I really believe the lead theory for high crime

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

To catch those up who don’t know, it’s a theory among sociologists that the primary reason crime was so high from the 1960s to the early 90s was lead exposure. Lead exposure in children leads to problems in brain development, especially impulse control.

That’s the science stuff, now here’s just anecdotal stuff, which is why I put this in MPSIMS:

I’m reading old local newspapers(I’m a South Floridian), I’m in 1980, and I’m reading story after story about crime. Not surprising, given that it’s 1980 in South Florida. But what really strikes me about the stories is how senseless it all was. People just doing crazy stuff to do crazy stuff. Punk rock guys would just go out and randomly beat people up for no reason. In Victoria Park they tried to install stop signs and people would steal them. Schools broken into and robbed on a weekly basis. Drivers being ambushed at stoplights and robbed and beaten. A Ted Nugent concert that degenerated into a riot for no discernible reason. It’s no wonder oldtimers thought that music was leading to violence, violence happened a lot in the name of music and at musical events.

It was all quite nuts, and I was actually around at the time, I was a kid. It was just accepted that there were a lot of people who were sick in the head and it was very easy to end up in trouble if you didn’t keep your head on a swivel at all times. And I didn’t even live in a bad neighborhood. Despite the fact that my neighborhood was standard middle class, the crime statistics that neighborhood did have were greater than crime in some of the worst neighborhoods today! And that was considered a relatively safe place to live, to give you an idea of how dangerous the 1980s were. The randomness of crime made it even more dangerous. It didn’t matter if you had something someone wanted or didn’t. People would die over a pair of shoes, even though the killers had shoes already. The victim had nicer shoes, maybe, or maybe they didn’t even know why they did it. Maybe they stole the shoes because they figured they should get something for their trouble.

And then, in the late 90s, it seemed to change overnight. Crime dropped by more than half, as much as 90% in some places. While fear of crime is obviously still a thing, it’s not an everyday part of our lives anymore. And when crimes do happen, more often than not there was an objective. The person wanted to steal money, or someone got killed because the other guy held a grudge.

So I’m also watching some old TV shows from the 70s and 80s. They reminded me of another phenomenon of that period, teens and young adults acting like assholes just because they could. A scene in an early episode of CHIPS has John Baker going out to his car and some young adults are sitting on it smoking and talking. He asks them to move so he can leave. They ignore him. He becomes insistent. The leader says, “Hey, can’t you see I’m trying to have a conversation here?” John gets in his car anyway and the leader attacks him. John of course kicks his ass, because if there was one thing those TV shows were good at, it was giving us some vicarious satisfaction at seeing society’s bullies taken care of. I just don’t see kids acting that way anymore. Kids still get into trouble, but they don’t go around looking to bully random people anymore for no reason. When I was growing up in the 80s, teenagers primarily amused themselves by “hanging out”. Nowadays kids go places and do things, and when they hang out they are messing around with their smartphones rather than looking for someone to mess with.

So, to conclude, given the insanity of the time, I do believe that there was a chemical cause. There were just too many people doing random, senseless things. Basically acting like animals, with no inhibitions or morals. They lived for narcissistic pleasures, only interested in what they could drink, smoke, or screw that day. And demonstrating dominance if an unlucky weaker victim came along. I just don’t get that same vibe from young people anymore.

So, any stories or observations about that period in time are welcome.

2

I can’t evaluate your theory, but it’s not the first time people have proposed statistical correlations between crime and other things. Most famously, in Freakonomics, the author proposed that the drop in crime correlated to abortion access and Roe v. Wade. Fewer unwanted children = fewer criminals. (This theory went over real well!) Absent any actual evidence, I guess you could just as easily argue it’s lead vs. abortion. You could even argue it has something to do with the internet and social media, which took off in the late 90s.

I don’t know what the answer is, but it probably is some weird random correlational thing like that.

I grew up in the 90s, graduated in '01, and I have no stories, other than to say other teenagers always seemed like assholes when I was a teen. They are still prone to assholish behavior, they just do it on the internet these days. I suppose that’s better. Though as for ‘‘narcissistic pleasures’’ there are a lot of social scientists and behavioral psychologists who have formally observed a distinct rise in narcissism over the last… internet years.

3

Yes, that period does coincide with abortion access, and also tough on crime measures that kept criminals locked up longer. The 1980s were the days of people having mile long rap sheets and yet still running around. Police expressed frustration that they’d catch violent criminals only to see them back on the streets days later. “Crime Boy” became a nationally known celebrity for having 50 felonies on his record by the age of 18.

4

It may very well be a confluence of several things. Perhaps also, due to the rise in obesity, kids are now too winded to steal traffic signs. :frowning:

We sure do live in interesting times.

5

I’ve always thought that, if lead exposure damaged a young child’s developing brain, then that damage (to whatever extent it was) would be largely irreversible and thus life-long.

So what happened to that cohort of kids as they grew older? After they finished being teens, what became of them in the following decades? If they were teens in the 60’s, then they’re in their late 60’s or 70’s now, right? Were they minimally-employable troublemakers all their adult lives?

6

There are a lot of factors there:

  1. As people age they become less able or interested in violence.
  2. A lot of these morons got Darwinned.
  3. A lot of these morons are serving extremely long sentences.
  4. Most of them stayed losers their whole lives. 1980s punk teens are today’s middle aged homeless guys. Some made it as far as living in a trailer park and getting on Jerry Springer.
  5. A very few got the help they needed and were better able to function.
7

It’s true that people statistically become significantly less violent as they age.

A thing about lead poisoning, though - wouldn’t it affect women’s impulse control, as well? I would expect more violent crime from women in those days if lead poisoning were the culprit. We’re getting into issues of biology that I don’t understand too well.

8

Violent crime has been declining worldwide.

In case you haven’t noticed there are other countries out there, so your US-centric abortion and incarceration theories don’t hold much water.

I think we’re just continuing to learn, as a species, how to be more accepting and open to differences. Look at the huge, almost unbelievable acceptance of LGBT rights in the last say 20 years.

Look how brutal we were centuries ago.

ETA: I don’t subscribe to the leaded gasoline theory.

9

So you were there, and yet you didn’t go lead-induced crazy. I was there too, (born 1957) and I didn’t go crazy. And neither did any of my friends.

Now, I didn’t eat (lead-based)paint that peeled off the walls, because my middle-class parents kept a nice clean house with no peeling paint.
Maybe in the poor neighborhoods, the kids did eat the paint for a couple decades. But I doubt if in, say, 1988, all the walls in all those houses suddenly got repainted with lead-free coatings.
And leaded gas was sold everywhere, in both poor neighborhoods and rich.
It seems to me that if there was lead in the environment, it would affect everybody equally;male and female, poor and rich.That didn’t happen.
(And yes, I know that lots of serious scientists have investigated the issue, and disagree with me. So I’m just talking out my ass.
But I like my ass. :slight_smile: )

And I kinda like Spice weasel’s theory about kids today being too obese to do damage. World Peace through fast food.

10

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve read up on it, but I remember that the leaded gas theory was very much supported by results from around the world based on whenever leaded gas was banned in each country. So it’s not just some US-centric thing.

11

Like Spice Weasel said, I could see the internet and social media being a factor. And video games. There are many more compelling distractions than even 30 years ago. Plus, there is exposure in the connected world. Everyone knows when you fuck up and they might even snitch you out when your cctv pic is being shared on the web.

There is also the rise of the surveillance state. Cameras have probably discouraged far more criminals than the police ever could. Plate readers, GPs tracking, EZ Pass…it’s hard being a felon these days.

I even have a wacko theory of another possible contributing factor: the rise of multi-state, massive lottery jackpots. I think it gives people hope even if the odds are ridiculous.

12

Some of them did, and people did pay more attention to it as awareness increased, so more kids got diagnosed and treated for lead poisoning, and parents were more likely to deal with peeling/crumbling paint. But not everyone. Juvenile lead poisoning is still a public health issue in many cities across the US, not just Flint.

It may have been sold everywhere, but most of it got burned in urban areas, where traffic was most dense. If you lived in suburban or rural areas, even if you worked in the city, you probably got a lot less exposure than someone who lived in the city. Which also helps explain high crime rates in urban areas.

Lead poisoning is understood to reduce impulse control, so it goes a long way toward explaining high rates of violent crime - murders and assaults, as opposed to things like shoplifting or burglary.

A short, worthy read:
The Crime of Lead Exposure

13

I think I’ve read somewhere the theory that the ancient Romans, mostly the upper class, went batshit crazy from eating some confiture cooked up in lead-glazed jars.

Not saying it’s the truth.

14

Abortion access plays a role, but I thought that the lead hypothesis was found to apply both in foreign countries as well as in states that already had easy access to abortion. So the lead hypothesis is more likely.

Lead lowers IQ, reduces impulse control, makes emotions harder to manage, etc. When lead is removed from gasoline, crime drops about 20 years later.

On another note, easy access to porn seems to reduce rates of sex crimes by maybe ~30%. So giving people porn and abortions, and removing lead from gasoline = highly effective anti-crime measures.

15

Most of the developed world used leaded gas at some time or another, but different countries started and ended at different times. And it’s my understanding that in all of those countries, there was an increase in crime that started at the time they started leading gas, and a corresponding decrease at the time that they stopped.

Well, it’s certainly known that they drank wine contaminated with lead. If you store wine in a lead container, then you end up with acetic acid in the wine reacting with lead, and lead acetate is sweet (it’s sometimes called “sugar of lead”), and they liked sweet drinks just as much as we do. Precisely what effect this had on them, it’s harder to say, but it can’t have been good.

16

I was pretty skeptical of this theory (subject to a lot of correlation-causation issues), but recent research tends to support it. Here’s a recent review article:

This puts me tentatively in the camp of thinking the theory has validity.

17

I am extremely skeptical of this porn claim. It makes no logical sense and IIRC a recent Science vs. Episode I listened to rejected the claim as unsubstantiated. Most rapes occur by friends and acquaintances and on dates and in the heat of the moment. Who says, “well I wanted to aggressively pursue sex with this person I’m currently physically close to, but I’m going to calmly step back, leave the premises, drive home and jerk off instead”?

Do you have a cite? Can you at least explain the nature of the argument?

18

I doubt this correlation has been demonstrated to an acceptible level of statistical significance and I’m not even sure methodologically how you’d go about that, particularly since the tetraethyl lead (TEL) residue remains persistant in the environment (and particularly the water table) for an indifinite period as well as the accumulated material within humans and other organisms. There is no off switch that causes TEL to suddenly disappear from the environment that could be correlated to dramatic shifts in behavior or incidence of crime.

And to be clear, while there is some apparent correlation to criminal behavior coincident with the introduction of TEL into gasoline (and the rapid expansion of the use of gasoline in combustion engines), this also corresponds to overall rapid population growth and increasing inequality, both of which are generally correlated with increases in criminal activity. Nor is the modern glut of crime and other atavistic behavior some unique incidence in an otherwise peaceful history of humanity; not only have people in past eras engaged in large destructive wars not related directly to a revolt or conquest (such as the Thirty Years War, Napoleonic Wars, and Mughal–Maratha Wars to name a few) but also incidents of outrageous hysteria such as the infamous witch trials in Early Modern Europe, long before bioavailable lead was released into the environment in mass quantities (although to be fair, lead was used for the production of tin and in various dishware and other applications).

In general, when you put too many people together in a society without sufficient social outlets to control angst or alieviate injustice, you get violence. Whether the introduction of TEL into the biosphere in progressively larger quantities fed into that is difficult to prove in any rigorous fashion. The history of tetraethyl lead and the gross abeyance of concern for public health by an industry is horrific enough without attributing 20th century crime and violence specifically and exclusively to it.

Stranger

19

Porn provides an outlet so people don’t have to bother real people.

20

That seems plausible to me. But those same studies make other claims that seem less plausible.
Your link to slate discusses not only porn on the internet, but also violence in the movies:

Okay, so they found a 2% drop in crime during movie hours. But I have a question: how many violent criminals go to the movies?
Sure , even violent gangbangers are people, and most people like to go to movies with their friends.
But I’ve got a gut feeling that calling your friends in advance, then standing in line politely to buy a ticket, and then standing in line again to buy some popcorn, etc, etc…isn’t the way most Hell’s Angels like to spend a nice evening with friends. And even if they do…most people only go to a movie once in a while, and usually on weekends. Did the crime rate drop the same 2% every day of the week? And why at 6.p.m? That seems pretty early for the kind of people who commit violence on the streets at night.Even if they spent 2 hours drinking cola, they probably spent the next 2 hours drinking beer. And what about weather conditions? I assume that there’s less violence on snowy days. Etc , etc, etc.
So despite the fact that those professors who wrote the study are vastly more qualified than I am to analyze statistics…my gut feeling is that their statistics don’t tell the whole story.