Old People Can’t Escape Their Childhood, Still Committing Violent Crimes at High Rates

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Keith Humphreys emails to say that his latest piece in the Washington Post is “Drum bait.” That’s my favorite kind of bait! Let’s take a look:

In absolute terms, arrests (like crime) are as expected consistently concentrated among the young at each historical time point. But surprisingly, the drop in the arrest rate over time is entirely accounted for by the current generation of young adults, who are busted 23 percent less frequently than prior generations were at their age. Remarkably, despite the national drop in overall crime and arrest rates, the arrest rate among older Americans is higher than it was 20 years ago.

The reason this is Drum bait is that it’s consistent with the lead-crime hypothesis. If you were age 18 in 2013, you grew up in the 90s, a low-lead era. That means you were likely to commit far fewer crimes than someone who was age 18 in 1993 and grew up in the 70s, the peak era for gasoline lead contamination.

But it’s different for older folks. People who were age 40 in 2013 grew up in the highly lead-contaminated environment of the 70s. However, the cohorts who were age 40 in 1993 and 2003 grew up in the 50s and 60s, which were also high-lead eras. It’s no surprise that there’s not much difference between them. (Their absolute crime rate is lower than it is for younger people because people tend to become less violent as they get older. The key here is that there’s very little difference between these three age cohorts because they all had similar exposure to lead in childhood, while there is a difference between the three age cohorts of 18-year-olds.)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Rick Nevin has made similar observations before:

From 1980 to 2011, the USA juvenile (under 18) index crime arrest rate fell by 57%, and the age-18-24 index crime arrest rate fell by 21%, but the index crime arrest rate increased by 32% for ages 35-49. The fall in the juvenile arrest rate from 1980-2011 compares youths born in the 1960s — near the peak in leaded gasoline exposure — with those born after leaded gas was eliminated in the mid-1980s. The 1980-2011 increase in the age-35-49 arrest rate compares adults born before the 1950s surge in leaded gas use with those born near the peak in leaded gas exposure.

(Note: “index crime” is a term that refers to an aggregate of four different violent crimes—murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.)

If you’re interested in reading more about this, and more about the full case for the lead-crime hypothesis, Nevin has put it all together in a short e-book, The Lucifer Curves. You can find it here for a mere $2.99!

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate