Sherry Chandler

Here’s a sort of intriguing thesis, as reported by Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post:

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

“I began with the city that was the crime capital of America,” Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent.”

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani’s tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the “New York miracle” was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children’s exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin’s work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

Anyone who has read much in Roman history should be familiar with the notion that the lead piping they used in building all their impressive aqueducts is what made those Augustan emperors mad as hatters — though it was mercury that drove hatters mad, I think.

If Nevin’s work should prove true, it would make a nice parallel — great empires gone wrong as a result of their great technology.

But crime rates have been rising lately, a trend I have wanted to put down to the tendency of our society to be more polarized under Republican rule and also the growing economic imbalance of the Bush years. Nevin has another explanation:

Nevin acknowledges that crime rates are rising in some parts of the United States after years of decline, but he points out that crime is falling in other places and is still low overall by historical measures. Also, the biggest reductions in lead poisoning took place by the mid-1980s, which may explain why reductions in crime might have tapered off by 2005. Lastly, he argues that older, recidivist offenders — who were exposed to lead as toddlers three or four decades ago — are increasingly accounting for much of the violent crime.

I have a prejudice against the culture of punishment (mandatory minimum sentencing for everybody but Scooter Libby for example). The concept justice strikes me apt to slip over into revenge. And it’s far more often the poor who are punished (once again, see Scooter Libby). So maybe I’m just a sucker for theories like Nevin’s and ending paragraphs like Vedantam’s:

Nevin’s finding may even account for phenomena he did not set out to address. His theory addresses why rates of violent crime among black adolescents from inner-city neighborhoods have declined faster than the overall crime rate — lead amelioration programs had the biggest impact on the urban poor. Children in inner-city neighborhoods were the ones most likely to be poisoned by lead, because they were more likely to live in substandard housing that had lead paint and because public housing projects were often situated near highways.

Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, for example, were built over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with 150,000 cars going by each day. Eighteen years after the project opened in 1962, one study found that its residents were 22 times more likely to be murderers than people living elsewhere in Chicago.

Nevin’s finding implies a double tragedy for America’s inner cities: Thousands of children in these neighborhoods were poisoned by lead in the first three quarters of the last century. Large numbers of them then became the targets, in the last quarter, of Giuliani-style law enforcement policies.