Recently in Social Factors Category

The Occupy Movement has a basic theme in common with the soft-on-crime Smart-on-Crime crowd:  Major elements of both subscribe to the America Stinks theory. Under the America Stinks (sometimes "Amerika Stinks") theory, much unfairness is created by capitalism, especially that nasty one percent who pay a grossly disproportionate share of taxes hog all the goodies.  Thus, the Occupy Movement thinks it's only just to throw bricks through the windows of banks and corporations, while the Smart-on-Crime crowd thinks that those who steal from such places should be, not prosecuted, but forgiven, since they are the dispossessed victims of said corporations (at least when they are not being the victims of the latest "syndrome" or of over-consumption of Twinkies).

The federal probe that resulted last night in the arrest of five purported anarchists for allegedly plotting to bomb an Ohio bridge began last year at an Occupy Wall Street rally in Cleveland that was infiltrated by an informant who was directed to attend the event by his FBI handlers.

It was at the October 21 OWS event that the informant first met Douglas Wright, 26, who reportedly confided details of his group's planned attacks "against corporate America and the financial system," according to court filings.

....Wright eventually served as the informant's bridge to the four other men busted in the bombing plot--despite the fact that the quartet was "unsure" about the snitch for whom Wright vouched. Of the five men arrested, four were involved in the Occupy Cleveland movement, according to their Facebook profiles, a news story, and a federal criminal complaint.

The most cherished belief of Politically Correct types when it comes to crime is that poverty is the root cause of crime.  If we only spent more money on government antipoverty programs instead of nasty things like enforcing the criminal law, crime rates would plunge.  The fact that we tried that during the Great Society and crime rates soared instead was explained away.

The problem with studying such things, of course, is that there are many factors that go into crime rates, and untangling them is difficult to impossible.

The best studies tend to be longitudinal studies that follow a group of people over a long time.  These studies cost a lot of money and take a long time, obviously, but they overcome some of the difficulties with snapshot surveys taken at one point in time.

The Christchurch Health and Development Study by Otago University in New Zealand has this press release today.

"But contrary to popular belief being brought up in a poor family in this study does not mean increased rates of crime or mental health problems in adulthood," adds Professor Fergusson.

The contextual impact of factors relating to the individual, as well as the family and social environment, were adjusted to distinguish these from the direct impact of low family income.

When this was done it found that poverty and other family factors are not associated with increased rates of crime in adulthood, or mental health problems or related outcomes; but the reasons are not yet clear.

The study therefore suggests caution with regard to claims that reducing childhood poverty will also have a significant and direct effect on crime and other psychosocial outcomes in New Zealand.

The technical article is Sheree J. Gibb, David M. Fergusson, and L. John Horwood, Childhood family income and life outcomes in adulthood: Findings from a 30-year longitudinal study in New Zealand, Social Science and Medicine (in press).  Abstract follows the jump.

The root cause of crime is irresponsibility.  Every society has some irresponsible people, but some societies have a lot more than others.  The cause of widespread increase in irresponsibility is culture rot.

Peggy Noonan has this article in the WSJ with the above title.

I've long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it's also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.

Now I'd go a step beyond that. I think more and more people are worried about the American character--who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.

Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.

Why is our culture spiraling downward?  Any attempt to identify one factor as the sole cause would be simplistic and naive.  A big part of the problem, in my view, is that too few people of sense choose the occupations that have the greatest influence in shaping the next generation.  Teachers who believe in standards of behavior, striving for excellence, and rejecting weak excuses find themselves an embattled minority.  The spectrum of viewpoints among journalists is substantially skewed from that of the general population.  The same is true in the entertainment industry.

If young people grow up in an environment where the values that constitute character are regularly sneered at, a downward spiraling culture is the natural result.

So, young people of sense, consider teaching, journalism, and other future-shaping professions as your career.  The culture you save may be your own.

Juan Williams has this op-ed in the WSJ, with the above subtitle:

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has sparked national outrage, with civil rights leaders from San Francisco to Baltimore leading protests calling for a new investigation and the arrest of the shooter.

But what about all the other young black murder victims? Nationally, nearly half of all murder victims are black. And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Where is the march for them?

See also the crime chapter of Williams' book, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It.

School discipline and criminal punishment have some things in common.  Indeed, failure to teach children to behave at a young age is one of the true "root causes" of crime.

Another thing the two have in common is the political left's obsession with "disparity" and its willingness to assume that any difference in statistics is the result of racial discrimination.  Jason Riley has this column in the WSJ on a new study and the Education Secretary's predictable reaction.

The reaction to studies like this reveals disturbing sensibilities on the left when it comes to education in general and black education in particular. The data were compiled by the Education Department's civil rights office, which probably thinks that it's doing black people a favor by highlighting these racial disparities and pressuring schools to reduce black suspension rates. No thought, it seems, was given to whether this course of action helps or harms those black kids who are in school to learn and not act up.

As The Day with No Name looms on December 25, and we dash across the snow in a one-horse open vehicle, we ought not forget to display our Holiday Tree. 

Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, the man who recently declined to turn over a killer for federal prosecution because the federal government has the death penalty (as Kent noted here), has done it again.

Kent has been doing a better job than I of covering OWS.  This is largely because Kent is more industrious, and industry is what it takes to keep up with the ever-lengthening list of crimes and other assorted bad behaviors going on. 

Still, it's not all bad behavior.  Some of it is the sort of refinement you'd expect from......well.......from one of those execrable one percenters who is (gasp!) living high on the hog by, of all malevolent things, having a successful job.

When I ran across this story, the very first thing I thought of was the Black Sea mansions Soviet commissars managed to get ahold of while working for The Good of The Masses. 

The names change, the venues change, and economic systems change, but what doesn't change is the fact that people who have talent come out ahead of people who don't.

Propensity for crime changes with age, in part because of physical changes and in part because of experiences we have along the way.  One major attitude-changing life event is having children.  Is parenthood a factor in the decline of criminality with age?  So find Kerr, Capaldi, Owen, Wiesner, and Pears in Changes in At-Risk American Men's Crime and Substance Use Trajectories Following Fatherhood, Journal of Marriage and Family, v.73, pp. 1101-1116 (Oct. 2011).  Here is the abstract:

James Q. Wilson has this article in the City Journal on crime rates, unemployment, and the various reasons for variations in crime rates.  Some excerpts follow the jump.

James Bovard has this article in the WSJ about the Obama Administration making subsidized housing even worse than it presently is.

Poverty is correlated with crime not because poverty causes crime but because irresponsibility is correlated with both.  That is, while a good many responsible people are poor through no fault of their own, the ranks of the poor include proportionately more irresponsible people than the ranks of other income strata because irresponsible people tend to be poor.  Those irresponsible people are more likely to engage in crime and otherwise behave in ways that make life difficult if not miserable for those around them.  It is the responsible poor people who suffer most from the actions of the irresponsible ones.

A government that really cared about the responsible poor people would crack down on the irresponsible ones.  A government that cares more about demographic numbers than real people would instead obsess about a crackdown on irresponsible behavior having a "disparate impact" on a demographic category of people, defining that category by race, sex, or income without differentiating responsibility versus irresponsibility.  That is exactly what the Obama Administration is doing, cracking down on local governments that try to crack down on people who raise hell, according to Bovard.

Nevertheless, middle-class blacks are the program's least inhibited critics. Sheldon Carter of Antelope Valley, Calif., testified at a recent public hearing on local Section 8 controversies: "This is not a racial issue. It is a color issue. The color is green and it's my dollars." Shirlee Bolds told Iowa's Dubuque Telegraph Herald in 2009: "I moved away from the city to get away from all this crap. Dubuque's getting rough. I think it's turning into a little Chicago, like they're bringing the street rep here."

We need to wake up, folks.  The great divide in America today is not between white and black or rich and poor or labor and management or any of the old divisions.  The great divide is between the responsible people on one side and the irresponsible people and their apologists on the other.

Theodore Dalrymple has this post at City Journal, on the same theme as Bill's post.

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor--quite likely--any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others' expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

Brian Carney has this article in the WSJ with the above title, subtitled, "Prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple asks why we feel compelled to understand monsters like Anders Breivik, but no need to explain others' righteous behavior."  The whole article is well worth reading, but here is an excerpt (emphasis added):

Your garden-variety convicts, he contends, are much simpler subjects than a man like Breivik. To ask them why they steal, he says, "is like asking you why you have lunch." They want something, so they take it. "And since in Britain," he adds with a smirk, "the state does very little to discourage [thieves]," or to incarcerate them when they are caught, "the question is not why there are so many burglars, but why there are so few."

A Breivik is a deeper mystery. Of him, "you can say, 'This man is highly narcissistic, paranoid and grandiose,'" and this may lead you to seek reasons for that in his past--"his father disappeared at the age of 15 and so on and so forth." But uncovering such facts doesn't solve the mystery because "whatever you find, you would also find among hundreds or thousands or even millions of people who didn't do what he did." There is, he says, "always a gap between what is to be explained and your alleged explanation. So there's always a mystery, and I think that's going to remain."

The human impulse to explain the inexplicably horrific is revealing, according to Dr. Dalrymple, in two respects--one personal, one political. First, it says something about us that we feel compelled to explain evil in a way that we don't feel about people's good actions. The discrepancy arises, he says, "because [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau has triumphed," by which he means that "we believe ourselves to be good, and that evil, or bad, is the deviation from what is natural."

For most of human history, the prevailing view was different. Our intrinsic nature was something to be overcome, restrained and civilized. But Rousseau's view, famously, was that society corrupted man's pristine nature. This is not only wrong, Dr. Dalrymple argues, but it has had profound and baleful effects on society and our attitude toward crime and punishment. For one thing, it has alienated us from responsibility for our own actions. For another, it has reduced our willingness to hold others responsible for theirs.

Bryon Johnson of Baylor University has this op-ed in the Houston Chronicle titled "The factor of faith in crime reduction."  Johnson is the author of "More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How it Could Matter More" (2011).

Put simply, increasing religiosity tends to be associated with decreasing crime. The weight of this evidence is especially intriguing in light of the fact that religion continues to be overlooked by so many. For example, one will look in vain to find any references at all to religion in criminology and criminal justice textbooks.

Much of the discussion on the Supreme Court today will likely be in the violent video game case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn., No. 09-1448.  (Gov. Moonbeam is automatically substituted as a party for the Governator.  See S.C. Rule 35.3.)

It's not really up our alley, so I won't discuss it in depth on this blog.  The split among the Justices is interesting, though.  Justice Scalia takes a straight First Amendment approach along the same lines the Supreme Court used in olden days to legalize pornography.  This is content-based regulation.  Strict scrutiny applies.  The statute fails that test (as statutes almost always do).  Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan concur.

Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, concur in the judgment.  They would strike down the statute on due process grounds as too vague, leaving to another day what they see as difficult First Amendment questions regarding applying old rules to new technology.

Justice Thomas does not see the First Amendment question as difficult.  Speech to minors bypassing the parents is not within "the freedom of speech" protected by the First Amendment as originally understood.

Justice Breyer believes the statute passes strict scrutiny, and he appends a 15-page list of "peer-reviewed academic journal articles on the topic of psychological harm resulting from playing violent video games."

This should throw a wrench into the "justice agreement statistics."

Deborah Sontag at the New York Times has an article titled A Schizophrenic, a Slain Work, and Troubling Questions about the murder of Stephanie Moulton by Deshawn James Chappell.  The article raises a number of issues about this sad tale of the well-intentioned and devoted mental health worker who is killed by a man with severe mental illness.  And one of those issues is the continued reduction of long-term psychiatric beds at state hospitals:

In the cuts being debated now, Mr. Patrick proposes to eliminate roughly a quarter of the 626 long-term care beds left in the state's psychiatric hospital system. This unnerves many mental health professionals.

A true measure of a mature and principled society is how well it cares for the truly sick.  Closing long-term psychiatric beds is a tragedy because not only does it deprive necessary care for those who need it but also because it leads to more cases like this sorrowful one.