Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (35 page)

56
Uniform Crime Report, “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2005,” FBI, Department of Justice, October 2006 (
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2005/downloaddocs/feloniouslykilled.pdf
). For information on accidental deaths of police see
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2005/table46.htm
.

57
This is a fairly typical year. Over the ten years from 1993 to 2002, there were on average 64 law enforcement officers murdered on the job each year (though the number of police officers rose over time). Source: “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2002,” FBI, U.S. Department of Justice.

58
Obtained via Bureau of Justice Statistics, Capital Punishment, 1985-2005, (
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pubalp2.htm#cp
) and from FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1976-2005, (
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/totalstab.htm
).

59
Not all murderers are eligible for the death penalty. To qualify, murders must have either killed multiple victims, children, or law enforcement officers, or committed murder while committing another felony. The smaller group of criminals that meet this criteria face a 1 in 70 chance of being executed. From 1977 to 2003, about 25 percent of murders were eligible for the death penalty. This assumes that that ratio holds for 2005. See Jeffrey Fagan, Franklin E. Zimring, and Amanda Geller, “Capital Punishment and Capital Murder: Market Share and the Deterrent Effects of the Death Penalty,”
Texas Law Review
(June 2006): 1819.

60
Steven Levitt, “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not,”
Journal of Economics Perspectives
(2004): 175.

61
For more on the role played by risk in criminal behavior, see W. Kip Viscusi, “The Risks and Rewards of Criminal Activity: A Comprehensive Test of Criminal Deterrence,”
Journal of Labor Economics
(1986): 317-340, and Michael K. Block and Vernon E. Gerety, “Some Experimental Evidence on Differences Between Student and Prisoner Reactions to Monetary Penalties and Risk,”
Journal of Legal Studies
(January 1995): 123-138.

62
Raymond Bonner and Ford Fessenden, “States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates,”
New York Times
, September 22, 2000, A1.

63
These were Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Vermont.

64
From 1977 to 1998, the population weighted drop in murder rates for the 12 states that never instituted the death penalty fell by 21 percent. For the 38 other states, their murder rate fell by 29 percent.
Http://www.disaster-center.com/crime/uscrime.htm
.

65
Some analysts inexplicably date the end of capital punishment to the 1972 Furman decision by the Supreme Court, even though executions had stopped in 1968. See John Donohue and Wolfers, “Uses and abuses of empirical evidence in the death penalty debate,”
Stanford Law Review
, 2006, 791-845. The graph I show uses the execution rate because it gives readers the best indication of the execution risk that criminals face by committing murder.

66
Paul G. Cassell and Richard Fowles, “Handcuffing the Cops? A Thirty-Year Perspective on Miranda’s Harmful Effects on Law Enforcement,”
Stanford Law Review
(April, 1998): 1055-1144. The Miranda decision may have affected crime rates, but it’s precise effect is difficult to evaluate; since it was a Supreme Court decision, we can only evaluate it through time-series data for the entire United States. Furthermore, there were so many other Supreme Court decisions as well as other possible explanatory factors that it is simply impossible to disentangle all of them.

67
The first serious cross-sectional tests using census data were in Isaac Ehrlich, “Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Additional Evidence,”
Journal of Political Economy
, August 1977. The first time-series estimates were in Isaac Ehrlich, “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment,”
American Economic Review
, August 1975.

68
Isaac Ehrlich, “Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Additional Evidence,”
Journal of Political Economy
(August 1977): 779.

69
Committee on Research on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, Understanding Crime—An Evaluation of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (National Academy of Science, Susan White and Samuel Krislow editors, 1977). See also Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen and Daniel Nagin,
Deterrence and Incapacitation: Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Science, 1978). Ehrlich co-authored another study responding to the National Academic of Sciences report. See Isaac Ehrlich and Mark Randall, “Fear of Deterrence,”
Journal of Legal Studies
(1977): 293-316.

70
The few studies that fail to find any deterrence from the death penalty either don’t use all the data or measure the execution rate in strange ways. For example, ignoring data from individual states, Narayan and Smyth look only at national statistics through a data set that has only thirty-seven observations. Richard Berk, for his part, achieved his result by discarding data for entire states such as Texas. See Paresh Kumar Narayan and Russell Smyth, “Dead Man Walking: An Empirical Reassessment of the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment Using the Bounds Testing Approach to Cointegration,”
Applied Economics
, 2006, and Richard Berk, “New Claims about Executions and General Deterrence,”
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies
, 2005. Rather than analyzing the percent of murders that result in
execution, some researchers measure the number of executions per prisoner. It is not clear why anyone would believe that if jails are filled up with additional prisoners convicted of crimes like drug possession or car theft, the risk murderers face from execution would decline. Comparing two unrelated statistics, it is hardly surprising that this research cannot identify any benefit from the death penalty. See Lawrence Katz, Steven Levitt, Ellen Shustorovish, “Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence,”
American Law and Economics Review
, 2003, 318-343. Another paper by Donohue and Wolfers has used this approach uncritically. See John Donohue and Wolfers, “Uses and abuses of empirical evidence in the death penalty debate,”
Stanford Law Review
, 2006, 791-845.

71
My work with Bill Landes finds a much larger benefit—implying that each execution saves hundreds of lives. We found that each one percentage point in execution rates lowered the murder rate by at least four percent. Lott,
The Bias Against Guns
(2003), Chapter. 6.

72
Lott and Landes in Lott,
The Bias Against Guns
(Regnery 2003), Chapter 6.

73
Lott,
More Guns, Less Crime
(University of Chicago Press, 2000), Chapter 9.

74
Prison wardens face a similar problem. If a prisoner is sentenced to death, it’s hard to find an additional penalty that you can impose on him in order to control his behavior. You can take away some privileges, but without some additional penalty it is difficult for the warden to control the prisoner.

75
ABC News/
Washington Post
Poll. June 22-25, 2006 (
http://www.pollingreport.com/crime.htm
). A 2006 Gallup poll further found that 51 percent of respondents believed the death penalty is not used enough, compared to 25 percent who think it is used “about right” and 21 percent believing it is used “too often.” Gallup Poll. May 8-11, 2006 (
http://www.pollingreport.com/crime.htm
.

76
Polls have found support for the death penalty at 60 percent among Eastern Europeans, 72 percent of South Africans, and 51 percent among Brazilians. See Craig Smith, “ In Europe, It’s East vs. West on the Death Penalty
,” New York Times
, November 19, 2006, p. 4; David W. Moore, “Death Penalty Gets Less Support From Britons, Canadians Than Americans,” Gallup Poll News Service, February 20, 2006; Datafolha / Folha de Sao Paulo,
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/12893
. See also
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/11872
,
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/9970
,
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/11639
.

77
49 percent of Britons support the death penalty (David W. Moore, “Death Penalty Gets Less Support From Britons, Canadians Than Americans,” Gallup Poll News Service, February 20, 2006), For somewhat lower percentages, see
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/10758
.

78
In a recent debate over the death penalty, Scalia declared:

79
“Study Finds 2.6% Increase In U.S. Prison Population,”
New York Times
, July 28, 2003.

80
The
Washington Post
makes a similar argument: “It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its citizens during the past decade. The number of prisoners in the city has dropped from 21,449 in 1993 to 14,129 this past week. That runs counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent during that time” (Michael Powell, “Despite Fewer Lockups, NYC Has Seen Big Drop in Crime,”
Washington Post
, November 24, 2006; There is a simple explanation for why both prison population and crime can fall in New York. When murders fall by 70 percent, can you really keep on expanding the prison population? Note that the prison population has fallen by a third, but violent crime in the city has fallen by much more than that. The number of prisoners per crime has still gone up dramatically. Or take their example for Idaho. “Perhaps as intriguing is the experience in states where officials spent billions of dollars to build
prisons. From 1992 to 2002, Idaho’s prison population grew by 174 percent. the largest percentage increase in the nation. Yet violent crime in that state rose by 14 percent.” It would have been helpful if they had put the numbers in per capita rates, rather than comparing numbers 10 years apart. Idaho’s population grew by more than 14 percent, though less than 174 percent. Thus their crime rate did fall as the prison population grew. Among the academic papers that find an increase in imprisonment leads to less crime, see Thomas Marvell and Carlisle Moody, “Prison Population Growth and Crime Reduction,”
Journal of Quantitative Criminology
, 1994, 109-140.

81
Gordon Tullock, “Does Punishment Deter Crime?”
The Public Interest 36
(Summer 1974), 103-11. James Q. Wilson,
Thinking About Crime
, (New York: Random House, 1985). See a more recent summary in my book,
More Guns, Less Crime
(2000).

82
David B. Mustard, “Re-examining Criminal Behavior: The Importance of Omitted Variable Bias,”
Review of Economics and Statistics
, vol. 84, no. 1, 2002.

83
John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley, “Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births,”
Economic Inquiry
, April 2001.

84
There is a broad range of private law enforcement. Other papers look at everything from private security guards (see Bruce Benson and Brent D. Mast, “Privately Produced General Deterrence,”
Journal of Law and Economics
, October 2001) to private enforcement catching those who jump bail (see Eric Helland and Alexander Tabarrok, “The Fugitive: Evidence on public verses private law enforcement form bail jumping,”
Journal of Law and Economics
, April 2004, 93-122.)

85
While it is difficult to compile precise national statistics for the number of outstanding concealed weapons permits, the following list relates the figures in some states: Florida (549,000) (
http://licgweb.doacs.state.fl.us/stats/licensetypecount.html
); Pennsylvania (600,000) (
http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061217/NEWS/612170334/-1/DATABASE01
); Washington (239,000) (
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003298710_shootingside11m.html
); Ohio (82,144) (
http://www.ag.state.oh.us/le/prevention/concealcarry/statistics.asp
); Utah (80,000) (
http://bci.utah.gov/CFP/Firearm%20Statistical%20Review/firearmrev_200603.pdf
); Texas (247,000) (
http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/administration/crime_records/chl/demographics.htm
); Virginia (125,020) (Let’s hunt for answers on gun use,
Richmond Times-Dispatch
, February 15, 2006); Indiana (300,000) (
http://www2.indystar.com/articles/1/161649-4651-092.html
), Michigan (133,000) (
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/msp/ccw_county_report_approved_177644_7.pdf
); North Carolina (59,597) (
http://sbi2.jus.state.nc.us/crp//files/02/91/70/f029170/public/other/conceal/Sept302004stats.pdf
); and South Dakota (41,000) (
http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061217/NEWS/612170334/-1/DATABASE01
).