January 3, 2013

Lead and Crime: I’ll Be on the Leonard Lopate Show Today at 1:20 pm

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If you’re in New York City, I’ll be on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC today at 1:20 pm discussing my story about the connection between lead and violent crime. Tune in!

And while I’m on the subject, there are a couple of quick items I’d like to mention that may or may not have been clear from my article:

  • Am I saying that gasoline lead is fully responsible for the nationwide drop in violent crime over the past two decades? No. Absolutely not. There are plenty of other factors, including the end of the crack epidemic, changes in policing tactics, higher incarceration rates, and more. The precise effect of all these things is a matter of controversy, but they almost certainly all played a role. However, I am saying that they probably played a smaller role than we think.
  • Is the lead-crime connection 100% proven? No. However, the evidence, which started out fairly thin ten years ago, is now quite extensive. In fact, one of my motivations for writing this piece was the fact that the criminology community has paid very little attention to the lead hypothesis, and I think it’s time they did. If it’s wrong, they should do the research to show that it’s wrong. But if it’s right, that should change the way we look at other crime-fighting tactics. Change #1, in my opinion, would be our current policy of mass incarceration, which quite likely had done as much good as it would ever do by the mid-80s. Given the decline in violence over the past two decades, and the possibility that it’s probably due to a permanent decrease in lead emissions, it’s quite likely that we could safely cut back on incarceration rates at this point.

More on this later.

Update: Listen to the interview here:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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