South Dakota has been on a prison bender during the past couple decades, incarcerating people at a faster rate than surrounding states even though our crime rate is about the same as our neighbors'. Governor Daugaard wants to address that costly problem with a proposal to reform our parole and probation system and reduce recidivism.
South Dakota's goal should not be to put more people in prison. Our goal should be to keep people from going to prison in the first place. Toward that end, Kevin Drum posts a hefty article in Mother Jones that contends one of the biggest contributors to crime (not to mention hyperactivity, attention-deficit problems, IQ decline, and other health problems) is lead contamination. He cites economic and public health research that finds the use of tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive correlates tightly with crime rates. When leaded gasoline surged, the crime rate surged about 20 years later. When the U.S. got rid of leaded gasoline, the crime rate dropped about 20 years later. The research Drum cites finds the lead–crime link holding at national, state, and even neighborhood levels. The science is pretty clear: even tiny amounts of lead mess up the parts of the brain that make people behave themselves.
Drum notes that even though we've switched to unleaded gasoline, all the lead we coughed from our tailpipes is still around on the ground. We kick it up and breathe it and our kids pick it up and eat it all the time. And there's still lead in the paint of lots of old houses, which gets released when folks renovate or just slide their windows open and shut. So there are still plenty of health gains to be had by cleaning up lead.
Drum estimates that a serious nationwide program to replace old windows and clean up lead in soil would cost $20 billion per year for twenty years. Adding up just the benefits of increased income from higher IQs and savings from a 10% reduction in crime, Drum estimates we'd get an annual return of $210 billion. Spend a buck on lead mitigation, and you get ten and a half bucks back, with nearly three-quarters of the benefit coming from crime reduction.
But the attention and money we could have been spending on lead mitigation has gone toward building prisons:
At the same time that we should reassess the low level of attention we pay to the remaining hazards from lead, we should probably also reassess the high level of attention we're giving to other policies. Chief among these is the prison-building boom that started in the mid-'70s. As crime scholar William Spelman wrote a few years ago, states have "doubled their prison populations, then doubled them again, increasing their costs by more than $20 billion per year"—money that could have been usefully spent on a lot of other things. And while some scholars conclude that the prison boom had an effect on crime, recent research suggests that rising incarceration rates suffer from diminishing returns: Putting more criminals behind bars is useful up to a point, but beyond that we're just locking up more people without having any real impact on crime. What's more, if it's true that lead exposure accounts for a big part of the crime decline that we formerly credited to prison expansion and other policies, those diminishing returns might be even more dramatic than we believe. We probably overshot on prison construction years ago; one doubling might have been enough. Not only should we stop adding prison capacity, but we might be better off returning to the incarceration rates we reached in the mid-'80s [Kevin Drum, "America's Real Criminal Element: Lead," Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 2013].
We still have to have someplace to put the inevitable bad guys. But a comparable investment in cleaning up lead would reduce the amount we have to spend on building prison cells. Governor Daugaard's proposal to reform our parole and probation system may do some good with people already in the system, but some serious, long-term environmental thinking will keep more people out of the criminal justice system.
Related: The South Dakota Department of Health reminds you that eating venison shot with lead bullets may pose a higher risk of lead contamination than eating pheasants shot with lead pellets.
Someone in EPA Research just tweeted a link to this integrated assessment in response to Drum's piece.
Self-extirpation is the new normal.
"Our goal should be to keep people from going to prison in the first place. Toward that end, Kevin Drum posts a hefty article in Mother Jones that contends one of the biggest contributors to crime (not to mention hyperactivity, attention-deficit problems, IQ decline, and other health problems) is lead contamination."
First off, the Cultural Marxists' transformation of American includes the promotion of criminality. Then Cory uses the New Age Theocrat's environmental extremism to argue that lead is causing criminals. It is the decline in morals that has lead (pun not intended) to increased criminals as the Cultural Marxists have attacked Christianity. Want to decrease criminal activity, then start teaching the kids to read the Bible in French Cory.
Kevin Drum's thesis is based upon a whole lot of speculation and a whole lot of totally unverifiable dollar estimates. This report looks to me like a situation where Kevin Drum started with his conclusion then wrote an article to support it.
When you start with a hypothesis, sometimes research supports it, and sometimes research leads you in a different direction than what you first anticipated. In this case, Mr. Drum apparently unduly focused on one possible reason for crime rates rather than looking at other reasons, i.e. poverty, economic conditions in the country, decreasing real wages for the less educated, those that Cory mentioned, etc. And in so doing, his theory on costs and savings are highly skewed, besides being purely speculative.
If you didn't intend the pun Sibby, why didn't you just write the word, "led" correctly?
R, besides being a very sloppy critical thinker, Sibby is also an atrocious speller. Pretty sure he thought he was spelling "led" right. This is what happens when one is continually being distracted by voices on one's head.
Sibby, make this the year you achieve mental wellness.
Here's a free starter kit: http://www.sanityscore.com/
UK report supports Drum hypothesis:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-export?CMP=twt_fd
My data-unsupported guess is that we are getting many chemicals into our systems with many unknown or not admitted by producers that cause all kinds of deleterious medical and mental problems. We may also find that many kinds of behavior conservatives and religionists believe are caused by morality failures are more directly related to genetics. Another data-unsupported opinion.
Sibby has an opportunity to get the led out this year. I have some sympathy to misspelling in forums. Such posting gets too much like normal speech where sound is more important than spelling. English has a few too many combinations like here and hear, their and there, etc. Right now I can't remember the name for those..also some where the word is spelled the same but with different pronunciation and meaning in different contexts.
Anyway, Sibby's spelling problems are insignificant in comparison to what he knows he knows, but whicht are actually totally incorrect, inappropriate, or irrelevant.
Sibby apparently does not mind being the forum equivalent of a fish in a barrel.
Excuse me: what part of the medical research on the harm caused by lead is flawed? If lead lowers IQ and makes people behave worse, how can reducing lead exposure not boost IQ and reduce crime?
Steve, what is so screamingly wrong or religiously kooky about trying to remove poison from the environment?
While Republicans still control the US House they will not stand for any IQ increasing policies that might add to existing demographic trends favoring Dems.
"Steve, what is so screamingly wrong or religiously kooky about trying to remove poison from the environment?"
I have no problem removing the New Age Theocrat's theology from public education. At least give taxpayers the option to not send their kids and grand kids into that poisonous environment and our education tax dollars follow that decision...all in the name of religious freedoms.
Mitchell is a poisonous environment. No taxpayer should have to send their children or grandchildren there.
Mercury joins lead in killing US:
http://www.wuwm.com/programs/lake_effect/lake_effect_segment.php?segmentid=10032
Sibby has a philosophical soulmate.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/08/armed-mafia-are-stalking-us-conspiracy-peddler-alex-jones-melts-down.html
Yup. Nut jobs. I watched that guy last night. And, not surprisingly, I'd heard every one of his rants before, right here in the good ol' SD Blogosphere.
There must be a newsletter that they all get to say the same things... plus some particularly strange mindset that inclines them all to say those nutty things.
Steve, this is straight science. No agenda, no rhetoric, just science. Lead makes us dumber and more anti-social. Cleaning up lead makes us smarter and healthier.
Surprise! South Dakota sees jump in youth incarceration:
http://www.aecf.org/KnowledgeCenter/Publications.aspx?pubguid={DFAD838E-1C29-46B4-BE8A-4D8392BC25C9}