Lethal Injection Under Fire Again

[Chaerophon]

Easy to say until it's your brother, father, sister or mother.

Cheap. That is too much of an assumption to make.

Cheap? Why, because it's true? What assumption? Your response makes no sense.

Funny, there are many countries in the world that HAVE reduced poverty and relative advantage through systematic modification that involves "throwing money at" the problem of inequality

More likely, money disappears into the hands of the corrupt. Money is a means, not an end. Take a basic economics course, and among the first lessons is: Money has no inherent value by itself, it is traded for goods and services. When you throw money at a situation, it disappears into the pockets of whoever is controlling it.

In this context, "throwing money at" the problem was a reference to the correlation in Western countries between more robust social welfare programs, lessened levels of social inequality, and lower incidences of violent crime. Your "lesson" for me is garbled and beside the point. France, Canada, Germany, the UK, all of the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Japan (to name a few) have per capita murder rates less than 1/2 of that in the U.S. Many of these nations also feature very diverse racial makeups. All of these countries have more expansive social welfare programs in place than the U.S. (some to a greater degree than others), and lower (sometimes much lower) levels of income inequality. Not definitively causal (of course), but certainly food for thought... Assault rates are even worse: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/us/cri

Stinks of herring. Where do you see us proposing we do nothing? Harumph. Getting the knowledge out that these institutions are corrupt is the first step. You cannot do anything until you're first aware of its existence.

You PM me to acknowledge that you had mistaken the context of my posts, and then, when I respond to someone else who has misinterpreted the very same context (and responded to the post that supposedly made you aware of your mistake in the first place) you respond in the exact same knee-jerk way as previously? THREADED VIEW!

Agreed. Poverty and Crime have no direct correlation. There are millions of law abiding poor, and a whole lot of high profile, money embezzeling, drug cartelling, murdering rich. Poverty is irrelevant here.

You and Roland both need to learn to differentiate social trends from specific instances. The fact that "some" or even "a lot" of rich people murder doesn't mean much in the context of our discussion given that that there is a well-documented social trend at play.

A listing of articles that mark a correlation of relative poverty and/or income inequality to violent crime rates. These are links from the World Bank - folks who, in my experience, are not typically thought of as "bleeding hearts":

* Bourguignon, F., 1998, "Crime as a Social Cost of Poverty and Inequality: a review focusing on developing countries", processed, DELTA, Paris.
* Fajnzylber, P., D. Lederman and N. Loayza, 1998, "Determinants of Crime Rates in Latin America and the World", World Bank Latin America and the Caribbean Viewpoints Series Paper.
* Fajnzylber, P., D. Lederman and N. Loayza, 1998, "What causes violent crime?", The World Bank, Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, processed.
* Hsieh, C. and M.D. Pugh, 1993, "Poverty, income inequality, and violent crime: a meta-analysis of recent aggregate data studies", Criminal Justice Review, 18(2): 182-202.
* Kennedy, B.P. and I. Kawachi, D. Prothrow-Stith, K. Lochner and B. Gibbs, 1998, "Social capital, income inequality, and firearm violent crime", Social Science and Medicine, 47(1): 7-17.
* Walberg, P., M. McKee, V. Shkolnikov, L. Chenet, D.A. Leon, 1998, "Economic change, crime, and mortality crisis in Russia: regional analysis", British Medical Journal, 317: 312-318.
* Wilson, M. and M. Daly, 1997, "Life expectancy, economic inequality, homicide, and reproductive timing in Chicago neighborhoods", British Medical Journal, 314: 1271-1278.

In searching for clues as to the factors contributing to this correlation, an interesting hypothesis from Wilson and Daly (as yet unproven, but they're working on it):

"Criminal violence can be considered an outcome of steep future discounting6 and escalation of risk in social competition.10 This is especially true of homicide in urban parts of the United States, where a large majority of cases involve competition for status or resources among unrelated men7 9 and even marital homicides result from sexual proprietariness in the shadow of male-male competition.14 15 This line of reasoning suggests that criminal violence will vary in relation to local indicators of life expectancy, hence our first hypothesis: homicide rates will vary as a function of local life expectancy."

Sounds reasonable, and promising.