Freedomnomics by John R. Lott

Author:John R. Lott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Press
Published: 2010-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

Overall, the three crime fighting techniques outlined above—increased use of the death penalty, rising arrest and conviction rates, and the passage of right-to-carry laws—account for between 50 and 60 percent of the drop in murder rates during the 1990s. While all these methods are the subject of much controversy, their effectiveness in reducing crime has been proven time and again.99

What Didn’t Really Matter? Part I

Age and Race

As we saw in our discussion of abortion, different age groups commit crimes at different rates. Violent criminals are overwhelmingly male youths between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. An offender’s likelihood of committing murder rises until he is twenty years old, then falls after that. By the time a person is twenty-nine, his likelihood of committing murder has declined to about half of what it was at age twenty.100 Although the relative rates that different age groups commit crime vary somewhat over time, in any year the odds of a person in his twenties committing murder are much higher than for those in their thirties. Presumably, if we could magically transform all the twenty-year-olds into thirty-five or forty-year-olds, there would be a huge decline in murder rates. Older people just don’t commit as many violent crimes as the young.

Despite the sensitivity of the subject, it must be mentioned that race is also a very important factor in crime statistics.101 African Americans are the most likely perpetrators of crime as well as the most common victims. In 2002, while the national murder rate was 5.6 per 100,000 people, the rate that African American males between seventeen and twenty-five committed murder was seventy-eight per 100,000, or about fourteen times the national rate. For white males of the same age group, the rate was fourteen per 100,000. It should also be noted that young African American males commit murder at a much higher rate than African Americans in general—in 2002, the overall African American murder rate was 24.1 per 100,000. This was well below its peak rate of 51.4 in 1991, although it is still much higher than the current rate of 3.6 for whites and 2.7 for all other ethnic groups. Murderers also overwhelmingly kill people of their own race. Ninety-one percent of African Americans are murdered by other African Americans, and 84 percent of whites are murdered by other whites.102

Percent of Murders Committed by Age for All Murders from 1976 to 2002

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