Lead and Crime: I’ll Be On the Melissa Harris-Perry Show Sunday at 10 am

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


By the time you see this I should be on a plane to New York, where I’ll be on the Melissa Harris-Perry show tomorrow on MSNBC talking about lead and crime. (Plus a few other topics.) One of the other guests on the lead panel will be Howard Mielke of Tulane University, who’s been doing lead research in New Orleans for the past two decades. Sarah Zhang interviewed him as part of our lead package for this issue, and you can read her interview here.

Before I head out to the airport, though, here’s another tidbit about lead and crime that didn’t make it into my magazine piece. (If you still haven’t read it, click here.) As you’ll recall, lead emissions mainly affect children. This means that when emissions decrease, you have to wait about 18 years to see any effect on violent crime. In the United States, lead emissions started to decline in the mid-70s, and crime began to decline in the early 90s. But what about the rest of the world?

Rick Nevin wrote an extensive paper in 2007 linking lead emissions to crime rates in other countries, so I asked him for his predictions about the decline of crime elsewhere in the world. Here’s his forecast:

  • The USA violent crime rate is now down about 50% from its peak in 1991, and I expect that the violent crime rate in Western Europe will be down by about 50% from its peak over the next 20 years, with the largest part of that decline over the next ten years.
  • Eastern Europe will follow the same trend, but will take a few years longer because they left gasoline lead levels quite high through the end of the Soviet era.
  • Crime will also plummet over the next 10 to 20 years in Latin America, where leaded gasoline use and air lead levels fell sharply from around 1990 through the mid-1990s.

The chart on the right shows just a single example of a non-U.S. link between lead and crime: the burglary rate in Britain. It peaked in the mid-90s and has been falling steadily ever since, following the same curve as blood lead levels in preschoolers. Nevin has a more layman-friendly version of his paper here if you want to dig into this further. He discusses lead levels and crime rates in Britain, Canada, Australia, West Germany, France, and New Zealand. His paper also discusses several things that I didn’t mention in my article, including the effect of living in a housing project near an expressway; recent arrest rates by age group; the disproportionate effect of lead emissions on African-Americans; Steven Levitt’s famous theory about a link between abortion and crime; and the impact of lead on IQ and school test scores. It’s worth a read.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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