11 To understand the magnitude of this change, consider this: if the rate of reporting of violent crimes had remained constant after 1999, the violent crime rate in 2005 would have been 390 per 100,000 people, not 469. Since nearly all murders are reported, this adjustment also implies that the overall violent crime rate has fallen more than the murder rate since 1991.
12 “Findings,” Washington Post, November 22, 2006.
13 “2006 Program Seeks to Fight Poverty by Building Family Ties,” New York Times, July 20, 2006.
14 Levitt and Dubner, Freakonomics, 137-144 revised edition 2006, 129.
15 Daniel Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality (New York: MacMillan Publishers, 1970).
16 Rockefeller Commission, “Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future” presented to the President and Congress in March of 1972. Http://www.population-security.org/rockefeller/011_human_reproduction.htm.
17 Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe, “One hundred and twenty children born after application for therapeutic abortion refused,” Acta Psychiat. Scand., 1966, 71-78.
18 Henry Morgentaler, “Message from Henry,” 1998. Online document available at: http://prochoice.about.com/newissues/prochoice/gi/dynamic/offiste.htm?sitehttp://www.morgentaler.ca.
19 Henry Morgantaler made this claim in the late 1960s. By 1979, opinion surveys showed that 61 percent of Americans believed that “many unwanted children end up being subject to child abuse, and it’s a mistake to force unwanted children to be born.” Roper Center at University of Connecticut Public Opinion Online, survey done from Februrary 8, 1979 to February 12, 1979.
20 David M. Alpern, “Abortion and the Law,” Newsweek, March 3, 1975.
21 John Donohue and Steven Levitt, “The Impact of Legalizing Abortion on Crime Rates,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, (2001): 379-420.
22 These were Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, and Washington.
23 John Donohue and Steven Levitt, “Further Evidence that Legalizing Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce,” Journal of Human Resources (2004): 29-49. See also Ted Joyce, “Did Legalizing Abortion Lower Crime?” Journal of Human Resources (2004): 1-28.
24 The data comes from the Centers for Disease Control. See Abortion Surveillance: Preliminary Analysis—United States, 1996, CDC, December 4, 1998, 1025-1028.
25 John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley, “Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births,” Economic Inquiry, Advanced Access June 29, 2006, 3. Donohue and Levitt do examine the relevant CDC data for a few of their estimates that use their aggregate measure of abortion (their so-called “effective” abortion rate). However, they never do this for the estimates that break down the murder rates by the age of the murderer where it is possible to closely link the age of the murderer with whether abortions were legalized at the time of birth (“Further Evidence that Legalizing Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce,” Journal of Human Resources, 2004, 29-49).
26 Abortion Surveillance: Preliminary Analysis - United States, 1996, Centers for Disease Control, December 4, 1998, 1025-1028, 1035. “Homicide Trends in the United States,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide), June 29, 2006.
27 The omission is curious, since it would have been easy to test a eugenics explanation, for example by measuring whether the drop in crime in the 1990s was still evident after accounting for the changing racial composition of the population. All my research on crime, including the link to abortion, controls for demographics.
28 A range of economists have noted Donahue and Levitt’s failure to test the eugenics approach. See Jonathan Klick, “Econometric Analyses of U.S. Abortion Policy: A Critical Review,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, March 2004.
29 George Akerloff, Janet Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics , 1996, 277-317. See also Jonathan Klick and Thomas Stratmann, “The Effect of Abortion Legalization on Sexual Behavior: Evidence from Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” Journal of Legal Studies, June 2003, 407-433. Klick and Stratmann find that “a large increase in gonorrhea and syphillis rates [occurred] due to changing sexual behavior” as a result of abortion (p. 431). See also George Akerloff and Janet Yellen, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the United States,” Brookings Policy Brief, August 1996 (http://www.heartland.org/pdf/24604a.pdf), 3.
30 Alberto F. Alesina and Paola Giuliano, “Divorce, Fertility and the Shot Gun Marriage,” Harvard University Institute for Economic Research Working Paper, No. 2117, June 2006. Alesina and Giuliano find that reducing restrictions on abortion increases out-of-wedlock births, but decreases births in two-parent families. See also Akerloff, Yellen, and Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing,” 277-317, and John R. Lott, Jr. And John Whitley, “Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births,” Economic Inquiry, Advanced Access published June 29, 2006, 19-20.
31 Akerloff, Yellen, and Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childrearing;” Akerloff and Yellen, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births;” and Alesina and Giuliano, “Divorce, Fertility and the Shot Gun Marriage.”
32 Http://statistics.adoption.com/information/adoption-statistics-placing-children.htm. Interestingly, the peak year for adoptions was 1970, the year when abortion was granted unrestricted access in five states, including the two largest, California and New York. See George Akerloff, Janet Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1996, 277-317. For other evidence on these trends see Department of Health and Human Services, “Report to Congress on Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing,” September 1995, p. 53 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/wedlock.pdf).
33 Jay D. Teachman, Jeffrey Thomas, Kathleen Paasch, “Legal Status and Stability of Corresidential Unions,” Demography, 1991, 571-586. See also Britta Hoem and Jan M. Hoem, “The Disruption of Marital and Non-Marital Unions in Contemporary Sweden,” 61-93, in James Trussell, R. Hankinson, and J Tilton (eds.), Demographic Applications of Event History Analysis, (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992).
34 A large portion of out-of-wedlock births are to teenage mothers. Without the increase in teenage births, the aggravated assault rate would have been about 20 percent lower than it was. See Jennifer Hunt, “Do Teen Births Keep American Crime High,” Journal of Law and Economics, October 2006, 533-566. The increased criminality among children born outside of wedlock is borne out in many other studies, although much of the research fails to separate out whether it is single parent families that lead to more crime or something else that causes both more single parent families and more crime. Examples of this research include: report by the Social Exclusion Unit, “Reducing Re-Offending by Ex-Prisoners” (2002). Http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:DVVPgqNYQHsJ; www.renewal.net/Documents/Policy%2520Guidance/Reducingreoffendingexprisoners.pdf 1; Sampson, R. J. (1987), “Urban black violence: The effect of male joblessness and family disruption,” American Journal of Sociology 93, 348-82; and Kellam, S. G., Adams, R. G., Brown, C. H., and Ensminger, M. E. (1982), “The long-term evolution of the family structure of teens and older mothers,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 44, 539-54.
35 Child Trends tabulations of data from the 2002 National Survey of America’s Families. See also Laura Meckler, “How a U.S. Official Promotes Marriage to Help Poor Kids,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2006.
36 “Oops-onomics,” The Economist, December 1, 2005. Levitt and Donohue thought they had accounted for whether states with low crime rates after the change in abortion laws already had low crime rates before the change. While Donohue and Levitt correctly described what test should be done, they carried out a different test. Another flaw is that they used changes in the abortion rate to explain changes in the total number of crimes in a state, not changes in the crime rate. For example, California and Louisiana may have had similar murder rates per 100,000 people in 1980 (14.5 and 15.7
, respectively), but they had vastly different numbers of murder (3,411 and 661). The authors made a similar mistake in their arrest statistics, confusing the total number of arrests with the arrest rate.
37 Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz, “Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data: A Comment on Donohue and Levitt (2001),” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-15, November 22, 2005. Their Table 1, row 1, shows that adding the state-year fixed effects implies that abortion increases violent crime, though it isn’t statistically significant. Foote and Goetz accounted for the number of people in different states to measure the per capita rates of crime and abortion and they used the arrests per capita instead of the total number of arrests in a state. Doing so led to results implying a strong, statistically significant increase in violent crime from more abortion.
38 The study by Whitley and I tried to improve on Donohue and Levitt’s methodology through steps such as using murder data that more closely linked the date of a murderer’s arrest with the date of his crime and by accounting for abortions performed prior to Roe v. Wade and to the 1970 “legalization” in five states See John R. Lott, Jr. And John Whitley, “Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births,” Economic Inquiry, Advanced Access published June 29, 2006, 14.Donohue and Levitt responded to these criticisms by developing new estimates of abortion’s effect on crime, estimates that they claimed accurately reflect whether a criminal was born before or after the legalization of abortion. The most accurate data, however, continue to show that legalized abortion increased crime. Furthermore, a new working paper by the pair does not use the most relevant data—the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR). See Donohue and Levitt, “Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz (2005),” University of Chicago Working Paper, January 2006. One crucial advantage of the SHR is that it records information according to the date that crimes were committed, not the date of arrest. For crimes such as murder, many years can elapse between the crime and the perpetrator’s arrest, thus skewing annual statistics. Based on SHR figures, my study with Whitley not only links dates of each criminal’s birth with what the abortion law was at that time, but also takes into account cross-state mobility. Unfortunately, the FBI only directly linked a criminal’s characteristics with when the crime occurred for the data regarding murder, not any other crime. Apparently, the only other study that uses the SHR is by Ted Joyce, who also found that the legalization of abortion implies more murders. See Ted Joyce, “The Inconsequential Association Between legalized Abortion and Age Specific Crime Rates,” Baruch College Working Paper, March 2006.
39 John R. Lott, Jr. And John Whitley, “Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births,” Economic Inquiry, Advanced Access published June 29, 2006, 5-6.
40 Abortion Law, History & Religion, The Canadian Health Network (http://www.cbctrust.com/history_law_religion.php#62). Although a 1969 Canadian abortion law loosened some restrictions on abortion, the law was nevertheless extremely strict. A committee of at least three doctors had to decide whether an abortion was necessary to protect the mother’s health, and the mother had no right to appeal their decision. These conditions were as strict as the most restrictive U.S. state laws prior to 1970. Studies of other countries have also cast doubt on the theory that abortion reduces crime. See Leo Kahane, David Paton, and Rob Simmons, “The Abortion-Crime Link: Evidence from England and Wales,” Department of Economics, California State University, East Bay Working paper, March 2006 and Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz, “Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data: A Comment on Donohue and Levitt (2001),” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-15, November 22, 2005.
41 However, as discussed later in this chapter, the impact of race on crime rates during the 1990s was very small. All the demographics for age, race, and sex accounted for only about 1 percent of the change in crime rates.
42 John R. Lott, “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk?,” Economic Inquiry, April 2000, 241 and 242.
43 The survey was conducted for the U.S. Department of Justice and Nassau County, New York. See Marvin Dunnetted, Joan G. Haworth, Leaetta Hough, James L. Outtz, Erich P. Prien, Neal Schmitt, Bernard Siskin, and Sheldon Zedeck, “Police Selection and Promotion Practices Survey Results,” HRStrategies (April 1993), 18.
44 Ibid.
45 “Test Officials Question State’s Move,” The Advocate (Baton Rouge, La.), August 31, 1996.
46 Spielman, Fran, “Mayor Defends Hiring Promotion Decisions on Police and Firefighters,” Chicago Sun-Times (January 31, 1996): 16, and “U.S. Judge OKS Exam for Firefighting Hiring; Ruling Ends 2 Decades of Federal Oversight,” Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1995.
47 Flannery, Mary, “Fitness Standards Set Up Through ‘Gender Norming,’” Houston Chronicle, September 11, 1995, 2.
48 Frank J. Landy, Principal Investigator. Alternatives to Chronological Age in Determining Standards of Suitability for Public Safety Jobs, volume 1: Technical Report, Boulder, Colorado: Saville and Holdsworth, 31 (January 1992).
49 Mary Ellen Synon, “Q. How do you help criminals get away? A. Easy, recruit women officers,” Mail on Sunday (London), May 1, 2005, 59.
50 The central part of my research examined the largest 189 cities in the U.S. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nineteen of those cities had consent decrees with the US government. Those consent decrees restricted the cities’ ability to include intelligence tests in hiring new employees.
51 John R. Lott, Jr., “Does a Helping hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime,” Economic Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (April 2000): 239-277.
52 Ibid.
53 A gun might not be as much of an equalizer for female officers as it is for women who use a gun defensively. Officers are frequently called upon to have physical contact with the criminals that they are pursuing, while women who use a gun defensively merely use the gun to keep a threatening person at bay.
54 John R. Lott, Jr., “Does a Helping hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime,” Economic Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (April 2000): 257-260.
55 Bryan Hubbell and Randall Kramer, “An Empirical Bayes Approach to Combining Estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life for Environmental Policy Analysis,” US Environmental Protection Agency National Center for Environmental Economics Working paper, November, 2001. W. Kip. Viscusi, Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
56 Uniform Crime Report, “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2005,” FBI, Department of Justice, October 2006 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2005/downloaddocs/feloniouslykilled.pdf). For information on accidental deaths of police see http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2005/table46.htm.
57 This is a fairly typical year. Over the ten years from 1993 to 2002, there were on average 64 law enforcement officers murdered on the job each year (though the number of police officers rose over time). Source: “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2002,” FBI, U.S. Department of Justice.
58 Obtained via Bureau of Justice Statistics, Capital Punishment, 1985-2005, (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pubalp2.htm#cp) and from FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1976-2005, (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/totalstab.htm).
59 Not all murderers are eligible for the death penalty. To qualify, murders must have either killed multiple victims, children, or law enforcement officers, or committed murder while committing another felony. The smaller group of criminals that meet this criteria face a 1 in 70 chance of being executed. From 1977 to 2003, about 25 percent of murders were eligible for the death penalty. This assumes that that ratio holds for 2005. See Jeffrey Fagan, Franklin E. Zimring, and Amanda Geller, “Capital Punishment and Capital Murder: Market Share and the Deterrent Effects of the Death Penalty,” Texas Law Review (June 2006): 1819.
60 Steven Levitt, “Understanding Why C
rime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not,” Journal of Economics Perspectives (2004): 175.
61 For more on the role played by risk in criminal behavior, see W. Kip Viscusi, “The Risks and Rewards of Criminal Activity: A Comprehensive Test of Criminal Deterrence,” Journal of Labor Economics (1986): 317-340, and Michael K. Block and Vernon E. Gerety, “Some Experimental Evidence on Differences Between Student and Prisoner Reactions to Monetary Penalties and Risk,” Journal of Legal Studies (January 1995): 123-138.
62 Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden, “States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates,” New York Times, September 22, 2000, A1.
63 These were Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Vermont.
64 From 1977 to 1998, the population weighted drop in murder rates for the 12 states that never instituted the death penalty fell by 21 percent. For the 38 other states, their murder rate fell by 29 percent. Http://www.disaster-center.com/crime/uscrime.htm.
65 Some analysts inexplicably date the end of capital punishment to the 1972 Furman decision by the Supreme Court, even though executions had stopped in 1968. See John Donohue and Wolfers, “Uses and abuses of empirical evidence in the death penalty debate,” Stanford Law Review, 2006, 791-845. The graph I show uses the execution rate because it gives readers the best indication of the execution risk that criminals face by committing murder.
66 Paul G. Cassell and Richard Fowles, “Handcuffing the Cops? A Thirty-Year Perspective on Miranda’s Harmful Effects on Law Enforcement,” Stanford Law Review (April, 1998): 1055-1144. The Miranda decision may have affected crime rates, but it’s precise effect is difficult to evaluate; since it was a Supreme Court decision, we can only evaluate it through time-series data for the entire United States. Furthermore, there were so many other Supreme Court decisions as well as other possible explanatory factors that it is simply impossible to disentangle all of them.
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