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Why has crack caused so much crime?
Relative to other drugs, that is. In a CrookedTimber symposium on Steve Levitt, I offer a few speculative and possibly false hypotheses:
1. Heroin and pot make you sleepy. Crack gets you riled up.
2. Crack was a new drug when it hit the market. Gangs were competing to hook new buyers. This is a far more violent activity than serving established drug clientele.
3. In dollar terms crack was a "bigger" drug than ever before. The gross and the profit margins were bigger. The resulting turf wars over profits led to murders. It is not worth killing people over a few marijuana sales. (Yet still I find this puzzling. Falling prices have taken profits out of the market; the gangs must either have had an extraordinarily high discount rate or they behaved irrationally in killing each other. In the latter case we have no economic explanation at all for the hike in crime.)
4. Perhaps you buy other drugs from your friends, but you buy crack from dealers. (Most people get Ecstasy from their friends, and this market is not very violent.) The new question is then why this might be. Could crack somehow require less personal certification from trusted acquaintances?
Here is my full post. I have opened up comments for your ideas. Contributions from economically literate and (previously) violent crackheads are especially welcome.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 24, 2005 at 06:12 AM in Economics | Permalink
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There is a reason I have asked this question. So I'll start at the beginning. Tyler Cowen ask the question, "Why has crack caused so much crime?"
Tyler Cowen goes on to list some possible reasons and asks for comments concerning the possible re... [Read More]
Tracked on May 26, 2005 1:14:43 AM
Comments
On theory 3, remember that just because the price fell doesn't mean that there was any good reason to think that it would at that time. Even if there was, look at who the violent dealers generally were, poor, inner-city youths. They probably expected to die young anyway, so yes, their discount rates would be (rationally) much higher than yours or mine.
Posted by: Maestro at May 24, 2005 8:15:06 AM
Theory 1: Cocaine (from which crack is derived), methamphetamines (speed), ecstacy (E), and alcohol (in some people) rile you up. If crime increases with the prevalence of drugs that rile you up, then there should be a corresponding increase in crime with the prevalence of cocaine. But the 1920s were relatively crime-free and cocaine was widely available. Why the disparity?
Not sure theory 1 amounts to much.
Posted by: Dave at May 24, 2005 8:36:15 AM
I offer this comment as a former heroin addict and part-time crack-smoker:
I think a big part of the answer is related to hypothesis #1: opiates like heroin "suffer" from quickly-declining marginal utility - once you've used a bit of heroin, subsequent use just doesn't do much for you.
On the other hand, any type of cocaine use, just like George Carlin once said, "makes you feel like doing some more cocaine."
This also leads crack addicts to staying up later, and they tend to chase their drugs late at night, whereas opiate addicts tend to look for their drugs during the day. Most opiate addicts keep relatively normal sleep schedules, but most crack addicts I've known would stay up for days at a time, finally sleeping (crashing) during the day. Maybe drug use/purchasing at night is more ammenable to the commission of crime?
On an unrelated note, most of the crack dealers I knew were kids being driven around by their moms. Score another one for Freakonomics, I guess.
Posted by: nobody at May 24, 2005 8:39:16 AM
I should add to my comment above that most of the crime committed in the 1920s was caused by Prohibition. Coke had little effect.
Posted by: Dave at May 24, 2005 8:39:40 AM
I hate to say this, but the answer here seems obvious to me - crack is strongly favored by young, inner-city black people, and as a group, this demographic is much more violent than the average American.
As you pointed out, the fact that crack makes you wired, cranky and irrational certainly contributes as well.
Posted by: Mike at May 24, 2005 9:12:44 AM
As for #4:
Maybe it isn't that crack requires less personal certification, but that "friends" aren't willing to provide that certification. Would you encourage a close personal acquaintance to smoke crack? This would also explain why heroin is also bought from a dealer.
Posted by: josh at May 24, 2005 9:19:15 AM
Powder cocaine and especially ecstacy are to some extent "social" drugs, frequently consumed at clubs or parties or other places where the users are happy and among friends. This may serve to limit violent action even though both drugs make users "riled up" in the same manner as crack.
In contrast, crack is more commonly used in solitary or otherwise non-social settings. Users are less likely to be among friends or in pleasant moods.
Posted by: Peter at May 24, 2005 9:47:45 AM
folks, ecstasy emphatically does not "rile you up" like coke (which does bend you out of shape a bit) and crack (more so). Infact E can turn football hooligans into cuddly bears. Moreover, it's not a drug anybody does day after day after day, unlike the other two.
Posted by: Luis at May 24, 2005 10:01:44 AM
+1 #2. - and this looks like the most testable.
I would also guess that crack/cocaine drugs are like Meth, PCP and everything else goes in a different pile. Certainly something to #1.
Posted by: theCoach at May 24, 2005 10:20:32 AM
Crack was (still is?) treated significantly different by the criminal justice system than marijuana, LSD, or Extacy. As a result, the greater stigma made its sale by "suburban kids" less fashionable, concentrating dealers in bad neighborhoods, and generally getting crack dealers worse jail terms.
Posted by: Mr. Econotarian at May 24, 2005 10:26:58 AM
The biggest problem with #1 is it describes an effect that crack has on users, whereas the overwhelming majority of crack-related crime is committed by dealers against other dealers, particularly gangs fighting over territory. Whether the drug those dealers are slinging is an upper or a downer shouldn't, it would seem, matter to that story.
Posted by: R.J. Lehmann at May 24, 2005 11:37:28 AM
I think what makes crack different is the state of mind it puts you in when the desired effect of the drug wears off--which happens to be very soon after taking it. More so than any other drug, coming down off of crack is hard to handle. So hard, in fact, that users are sorely tempted to go to extreme measures to acquire more crack. For some, the craving for more crack never goes away, even if they somehow find the will to stop using.
Junkies can get by scoring heroin once a day. They may have to score a large amount, but they don't have to spend all day attempting to acquire more and more. Crack users do. Crack users may be purchasing crack $5 worth at a time, and committing one petty crime after another to support their consumption.
Posted by: Michael Giesbrecht at May 24, 2005 12:38:49 PM
I think there are multiple sources for the correlation. First, make a distinction between highly addictive substances and those that aren't. Comparing crack to pot or ecstasy is mostly useless for that reason. Nobody killed someone for an ecstasy fix who was not already predisposed to killing people.
Among the addictive substances, I think Mike hits on it. Crack is (to my understanding) highly correlated with particular socio-economic environments that are themselves already highly correlated with high crime rates.
Posted by: sidereal at May 24, 2005 4:15:59 PM
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the crack wars took off in the late 1980s precisely in those metropolises that had legalized abortion, de jure or de facto, in 1970, three years ahead of Roe v. Wade: NYC, LA, and DC.
The crack wars, which were fought by exceptionally young males, then spread nationwide as the first generation born after Roe v. Wade entered their mid to late teenage years. Both the homicide and "serious violent crime" rates for ages 17 and under peaked in 1993 and stayed very high in 1994, according to FBI statistics collected under highly different methodologies.
And the wave of crack violence was worst among the group with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s: urban blacks. The non-white abortion rate, according to the Alan Guttmacher institute peaked in 1977, and was already at it's long term level by 1976, so the timing fits much better for the theory that abortion increased violent crime than Levitt's now-famous theory that it cut violent crime.
Correlation isn't proof, but there seems to be about as much evidence for the proposition that legalizing abortion increased the murder and serious violent crime rates as for Dr. Levitt's theory that abortion decreased it.
Why was there this geographical and demographic correlation between the usage of legal abortion and the crack violence wave? Dr. Levitt has tried to ignore this correlation for six years. He has tried to define the question surrounding abortion's effect as only whether it played a role in the decrease in crime in the mid-1990s and avoided the whole question
Perhaps legalizing abortion had a corrosive effect on urban black culture.
To speculate: First, legalization tended to kill off marriage by removing the moral burden on the impregnating boyfriend to marry the girl because she could now get an abortion with the full approval of the law. Levitt claims that legalizing abortion increased the "wantedness" of the babies who were born, but it sure didn't improve how much the fathers wanted them: the illegitimacy rate soared. As Levitt himself points out, being raised in a single parent home seems to double the chance of being a criminal.
Second, legalizing abortion, according to Levitt himself, drove down the birthrate by only 6% but increased the pregnancy rate by almost 30%. In other words, it vastly increased the rate of unwanted pregnancies. Let's think about the impact on respect for life among young males. If you live in a culture where role models tell you that the proper response to an inconvenient unborn baby is an abortion, does that have an impact on your attitude toward the proper resonse to inconvenient business rivals?
Third, let's look at the effects of legalizing abortion on urban blacks from a selectionist point of view. Both Levitt and I are much more selectionist in our thinking than is politically correct today -- i.e., as you'll see from his chapter on parenting techniques, he believes who the parents are is more important than what they do. Obviously, a big part of the sub rosa appeal of Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory is that blacks get more abortions than other groups, a point he made in his original 1999 paper with Donohue, although he dropped in later versions.
But which blacks were getting abortions? According to the Alan Guttmacher institute, almost as many unintended pregancies end up in a birth as in an abortion, so the effect on the wantedness of the babies actually born is much more uncertain than it sounds like in "Freakonomics." It is quite likely in fact that legalized abortion culled proportionally more middle class and working class blacks, while underclass blacks tended to just have the babies. Thus, legalized abortion could have lowered the social standards of blacks. Indeed, if you compare the kind of music that blacks youths were listening to in 1970 (e.g., James Brown, Marvin Gaye) to the kind of music they were listening to in 1993 (gangsta rap, which celebrates the ethos of the crack dealer), it does appear that the social standards of blacks declined, which would be in line with this theory.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 24, 2005 4:39:36 PM
You can read all the facts about the link between abortion and violent crime that Levitt doesn't want you to think about at
http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 24, 2005 4:44:40 PM
Also, one of the causes of the decline in crime in the 1990s was likely the switch by urban youth from smoking crack to smoking dope. Black youths started getting much fatter in the 1990s, which can happen from smoking dope, while a crack addiction tends to make people skinnier. Heavy dope smokers aren't going to set the business world afire, but they kill a lot fewer people than crack smokers.
This movement away from crack went along with a widespread swing away from self-destructive behavior, perhaps in reaction to the intense self-destruction of the crack era. For example, the black illegitimacy rate, which had been shooting upward for decades started to fall in 1995. The abortion rate went down considerably in the 1990s, too. (Interestingly, the illegitimacy and abortion rates are not negatively correlated, as you might assume from Levitt's theory that legalizing abortion cuts unwantedness, but historically have proven to be somewhat positively correlated.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 24, 2005 8:41:33 PM
Two more things to consider.
1. Previous illegal drugs were sold in houses with doors locked, blinds drawn. Crack is sold in open air markets that have to be defended against both competitors and police. The dealer may not have been a friend but the transaction wasn't made so publicly either.
2. There is a precedent in Prohibition. I'd surmise that the reason that alcohol prohibition and crack prohibition differed from other drugs is that both spawned an entirely new organized crime force. The involvement of organized crime in heroin, marijuana and cocaine was by established organized crime families with established territories and existing rules of business. Crack markets, for whatever reason, weren't Mafia controlled and resulted in the rise of new organized crime.
Posted by: Tom Hanna at May 24, 2005 9:18:45 PM
One other thing to keep in mind about the crack murder wave and the sudden drop in crime when it was over is how strongly it culled likely murderers. A very high fraction of the people murdered in the crack wars were reasonably likely to have murdered somebody else if they had survived. The crack wars probably killed off an excess of 50,000 or maybe 100,000 of the baddest dudes in America. That is one of the ignored reasons for the sharp decline in crime after 1994: an awful lot of the criminally-inclined were dead. Dr. Levitt is pushing his pre-natal execution theory as a big reason crime fell, but these post-natal executions of gang rivals was infinitely more targeted on dangerous guys.
Let me give you one statistic that will explain the impact of the massive culling by murder and imprisonment over the last 18 years: today in New York City, there are 36% more black women than black men alive.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 24, 2005 11:36:53 PM
Finally, some reasoned comment from someone without an agenda. Nope, no agenda whatsoever. Just open minded scientific skeptical hypothesis-testing. Yes, sir.
"You can read all the facts about the link between abortion and violent crime that Levitt doesn't want you to think about at..."
I have to ask; why doesn't Levitt want me to think about things? Wouldn't his book have been just as interesting if he showed that abortion causes an increase in crime. You can disagree all you like, but there's no need to villify.
Posted by: josh at May 25, 2005 8:38:25 AM
Josh asks:
"I have to ask; why doesn't Levitt want me to think about things?"
Put on your economist's reasoning hat and think about the financial and status incentives facing Levitt and you'll understand better why Levitt's account of his abortion-cut-crime theory in "Freakonomics" is so one-sided and misleading.
He and Donohue concocted a half-baked theory in 1999 based on a slapdash look at crime statistics (and completely failing to look at the most relevant crime data by age), and wrote up a draft paper. They took it around to seminars, where it got a respectful hearing and few empirical challenges.
Then it got leaked to the Chicago Tribune. It was a media sensation in the late summer of 1999, and the first time Levitt had gotten a lot of publicity in the broad press. I read about it. It didn't seem implausible but I wasn't convinced either. So, I looked at the relevant historical data for murder and serious violent crime rates for under-17 year olds and found they strikingly disconfirmed his theory: the worst years for youth violence in recorded history were 1993 and 1994. I invited Levitt to debate me in Slate.com. You can read it at http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33571/
I pointed out that there seemed to be about as much empirical evidence that legalizing abortion first raised serious crime as that it later cut it, and that Levitt's own admissions showed that his theory of human behavior about why abortion would cut crime behind his assertion was terribly simplistic.
Levitt could have backed off but his name was now associated with this theory more than anything else, a theory for which there was a clear and large market. As you can tell from the many softball book reviews of "Freakonomics" that credulously accept this most hyped part of the book without even the quickest Google search, which would have showed there was a lively controversy over the abortion-cut-crime theory, there is a real hunger among the commentariat for this theory to be true.
So, Levitt has continued to hype his theory, with vast success, even though he is well aware of its shortcomings. He has improved his publicity techniques since 1999, however. Back in March when his publicist recommended he resume his debate with me in some public forum to publicize his book, he refused. Most prudently, I would add.
I realize that an awful lot of social scientists want Levitt to triumph in his new role as best-selling media celebrity wise man because they hope it will open doors for them, too. Personally, I liked most of the rest of his book, even though it was egomaniacal and slapdash. I just don't think he's come close to meeting the burden of proof on the abortion-cut-crime controversy.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 25, 2005 1:07:01 PM
Mr. Sailer is arguing by using a lot of passive aggressive ad hominems and cui bonos. His choice of words says much more about what his agenda is than about Levitt:
"Levitt's account ... one-sided and misleading"
"concocted a half-baked theory", "it got leaked"
"his book ... egomaniacal and slapdash"
"Levitt has continued to hype his theory"
"he is well aware of its shortcomings"
As I understand, Mr. Sailer is argueing that Mr. Levitt is a hack who is selling his skills to a 'commentariat conspiracy':
"incentives facing Levitt"
"theory for which there was a large market"
"the commentariat"
"softball book reviews"
"social scientists want Levitt to triumph ... because they hope it will open doors for them"
There is a not so subtle tone of megalomania in Mr. Sailers account:
"I invited Levitt to debate me"
"[to] debate with me, he refused. Most prudently, I would add."
Mr Sailer,
your technical counter-argumentation is an interesting starting point, yet it seems that you did not come here merely to have a honest debate, but mostly to poop on Mr.Levitt.
To use your own cui bono argumentation, I suggest that there is an even larger "market for a theory" exacly opposite to Mr. Levitt's. You are free to write your own book for that market and for its "commentariat" (townhall.com, NRO, etc.). The anti-abortionists will happily pay you any amount of money if you can proove that abortions are the root of all evil (crime).
Posted by: Oskar Shapley at May 25, 2005 7:38:41 PM
"To use your own cui bono argumentation, I suggest that there is an even larger "market for a theory" exacly opposite to Mr. Levitt's. You are free to write your own book for that market and for its "commentariat" (townhall.com, NRO, etc.)."
I'm not noticing a lot of rational argument here about the facts and logic of the abortion-cut-crime theory!
Why don't you read what I've written on Levitt's theory over the last six years ( http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm ) and then come back and discuss that? At that point you'll be a lot better equipped to discuss my motivations and Levitt's.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 26, 2005 12:15:02 AM
Crack causes crime for one simple reason. Its illegal.
Prohibitive drug laws create criminals. People will do drugs, legal or not.
Posted by: Sam at May 27, 2005 6:29:09 PM
Mr Sailer:
"Why don't you read what I've written on Levitt's theory *over the last six years*...?" (my emphasis) "...you'll be a lot better equipped to discuss my motivations and Levitt's."
Doubtless I would, but I have a pretty good idea of the strength of your motivation just by reading the above, whatever its nature is. Obsessed much?
Posted by: derek at May 29, 2005 5:34:00 AM
It's definitely the nature of the drug. I would simply point out that the dramatic increase of meth use overlapping the ecstasy community has led to increased incidence of violence in traditional ecstasy communities. Meth, PCP, and crack are all similar in that they inhibit empathy, increase ego-driven behaviors, agression, and paranoia. There is plenty of clinical evidence to show that people on these substances do poorly on tests of agression. In other words, people who do these drugs are violent whether or not there is money in it, and most dealers ignore the rules about "don't get high off your own supply".
Posted by: Joshua Allen at Jun 1, 2005 4:12:24 PM
