades (versus our 8 to 10 per 100,000)-but
has historically occurred "overwhelmingly between relatives
and persons known to each other." The United States, in short,
as people in less violent countries understand and routinely comment
upon, is a strange and disturbing anomaly in the developed world.
These differences are not confined to
homicide, although it's there that our statistics are most reliable
and, probably not coincidentally, that the international differences
are sharpest. Take robbery: although even minor robberies are
apparently more likely to be reported and recorded in many other
developed countries (because their citizens are less resigned
to being robbed and less fearful of reporting crime to the police),
reported robbery rates are much higher here than in comparable
countries. Thus, despite the several-year decline in crime in
New York City, it was only in 1995 that the number of robberies
there fell below that in all of England and Wales, with seven
times the population.
Robberies in America, moreover, are far
more likely to be committed with weapons. And it is the combination
of the greater likelihood of violent crime in the first place
with the higher probability that the crime will involve a weapon,
especially a gun, that accounts for the uniquely high levels of
deadly violence in the United States. Franklin Zimring and Gordon
Hawkins have detailed this pattern in comparing robberies and
burglaries in London and New York City. New Yorkers are far more
likely to be robbed (the rate of reported robberies in 1992 was
nearly four times that in London); and their chances of being
killed during a robbery are even more disproportionate. There
were 5 robbery deaths in London in 1992, versus 357 in New York.
That difference, not surprisingly, is closely tied to the far
more frequent presence of guns in New York's robberies. Startlingly,
however, the risk of being killed in the course Of a robbery in
New York that does not involve a gun was still four times greater
than the risk of being killed in any robbery in London.
Compared with the British, then, the American
pattern is distinctive at every level: Americans are far more
likely to commit robbery in the first place, more likely to use
a gun and thus risk the death or serious injury of their victim
if they do, and more likely to inflict deadly force on their victim
whether or not they use a gun. Among other things, this suggests
that reducing the use of guns in predatory crimes could go a very
long way toward reducing the worst American violence-an issue
to which we'll return. But it also reminds us that the distinctive
American levels of violence involve forces that go much deeper
than the availability of guns alone.
It is hard, then, to credit the idea that
"prosperity" is to blame for a problem which remains
relatively tractable in most prosperous societies-with one notable
exception. Blaming "freedom' for crime's ravages runs up
against the same logical problem. Holland may be the "freest"
country in the world, when it comes to tolerance of doing one's
own thing (that has certainly been true of its attitude toward
drug use). But Holland's murder rate, at last count, was one-sixth
the U.S. rate.
p119
... the stark differences in serious criminal violence among the
wealthy industrial democracies make it clear that neither democracy
nor freedom nor prosperity can explain these patterns-and that
something that distinguishes the United States from most other
industrial countries must be an important part of that explanation.
*
If prosperity, democracy, and freedom
are not to blame for America's violence problem, what is?
The accumulating research suggests that
the answers are complex. But there are answers. There are indeed
"root causes" of America's disturbingly high levels
of violence, and they involve precisely those things that have
made America's brand of prosperity very different from that of
other advanced societies.
We can begin to trace some of these differences
in the findings of the Luxemburg Income Study (LIS), an international
survey of poverty, inequality, and government spending in industrial
countries, directed by Lee Rainwater of Harvard University and
Timothy Smeeding of Syracuse University. With carefully assembled
data and in cautious, understated language, the LIS paints a troubling
portrait of the United States-a country that, though generally
quite wealthy, is also far more unequal and far less committed
to including the vulnerable into a common level of social life
than are other developed nations.
To begin with, children and families in
the United States are far more likely to be poor than are their
counterparts in other industrial democracies-and, if they are
poor, are more likely to be extremely poor. Our overall child
poverty rate in the early 1990s was about 22 percent; Australia
and Canada, our closest "competitors" in the industrial
world, had rates of about 14 percent. Most of Europe was far behind,
with France and Germany at around 6 percent and Sweden, Norway,
and Denmark, among others, below 4 percent.
If These calculations are based on a relative
measure of poverty, in which being poor is defined as having less
than half the country's overall median income. But the LIS also
shows that America's poor are poorer in absolute terms than their
counterparts in almost every industrial nation in the world. It
is often argued that poor people in America are really not so
badly off at all-indeed, much better off than middle-class people
in many other countries-proof that "economic poverty"
cannot be a significant cause of crime or other American social
ills. But the LIS shows that the reality is quite different. Rich
American children are indeed considerably better off, on average,
than rich children in most other advanced societies; middle-income
American children also tend to be somewhat better off than middle-income
children elsewhere. But poor American children are considerably
worse off- sometimes dramatically so-than their counterparts in
other advanced countries. Measured by the real income available
to their families, Swiss and Swedish children in the bottom 20
percent of the income distribution have 72 percent more income
than their American counterparts; German children, 40 percent
more; Canadian children, 25 percent more. Of the eighteen countries
studied by the LIS, only in Ireland and Israel-two relatively
low-income countries-are poor children poorer, in standardized
dollar terms, than their American counterparts.
Accordingly, the economic condition of
children in America combines both absolute deprivation and inequality;
our poor children are poorer and our rich children are richer
than those in comparable societies. And these figures actually
understate the relative plight of low-income American children
because they are based on what economists call "purchasing-power
parities" (that is, on what families can buy in the private
market). They mask the fact that in other advanced nations certain
basic social services-including health care and child care-are
often provided by the government as a matter of right. Factoring
in the publicly funded national health care in Britain or Ireland,
for example, would raise the estimate of poor children's real
income in those countries, reduce the measured inequality among
their children, and widen the gap between the economic well-being
of poor children there and in the United States.
We know-from both the LIS and other studies-that
there are two key reasons for these differences. The first is
that Americans who work in the lower reaches of the paid labor
market are more likely to earn very low wages than their counterparts
elsewhere. The problem of the "working poor," in other
words, is much more severe in the United States. The Harvard economist
Richard B. Freeman points out that American workers in the lowest
10 percent of the pay scale earn, on average, just 38 percent
of the national median wage for all workers-versus 61 percent
among Japanese and 68 percent among German workers. The result
is that the United States maintains a very high rate of what economists
refer to as "pretransfer" poverty-poverty before government
steps in with public income supports to buffer the effects of
low (or no) earnings.
But the LIS makes startlingly clear that
the United States also does less to offset the problem of poor
earnings through government benefits. The United Kingdom, for
example, also has a high rate of family poverty before government
transfers, but a moderate (though recently increasing) rate after
the government steps in with income assistance (again, this is
true even without factoring in the value of free health care under
the British national health system). In Germany and Scandinavia,
generous government income supports for families and children
come on top of already high incomes from work, which makes for
exceptionally low rates of "posttransfer" poverty. In
Sweden, the rate of posttransfer poverty among single-parent families
is less than half the American rate for two-parent families. This
may change, as both the Swedish commitment to full employment
at high wages and their generous system of social provision have
come under attack in the name of fiscal austerity. But historically,
these two factors have combined to keep poverty in Sweden among
the lowest in the world.
A similar picture of America's distinctive
pattern of high inequality and low social support emerges if we
calculate how much various countries spend on what Europeans call
"social protection as a proportion of their overall economic
wealth. Thus, counting not only what we normally think of as "welfare"
but also family allowances, unemployment compensation, and disability
benefits, the United States spends less than 4 percent of its
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on Such programs, and the proportion
has fallen steadily since 1980. At the other extreme, the Scandinavian
countries and the Netherlands spend from 12 to more than 14 percent,
and the proportion has generally risen in recent years-sharply
in some countries. Even after years of conservative rule, Britain
spends twice what the United States does, proportionately, on
social protection-as does Ireland, again a relatively poor but,
within its economic constraints, quite generous society by American
standards.
The bottom line, then, is that American
children and their families are forced to make do in the vicissitudes
of a volatile market economy with unusually little public support.
They are far more likely to suffer a kind and degree of social
exclusion that is no longer tolerated in other industrial societies-even
ones that in sheer material terms are considerably poorer than
the United States. It's important to be clear that this is not
just a difference in material conditions but also a difference
of values-of culture. Our willingness to tolerate extremes of
deprivation and social insecurity points to deep cross-national
differences in the most basic conceptions of collective responsibility
for the well-being of others. Among the industrial societies at
the close of the twentieth century, the United States stands out
as uniquely Darwinian, a prime example of what the British criminologist
David Downes calls a "winner-loser culture."
And these differences are becoming more
pronounced, for both inequality and poverty have recently increased
more rapidly in the United States than in most other developed
countries. The numbers are familiar, and we need only touch on
a few that reveal the magnitude of these shifts in the United
States. The early 1970s as we've seen, marked the beginning of
the American prison boom they were also the low point in American
rates of poverty and economic inequality. About 11 percent of
families with children under eighteen were poor in 1973; the figure
reached almost 19 percent by 1993 and, despite a strong economic
upswing, was still over 16 percent in 1995. And a greater proportion
were not just poor but desperately poor. In 1976, 28 percent of
poor children lived in families earning less than half of the
federal poverty line; by 1995, 39 percent did. Among black children,
the proportion in severe poverty doubled in those years: nearly
half of poor black children in 1995 (in the midst of an economic
boom) were living below 50 percent of the federal poverty level.
Partly because of the spread and intensification of poverty, the
economic gap between haves and have-nots in the United States
increased as well. In the mid-1970s, families in the upper 20
percent of the income scale I had about 7 1/2 times the income
of those in the bottom 20 percent by the mid-1990s, 11 times.
*
p125
Countries where there is a wide gap between rich and poor routinely
show higher levels of violent crime-which helps explain why the
world's worst levels of violence have been found in places like
Colombia, Venezuela, South Africa, and Mexico, where inequalities
are even harsher and more consequential than in the United States.
Look closer, and it becomes apparent that violence is worse in
neglectful or mean-spirited societies than in more generous ones-even
if they are poorer. Societies with weak "safety nets"
for the poor and economically insecure are more likely than others
at a comparable level of development to be wracked by violence.
That is one conclusion, for example, of
a study by Rosemary Gartner of the University of Toronto, who
examined homicide rates in eighteen developed countries from 1950
to 1980. Even in the earlier part of the period, the United States
already suffered considerably higher rates of homicide than the
other countries, and the composition of American homicide was
different as well: Americans homicide victims were more likely
to have been murdered by strangers, as opposed to intimates, than
were murder victims in other countries. And though homicide increased
somewhat for the eighteen countries as a whole over the thirty-year
period, the extraordinary dominance of the United States remained
unchanged. On average, American men died of homicide at an annual
rate of about 14 per 100,000 during these years. The next-highest
rate-about 4 per 100,000-was in Finland. No other country among
the eighteen had a rate as high as 3 per 100,000, and several-including
Denmark, England and Wales, Ireland, Holland, and Switzerland-had
rates below 1 per 100,000.
What accounted for these differences?
Gartner's study points to several factors. Economic inequality
had a powerful effect on the countries' homicide levels. A measure
of "social security" expenditure as a proportion of
GNP-including cash benefits for social welfare and family allowances,
along with unemployment insurance, public health spending, and
other ameliorative programs-likewise had a strong effect on the
risks of homicide for every age group. High divorce rates, ethnic
and cultural heterogeneity, and a cultural leaning toward violence
generally (as measured by support for the death penalty and frequent
wars) also seemed to promote homicide. But the effects of both
inequality and the relative absence of social provision remained
powerful even when all else was accounted for.
*
p131
The links between extreme deprivation, delinquency, and violence
then, are strong, consistent, and compelling. There is little
question that growing up in extreme poverty exerts powerful pressures
toward crime. The fact that those pressures are overcome by some
individuals is testimony to human strength and resiliency, but
does not diminish the importance of the link between social exclusion
and violence. The effects are compounded by the absence of public
supports to buffer economic insecurity and deprivation, and they
are even more potent when racial subordination is added to the
mix. And this-rather than "prosperity"-helps us begin
to understand why the United States suffers more serious violent
crime than other industrial democracies, and why violence has
remained stubbornly high in the face of our unprecedented efforts
at repressive control.
p131
... those countries with the most developed welfare states have
far less violence than the United States, the industrial nation
with the least developed welfare state.
p132
The cross-national research conducted by Rosemary Gartner and
her colleagues sheds more light on this issue. In one study Gartner
and Fred C. Pampel of the University of Colorado explored the
implications of a peculiar difference in the pattern of youth
violence between the United States and other high-income countries.
One of the most consistent findings about the homicide rate in
this country is that it tends to be higher when there is a higher
proportion of youths in the population. (A rising proportion of
young people is one key reason, for example, why homicide rates
rose sharply in the United States during late 1960s.) Some criminologists
have taken this to mean that there is an ironclad connection between
youth and violence. But when we look overseas, the connection
evaporates. In many other industrial democracies, the proportion
of youths in the population has little or no effect on the homicide
rate. This suggests that it is not simply the fact of being young,
but something about being young in the American social context
specifically, that leads to higher homicide rates when the youth
population grows. But what is that "something"?
Rejecting what they call a "naive
demographic determinism," Gartner and Pampel found that what
matters more than the sheer number of youths are the social protections
a society provides for young people and their families. In societies
sharing what they call a "collectivist" orientation-societies
that, among other things, provide universal and relatively generous
social benefits (including health care, income support, disability,
unemployment insurance, and family allowances)-there is only a
weak connection between the size of the youth population and the
rate of homicide. In Norway, for example, a classic "social
democracy," changes in the age structure have no effect on
the level of homicide; in the U.S., an equally classic example
of an "individualistic" political culture, rises in
the proportion of youths in the population translate directly
into higher homicide rates. The research is complex and sophisticated,
but the basic message is simple: countries that have made a long-standing
commitment to provide at least a modest floor of income and social
inclusion for all their citizens have less youth violence than
those in which children and families are routinely left to fall
through the holes of an already threadbare "safety net."
Similarly, the few studies that look specifically
at the impact of welfare benefits on rates of crime within the
United States show that welfare actually tends to lower crime
rates, not raise them. The University of Connecticut sociologist
James DeFronzo, for example, has found that higher welfare payments
appear to reduce rates of burglary. DeFronzo looked at Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits per person, adjusted
for differences in the cost of living, in 140 metropolitan areas
across the United States. He also included, as "control"
variables, the cities' level of poverty and unemployment, the
number of households headed by women, the percentage that was
black or Hispanic, the proportion of young males in the population,
the per capita income, and the city population. With all of these
other factors controlled, AFDC payments had a strong negative
relationship to burglary rates-that is, the higher the average
welfare benefit, the lower burglary rate.
Why might higher welfare payments reduce
property crimes? DeFronzo's data cannot provide an answer, but
there are several possibilities. One is that where poor families
get only a bare minimum income from either work or welfare, illicit
ways of earning income-whether from stealing, dealing drugs, or
prostitution- will obviously be more attractive. Another, more
complex, explanation may be that extremely poor families are less
able to nurture and supervise children and teenagers in ways that
keep them from committing this kind of crime. (Burglary is typically
a crime of the young; the rates peak at about age fifteen.) Whatever
the specific mechanism-and there may be several-the overall implication
is that, as DeFronzo says, "lowering welfare support levels
for the poor might increase crime rates." In a more recent
study, DeFronzo has found a similar pattern for homicide; once
other social and economic factors are controlled, high homicide
rates are strongly correlated with low AFDC payments.
*
p134
The key to our unique problem with violence, in short, is not
the overdevelopment of the welfare state but the opposite: the
underdevelopment of the mechanisms of social and economic inclusion
that have blunted the edges of market capitalism in other industrial
democracies.
But what is it about extreme social exclusion
of the kind so prevalent in the "sink or swim" culture
of the United States that breeds violence and delinquency with
such distressing predictability? Knowing that there is a powerful
connection between deprivation and crime doesn't by itself tell
us exactly how that connection operates. Here again, we don't
know all that we need to know, but some of the mechanisms seem
increasingly clear from the accumulating evidence. Most of them
are, on reflection, not very surprising. And they help us mightily
to think about crafting solutions.
To give the skeptics their due, it's true
that the connections between poverty, inequality, and violence
aren't always either simple or direct. It isn't the lack of money
alone that breeds violence; if that were the case, then graduate
students would be very dangerous people indeed. It's rather that
the experience of life year in, year out at the bottom of a harsh,
depriving, and excluding social system wears away at the psychological
and communal conditions that sustain healthy human development.
It stunts children's intellectual and emotional growth, undercuts
parents' ability to raise children caringly and effectively, increases
the risks of child abuse and neglect, and diminishes the capacity
of adults to supervise the young. It creates neighborhoods that
are both dangerous and bereft of legitimate opportunities and
role models, makes forming and maintaining families more difficult,
and makes illicit activities far more alluring for teenagers and
adults. Life, in short, is harder, bleaker, less supportive, and
more volatile at the bottom- especially when the bottom is as
far down as it is in the United States. And those conditions,
in ways both direct and indirect, both obvious and subtle, breed
violent crime.
p158
In Europe, care for children aged three to five is virtually universal.
Sometimes, as in Sweden, it is offered in freestanding child-care
centers; more often, it is provided through heavily subsidized
preschool programs connected with the school systems. Again, exactly
how we provide a similar level of care is less important than
that we do it one way or another. For older children, making school
facilities widely available after regular school hours for learning
and recreation (what some advocates call "second-shift"
schooling) promises similar benefits.
The fact that we are the only advanced
nation without a national system of subsidized health care also
contributes to our crime problem in several ways.
p160
It is now fashionable to argue that private philanthropy and voluntarism
should take up the 1 tasks we are increasingly stripping from
government. But though exhorting more Americans to volunteer to
help the casualties of an increasingly unequal and insecure economy
may be better than no response at all, it cannot compensate for
the damage done by shortsighted social policies.
The present drift of national policy,
indeed, reflects a stunning degree of collective denial. Across
the political spectrum, for example, there is agreement that families
are critical-that what happens in them has an enormous influence
on whether our children grow up compassionate or predatory, moral
or irresponsible. Yet as a society we want to have it both ways.
We want competent, caring families that can do a good job of socializing
and supervising children, but we refuse to provide the social
supports that would make that possible. We force many parents
to choose between draining overwork in the low-wage economy and
demoralizing poverty outside it. We want parents to work, but
we balk at providing the child care that would allow them to do
so without jeopardizing the well-being of their children. We want
parents to spend quality time with their children, but we reject
the paid work leaves or shorter hours that would make it possible.
Then we blame families for the consequences. We understand that
childhood traumas may lead to violence, but we draw the line at
reliably providing the preventive health care that could address
them. We acknowledge the link between child abuse and violent
crime, but we starve our child-protective systems. In the future,
we will have to choose between perpetuating the kinds of family
stresses that we know breed violence and finally bringing our
family policies into line with those of most other industrial
democracies-which, not coincidentally, suffer far less violent
crime.
The same head-in-the-sand denial runs
through our attitude toward work. Here, too, we seem to want contradictory
things. We want people to work, and, of course, we want them to
work in the legitimate labor market. But we also deliberately
maintain unnaturally high levels of joblessness, partly because
we are afraid that full employment will raise wages-and hurt the
stock and bond markets. We support, rhetorically, the idea that
everyone ought to be a productive member of the community. But
in practice, we are apprehensive at the prospect of an economy
in which everyone is engaged in productive work. That is the main
reason why we haven't made a serious commitment to public job
creation, even though such a commitment has been urged repeatedly
since the Second World War. But we simply cannot have it both
ways. We cannot insist on maintaining Depression-era levels of
joblessness among the young and poor in order to preserve the
income of affluent bondholders and simultaneously expect to keep
our streets and homes safe from violent crime.
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