Brookings: Experts - Jens Ludwig

More Prisoners Versus More Crime is the Wrong Question

Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:09:00 -0500

Policy Brief #185

The unprecedented surge in incarceration since 1980 has stimulated a national debate between those who claim that locking up over 2 million people is necessitated by public safety concerns, and those who say the human and financial burden of imprisoning so many of our citizens is intolerable.

But framing the incarceration debate as a tradeoff between public safety and public finance is far too narrow. The best evidence suggests the prison population would be substantially reduced with negligible effects on crime rates. Crime could actually be reduced if the savings were put to use in strengthening other criminal justice programs and implementing other reforms. Making this case requires that we confront widespread skepticism about the possibility of reducing criminal behavior on the outside.

The research community has made real progress in identifying the causal effect of various crime-related policies in recent years, providing us with proven alternatives to prison for controlling crime. The key has been to make greater use of experimental methods of the sort that are common in medicine, as well as "natural experiments" that arise from naturally occurring policy or demographic shifts.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The resources currently dedicated to supporting long prison sentences should be reallocated to produce swifter, surer, but more moderate punishment. This approach includes hiring more police officers -we know now that chiefs using modern management techniques can make effective use of them.
Increased alcohol excise taxes reduce not only alcohol abuse but also the associated crime at very little cost to anyone except the heaviest drinkers. Federal and state levies should be raised.
Crime patterns and crime control are as much the result of private actions as public. The productivity of private-security efforts and private cooperation with law enforcement should be encouraged through government regulation and other incentives.
While convicts typically lack work experience and skills, it has proven very difficult to increase the quality and quantity of their licit employment through job creation and traditional training, either before or after they become involved with criminal activity. More effective rehabilitation (and prevention) programs seek to develop non-academic ("social-cognitive") skills like self-control, planning, and empathy.
Adding an element of coercion to social policy can also help reduce crime, including threatening probationers with swift, certain and mild punishments for illegal drug use, and compulsory schooling laws that force people to stay in school longer.

The unprecedented surge in incarceration since 1980 has stimulated a national debate between those who claim that locking up over 2 million people is necessitated by public safety concerns, and those who say the human and financial burden of imprisoning so many of our citizens is intolerable. This debate played itself out vividly in the U.S. Supreme Court's May 2011 decision (Brown v. Plata) requiring California to dramatically scale back the size of its prison population. The majority's decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy focused on inhumane conditions in California's prisons. In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia emphasized the "terrible things [that were] sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order," while Justice Samuel Alito argued the majority was "gambling with the safety of the people of California." These dissenting opinions will sound familiar to states considering cutbacks in incarceration to balance dwindling state budgets.

However, framing the incarceration debate as a tradeoff between public safety and public finance is far too narrow. Prison is not the only option we have for controlling crime. But making the case for alternative approaches has historically been an uphill battle. What noted crime expert and UCLA professor Mark Kleiman calls the "brute force" strategy of locking up lots of people in prison has an obvious logic to it. The perception that "prison works" is reinforced by today's crime rates, now at a 50-year low.

In contrast, there is an abiding skepticism about the effectiveness of other efforts to change criminal behavior on the outside. One reason for this skepticism is the difficulty of distinguishing cause from effect in crime data. For decades, criminologists have maintained that one obvious alternative to prison - putting more police on the streets to help deter crime - doesn't work, because the numbers suggest a positive association between the crime rate and the number of police. (This is analogous to the association between the large numbers of physicians in areas with high concentrations of sick people, such as hospitals.)

Confidence in rehabilitation through social programs also is low, because recidivism rates are so high, even among inmates who participate in re-entry programs. In a recent interview, for example, the Los Angeles District Attorney told Time that, with respect to rehabilitation for gang-involved inmates, "we predict with some degree of confidence . . . it will fail in many, many, many cases."

Fortunately, in recent years researchers have made real progress in identifying the impact of various crime-related policies. The key has been to make greater use of experimental methods of the sort common in medicine, as well as "natural experiments" that arise from naturally occurring policy or demographic shifts.

The over-riding conclusion of the best new research is that there is "money on the table"; we can reduce the financial and human costs of crime without stimulating resurgence in crime rates.

Prisons and crime

Much of the reluctance to reduce the prison population reflects a belief that the extraordinary reduction in crime that occurred in the 1990s was caused by a surge in imprisonment. But even a casual look at the actual statistics challenges the view that prison trends get all or most of the credit for the crime drop.

Looking at three periods from recent history, we see that the crime drop of the 1990s did coincide with a large increase in the prison population. But the large crime increase during the prior period was also associated with a jump in imprisonment - and so was the relatively static crime pattern since 2000. If the prison surge of the 1990s gets credit for the crime drop, then fairness requires that the prison surge of the 1980s gets the blame for the crime increase of that period, while the prison increase of the 2000s was largely irrelevant. This type of armchair analysis supports almost any conclusion.

PERCENTAGE CHANGE
	Prisoners/cap	Robbery rate
1984-1991	+66	+33
1991-2000	+42	-47 (the crime drop)
2000-2008	+10	0

Studies suggest that increased use of imprisonment indeed should receive part of the credit for the crime drop of the 1990s, in the sense that crime was lower than it would have been had we taken all the funds devoted to prison increases and spent it for purposes other than crime control. But is that the right counterfactual? If the vast increase in prison expenditures came at the expense of alternative crime-control efforts that might be even more effective, then the net effect of the imprisonment boom is not so clear, even qualitatively.

Alternatives to prison

Prison alternatives can be organized into two large and somewhat overlapping bins of crime-control activities, which we label "changing individual propensities towards crime" and "changing the offending environment." Under each heading, we identify particularly promising programs, based on recent assessments of costs and benefits. We conclude with rough calculations that highlight the potential magnitude of the inefficiency within our current policy approach - that is, how much extra crime-prevention could be achieved by simply reallocating resources from less-efficient to more-efficient uses.

Changing individual propensities towards crime

The difficulties of changing poverty and adverse mental health: While a large body of criminological and psychological theory has emphasized the role of economic disadvantage and mental health problems in contributing to criminal behavior, empirical evidence suggests that job training and mental health courts are not the most cost-effective ways to control crime - not because these disadvantages don't matter, but because they are so difficult to modify in practice.
Coercive social policy: The average high school graduation rate in the America's 50 biggest urban school systems is about 53 percent. One of the few levers available to policymakers to ensure youth stay in school is to raise the compulsory schooling age - although it is natural to wonder what good schooling will do for youth who are being forced to go against their will. It is thus striking that we have strong quasi-experimental evidence from both the United States and Great Britain that cohorts exposed to an increased compulsory schooling age have reduced crime involvement. That benefit augments the usual list of benefits associated with more schooling, and it complements the benefits of early childhood interventions like Perry Preschool (a two-year preschool program for disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-olds) and Head Start (the large-scale federal preschool program).
Social-cognitive skill interventions: Most of the economics-of-crime literature has focused on ways of reducing crime by changing the incentives that confront potential offenders, with very little attention devoted to helping people respond to the incentives they already face. A growing body of evidence shows that social-cognitive skills - for example, impulse control, inter-personal skills and future orientation - influence people's response to incentives and predict criminal involvement, schooling and employment participation.

Moreover, intervention research also suggests that targeted efforts to improve the social-cognitive skills of young people at risk and to modify the social systems that may contribute to or reinforce delinquency can reduce crime. The benefits of such efforts can far exceed their costs.

Changing the offending environment

Swiftness and certainty, not severity, of punishment: Much of the increase in America's prison population since the 1970s comes from an increase in average sentence lengths. Yet new data from the randomized Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) experiment found that frequent drug testing, followed immediately by a very short jail stay for dirty urine, substantially reduced drug use and criminality among probationers. Studies of the federal government's Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) police hiring grants provides further empirical support for the growing suspicion that swiftness and certainty of punishment may actually be most important for controlling crime. The notion that crime is reduced by simply putting more police on the streets without changing what they do, and that deterrence (rather than simply incapacitation) may be an important mechanism behind this result, also overturns the conventional wisdom that prevails in many criminology circles.
Demand curves for criminogenic goods are negatively sloped: The federal and state excise taxes on beer and liquor have declined markedly (in real terms) since World War II. These rates are considerably below the marginal external social cost, even if effects on crime are not considered. Many people outside the economics profession are skeptical that modest changes in the price of alcohol can do much to change use, given the social context in which drinking so frequently occurs; the possibility that many of highest-risk alcohol users have some level of dependency; and how little attention so many people pay to a 5, 10 or even 20 percent change in prices. Yet the empirical evidence that raising taxes and prices would reduce some types of crime is very strong.
Private co-production: Most of the research on crime control strategies focuses on the role played by government and non-profit interventions. But private citizens and businesses account for a surprisingly large share of resources devoted to preventing crime. State and local governments can help reduce crime indirectly by encouraging private actions that make law enforcement more productive. Two examples for which benefits exceed costs by an order of magnitude are building the police-tracking infrastructure for Lojack, and creating the legal framework for Business Improvement Districts (where local businesses are subject to tax payments that go in part toward making the neighborhood clean and safe).

It bears repeating that the goal is not to identify the "best" alternative to prison, but rather the best portfolio of options.

What the status quo costs us

Our review of the best available social science suggests that America's current approach to crime control is woefully inefficient. Much greater crime control could be achieved at lower human and financial cost. To illustrate the potential gains from improving the efficiency of the current system, consider the following hypothetical policy experiment.

Imagine that we changed sentencing policies and practices in the United States so that the average length of a prison sentence reverted to what it was in 1984 - i.e., midway through the Reagan administration. This policy change would reduce our current prison population by around 400,000 and total prison spending (currently $70 billion annually) by about $12 billion per year.

What would we give up by reducing average sentence lengths back to 1984 levels? In terms of crime control: not all that much. Assume that society "breaks even" on the $12 billion we spend per year to have average sentence lengths at 2009 rather than 1984 (so that the benefits to society are just worth $12 billion), although more pessimistic assumptions are also warranted.

What could we do instead with our newly acquired $12 billion? One possibility would be to put more police on the streets. Currently, the United States spends around $100 billion per year on police protection, so this hypothetical policy switch would increase the nation's police budget by 12 percent, enabling deployment of as many as 100,000 more police officers. The estimated elasticity of crime with respect to police is far larger (in absolute value) than even the most optimistic assessment of what the elasticity of crime would be with respect to increased sentence lengths. This resource reallocation would lead to a decline of hundreds of thousands of violent and property crime victimizations each year.

A different way to think about the potential size of this efficiency gain is to note that the benefit-cost ratio for increased spending on police may be on the order of 4:1. If the benefit-cost ratio for marginal spending on long prison sentences is no more than 1:1, then reducing average sentence lengths to 1984 levels in order to increase spending on police could generate net benefits to society on the order of $36 billion to $90 billion per year.

Suppose instead that we devote the resources from a $12 billion cut in prison spending to supporting high-quality preschool programs. This would enable a large increase in federal spending on preschool services - for example, $12 billion would represent a 150 percent increase in the annual budget for Head Start (currently around $8 billion per year). Currently Head Start can enroll only around half of eligible 3 and 4-year-olds, and provides early childhood education services that are far less intensive than successful, widely-cited model programs like the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian. Head Start children participate in the program for shorter periods (usually one year, versus two to five years for the others), and the educational attainment of Head Start teachers is lower.

A 150 percent increase in Head Start's budget could dramatically expand the program on both the extensive and intensive margins. Given available data, the benefit-cost ratio of this expenditure would fall in the range of 2:1 to 6:1 - that is, from two to six dollars in long-term benefit for every dollar spent. Reallocating resources from long prison sentences to early childhood education might generate from $12 billion to $60 billion in net benefits to society.

If crime reduction is a key goal, we might do better still by focusing on human capital investments in the highest-risk subset of the population - through efforts to address social-cognitive skill deficits of young people already involved in the criminal justice system. Marvin Wolfgang's seminal cohort studies found that only a small fraction of each cohort commits the bulk of all crime. While early intervention programs target children during the time of life in which they are most developmentally "plastic," interventions with adolescents and young adults can be more tightly targeted on those whose arrest histories suggest they are likely to end up as serious offenders. Another benefit of targeting criminally active teens and adults is an immediate crime reduction payoff.

What sort of social-cognitive skill development could we provide to high-risk young people with $12 billion per year?

With around $1 billion, we could provide functional family therapy (FFT) to each of the roughly 300,000 youths on juvenile probation. E.K. Drake and colleagues estimate that FFT costs something less than $2,500 per youth, with a benefit-cost ratio that may be as high as 25:1 from crime reduction alone.

With the remaining $11 billion we could provide multi-systemic therapy (MST) to almost every arrestee age 19 and under. The cost of MST is around $4,500 per year, with a benefit-cost ratio of around 5:1.

Estimates such as these indicate that diverting $12 billion from long prison sentences to addressing social-cognitive skill deficits among high-risk youth could generate net social benefits on the order of $70 billion per year. Even if FFT and MST, when implemented at large scale, are only half as effective as previous experiments suggest, this resource switch would still generate substantial societal benefits.

The preceding calculations are intended to be illustrative rather than comprehensive benefit-cost analyses, and, clearly, they are subject to a great deal of uncertainty. Nevertheless, they strongly suggest the enormous efficiency gains that could result from reallocating resources from prisons to other uses that will, among other beneficial outcomes, reduce crime.

A key challenge we currently face is that our government systems are not well suited to converting the fifth year of a convicted drug dealer's prison term into an extra year or two of Head Start for a poor child. Government agency heads have strong incentives to maximize the budgets of their agencies, and pour any resources that are freed-up from eliminating ineffective program activities back into their own agencies. This is the intrinsic difficulty of rationalizing policies across domains, agencies, and levels of government. If we could solve this problem - and orient the policy system to up-weight evidence from design-driven research - then in our quest for effective crime control, it appears possible that we could have more for less.

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Philip J. Cook
Jens Ludwig

Image Source: © Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Increasing Residential Mobility to Boost Economic Mobility

Jens Ludwig and Steven Raphael — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:48:00 -0400

ABSTRACT—

The paper proposes the creation of a “mobility bank” at a government cost of less than $1 billion per year to help finance the residential moves of U.S. workers relocating either to take offered jobs or to search for work, and to help them learn more about the employment options available in other parts of the country. Whereas those with college degrees and savings are much more likely to move in response to job loss and to improve their job market outcomes, those with less skills and no savings may have difficulty financing such transitions. The government should target mobility bank loans toward displaced, unemployed, and underemployed people in depressed areas of the country and should help to insure people against job-outcome uncertainty by making repayment terms contingent on the borrower’s postmove employment and income. This proposal extends government support for work-related moves that already are included in the U.S. tax code but that primarily benefit higher income households. Calculations suggest that the benefits compare favorably with the costs from alternative federal efforts. Perhaps more importantly, our proposal helps address a persistent market failure that limits the ability of low-income families to borrow against future earnings to “invest” in job-promoting residential moves.

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Jens Ludwig
Steven Raphael

Publication: Hamilton Project Discussion Paper

Is the Right to Bear Arms an Anachronism?

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

June 11, 2007
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

In the biggest decision in decades on whether the Constitution's Second Amendment creates a personal right to keep and bear arms, a District of Columbia federal appeals court recently struck down the District's ban against having a pistol or an operational rifle, even at home for self-defense. If the district seeks Supreme Court review, it could lead to the most important gun control decision in history. Meanwhile, the mass murder at Virginia Tech University stoked the perennially simmering debate whether stronger gun controls could prevent such horrors—or make them more likely.

On June 11, the Brookings Institution continued its Judicial Issues Forum series with a discussion of the practical and constitutional arguments for and against various forms of gun control. Panelists included Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center; Randy Barnett, Carmack Waterhouse professor of legal theory at the Georgetown University Law Center; Jens Ludwig, professor of public policy at Georgetown University and nonresident senior fellow at Brookings; and Benjamin Wittes, guest scholar at Brookings.

Stuart Taylor, Jr., a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and a writer for National Journal and Newsweek, moderated the panel.

Participants

Moderator

Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Columnist, National Journal; Contributor, Newsweek

Panelists

Josh Sugarmann

Executive Director,
Violence Policy Center

Randy Barnett

Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, Georgetown University Law Center

More COPS

Jens Ludwig and John J. Donohue III — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

It would be unrealistic to expect crime to continue dropping sharply as it did in the 1990s, but that is no reason to undermine the progress brought by successful policies. With recent FBI data showing crime on the rise, it is time to reconsider the massive de-funding of one of the most successful federal anti-crime measures of the 1990s: the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Community Policing Services (COPS) program. The program, authorized by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, provides grants to state and local police to hire additional officers and adopt aspects of "community policing."

The COPS program distributed nearly $1 billion in hiring grants to state and local police in each fiscal year from 1995 to 1999. Yet the amount of COPS funding allocated to helping state and local departments hire more police has declined dramatically over the past several years. The funding allocated for this purpose in fiscal 2005 was just $5 million. COPS has been effective in putting more police officers on the street. The best available evidence suggests that more police lead to less crime. Thus, COPS appears to have contributed to the drop in crime observed in the 1990s.

Given that the costs of crime to American society are so large - perhaps as much as $2 trillion per year - even small percentage reductions in crime can reap very large benefits. Our calculations suggest restoring the $1.4 billion COPS budget that prevailed in fiscal 2000 is likely to generate a benefit to society valued from $6 billion to $12 billion. COPS appears to be one of the most cost-effective options available for fighting crime.

Policy Brief #158

Introduction

FBI statistics suggest that violent crime rates increased from 2004 to 2005, and continued to climb through at least the first half of 2006. The massive drop in violent crime witnessed in the 1990s, when homicide rates declined by nearly 45 percent, has stalled since the turn of the millennium (Figure 1). As the Washington Post noted in a front-page article in December 2006, "the historic drop in the U.S. crime rate has ended and is being reversed."

It is in our view no coincidence that violent crime rates were declining during the 1990s when the number of police patrolling U.S. streets was on the rise (shown in Figure 1 by the number of police per 100,000 people), and that the crime drop has stalled as the number of police per capita has declined. The increase in police spending during the 1990s was driven in part by the federal government's new COPS program, which distributed nearly $1 billion in hiring grants to state and local police in each fiscal year from 1995 to 1999. Yet the amount of COPS funding allocated to helping state and local departments hire more police has declined dramatically over the past several years; the total amount of funding allocated for this purpose in 2005 was equal to just $5 million (see: http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/mime/open.pdf?Item=1611).

A funding cut of 99.5 percent for police hiring under COPS would make sense if the program were ineffective or inefficient, but this is not the case. The best available research suggests that putting more police officers on urban streets is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce crime.

COPS and Cops

Demonstrating the desirability of the COPS program requires that we establish a number of propositions. First, in order for the COPS program to reduce crime successfully in the United States, COPS hiring grants to state and local law enforcement agencies need to actually translate into more police officers on the street. This need not be the case, since as with any government program many things can go wrong. Money might be mismanaged or misspent. State and local police departments might be unable to recruit and train enough new police officers, particularly when the labor market is tight, as it was in the 1990s. Or jurisdictions that receive a grant from the federal government to hire more police might simply reduce their own financial contributions to the police department by the exact same amount.

Yet the best available research suggests that the COPS program was in fact successful in putting more police on the street. A recent report by the Government Accounting Office estimated that in 2000, the peak year of COPS hiring grants, the program funded around 17,000 sworn officers, equal to around 3 percent of the total number of sworn police officers across the country. A study by economists William Evans and Emily Owens at the University of Maryland suggests that state and local law enforcement agencies do reduce somewhat their own budgets for hiring in response to COPS grants, but that on average each extra 10 officers paid for by a COPS grant increases the size of the agency's police force by seven officers. Accounting for the partially offsetting behavior by state and local government suggests that COPS increased the total number of police officers on the street in the peak year of 2000 by 11,900 officers, equal to around 2 percent of the total police force in the country that year.

COPS and Crime

The second proposition - that more police on the streets leads to lower crime - would appear to be obviously true. But substantial social science research at one point seemed to challenge this proposition. The skeptics concerning police effectiveness pointed out that the police very rarely arrest someone who is in the middle of committing a crime. Even the very best police departments require several minutes to respond to a 911 call for help - which is usually enough time for criminal perpetrators to flee the scene. And of course with many violent and property crimes the victims themselves are unable to report the crime to the police until after the crime has been completed. As President Clinton was advocating the need for 100,000 more cops on the street in 1994, one prominent academic skeptic on police effectiveness (David Bayley) wrote: "The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society's best defense against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth."

Despite the plausibility of the view that stepped-up policing might reduce crime by increasing the chances that an offender is successfully identified, arrested and punished after the fact, many criminologists were primed to endorse Bayley's conclusion. These criminologists are skeptical about the whole idea of deterrence, noting that many would-be offenders are likely to be unaware of changes in policing intensity, while even those who are aware of stepped-up policing may be undeterred because they are drunk, destitute, enraged or deranged. Economists usually respond that more police spending can still reduce aggregate crime rates, even if many crime-prone people are unaware or unaffected by the policy change. All that is required is that at least some people at risk for committing crime realize and respond to the change in a local policing environment. Moreover, economists usually believe that criminals will be more responsive to changes in punishment certainty than severity, in part because people generally tend to be more focused on events that happen close in time rather than in the distant future. This implies that to the extent to which criminals can be deterred, stepped-up policing that increases the chances offenders are punished at all may be a more effective use of resources than handing out ever longer prison terms.

Progress in the science of econometrics has played an important role in providing a better answer to the important empirical question of the impact of police on crime. The key difficulty to generating good econometric estimates of this impact stems from the fact that police are not randomly distributed across municipalities in America. Big-city mayors are usually more worried about crime than their counterparts in charge of affluent suburban communities, and set their police budgets accordingly. But the fact that high-crime cities spend more on police per capita on average than do lower-crime jurisdictions does not mean that police cause crime, in the same way that the increased prevalence of sick people in doctor's offices does not mean that modern medicine causes bad health outcomes. Even comparing how crime changes within a given jurisdiction when police spending goes up may be problematic, since additional resources are often devoted to police departments when crime rates are increasing.

Only recently have social scientists been able to make real headway in untangling this causal relationship, with the best available studies now suggesting that increasing the number of police on the streets will in fact reduce crime. One of the best of these studies is by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt,, who examines what happens in cities that increase police spending for reasons unrelated to what else is going on with local crime trends, for example because of stronger public service unions. Levitt's estimates suggest that each 10 percent increase in the size of the police force reduces violent crime by 4 percent and property crimes by 5 percent. The 2 percent jump in the number of police generated by COPS should reduce violent crimes by about 0.8 percent and property crimes by about 1 percent. Other studies that have followed Levitt's strategy of seeking natural experiments to generate valid estimates of the effectiveness of police in reducing crime typically find qualitatively similar results.

Note that Levitt's estimates reflect what happens to crime when cities put more police on the street and continue to deploy them in the usual way. Other research in criminology and economics suggests that the effectiveness of police resources might be enhanced further by targeting police attention at the highest-risk people or places, such as crime "hot spots" or gang members, or focused on the highest-cost parts of the crime problem, such as gun violence. These are the types of responses that the COPS Office promotes, and so the effects of increased police presence funded by the COPS program could in principle be somewhat larger than Levitt's estimates might imply.

Several recent studies that attempt to directly evaluate the effects of the COPS program suggest that the COPS resources may indeed have been effectively targeted to generate such greater crime reductions. One of the best of these COPS evaluations is by University of Maryland economists William Evans and Emily Owens. Their estimates suggest the 2 percent increase in police under COPS led to a 2 percent decline in violent crime and a 0.5 percent reduction in property offenses. A recent study by the GAO yields qualitatively similar findings, suggesting that the COPS program contributed to a 2.5 percent decline in violent crime rates and a 1.3 percent decline in overall crime rates from 1993-2000.

These calculations imply that the COPS program is helpful but can account for no more than a small share of the massive proportional decline in violent crime rates observed throughout the United States during the 1990s. Other factors were even more important, including the increased spending on police that state and local governments undertook on their own, a massive increase in the nation's incarceration rate, and the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic. The legalization of abortion in the early 1970s may have also contributed to the crime drop of the 1990s by reducing the share of adolescents and young adults who were brought up in disadvantaged household environments. Other politically controversial public policies, such as new gun control measures, liberalized gun-carrying laws, and increased application of the death penalty, do not appear to have contributed to the crime drop.

In any case, the right standard for judging whether COPS is a success is not whether the program can account for a "large" share of the crime drop in the 1990s. The key issue instead is whether the independent effects of the COPS program to reduce crime is large enough to justify the program's budget. We turn to this third point next.

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Jens Ludwig
John J. Donohue III

Success By Ten: Intervening Early, Often, and Effectively in the Education of Young Children

Isabel V. Sawhill and Jens Ludwig — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Success by Ten is a proposed program designed to help every child achieve success in school by age ten. It calls for a major expansion and intensification of Head Start and Early Head Start, so that every disadvantaged child has the opportunity to enroll in a high-quality program of education and care during the first five years of his or her life. Because the benefits of this intensive intervention may be squandered if disadvantaged children go from this program to a low-quality elementary school, the second part of the proposal requires that schools devote their Title I spending to instructional programs that have proven effective in further improving the skills of children, especially their ability to read

The proposal is based on the principle that early intervention is particularly important because of the brain's unusual "plasticity" during a child's early years. Children from different family backgrounds currently experience very different types of learning environments during the early years. The result is that large disparities in cognitive and noncognitive skills are found along race and class lines well before children start school, even before they can enroll in the federal Head Start preschool program at age three or four years. Most of America's social policies try to play catch-up against these early disadvantages—and most disadvantaged children never catch up.

Findings from a number of rigorously conducted studies of early childhood and elementary school programs suggest that intervening early, often, and effectively in the lives of disadvantaged children from birth to age ten may substantially improve their life chances for higher educational attainment and greater success in the labor market, thereby helping impoverished children avoid poverty in adulthood. Another consequence would be to greatly improve the skills of tomorrow's workforce, thereby enhancing future economic performance. These benefits for children would be accompanied by benefits for their parents, many of whom work full time and need high-quality child care, such as the program would provide.

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Publication: Hamilton Project Discussion Paper, The Brookings Institution

Evaluating Gun Policy : Effects on Crime and Violence

Jens Ludwig and Philip I. Cook, eds. — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Brookings Institution Press and Brookings Metro Series 2003 456pp.

Compared with other developed nations, the United States is unique in its high rates of both gun ownership and murder. Although widespread gun ownership does not have much effect on the overall crime rate, gun use does make criminal violence more lethal and has a unique capacity to terrorize the public. Gun crime accounts for most of the costs of gun violence in the United States, which are on the order of $100 billion per year.

But that is not the whole story. Guns also provide recreational benefits and sometimes are used virtuously in fending off or forestalling criminal attacks.

Given that guns may be used for both good and ill, the goal of gun policy in the United States has been to reduce the flow of guns to the highest-risk groups while preserving access for most people. There is no lack of opinions on policies to regulate gun commerce, possession, and use, and most policy proposals spark intense controversy. Whether the current system achieves the proper balance between preserving access and preventing misuse remains the subject of considerable debate.

Evaluating Gun Policy provides guidance for a pragmatic approach to gun policy using good empirical research to help resolve conflicting assertions about the effects of guns, gun control, and law enforcement. The chapters in this volume do not conform neatly to the claims of any one political position.

Chapter Summaries:

The book is divided into five parts. In the first section, contributors analyze the connections between rates of gun ownership and two outcomes of particular interest to society—suicide and burglary. Regulating ownership is the focus of the second section, where contributors investigate the consequences a large-scale combined gun ban and buy-back program in Australia, as well as the impact of state laws that prohibit gun ownership to those with histories of domestic violence.

The third section focuses on efforts to restrict gun carrying and includes a critical examination of efforts in Pittsburgh to patrol illegal gun traffic and a re-examination of the effects of permissive state gun-carrying laws. This section also features the first rigorous—and critical—analysis of Richmond's Project Exile, which serves as one model for the national Project Safe Neighborhoods program. The fourth section focuses on efforts to facilitate research on gun violence, including a database on state gun laws and the ongoing development of a nationwide violent-death reporting system. The book concludes with an examination of the policy process.

Differences in opinion about gun policy flourish partly because of the lack of sound evidence in this area. The contributors to this volume demonstrate that skilled and dispassionate analysis of the evidence is attainable, even in an area as contentious as firearm policy. For pragmatists who wish to reduce the social burden of gun violence, there is no acceptable alternative.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Jens Ludwig

Philip I. Cook

Philip J. Cook is the ITT/Sanford Professor of Public Policy at Duke University. Cook and Jens Ludwig coauthored Gun Violence: The Real Costs (2000, Oxford University Press).

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Can Housing Vouchers Help Poor Children?

Greg J. Duncan and Jens Ludwig — Sat, 01 Jul 2000 00:00:00 -0400

Despite good news about recent trends in test scores, high-school completion, and crime rates, social problems among youth remain distressingly widespread in many urban areas. Conventional wisdom points to the violent and disorganized nature of inner-city neighborhoods and the poor quality of inner-city public schools as key causes of these problems.

This policy brief examines the results of an experiment aimed at dramatically improving the neighborhood conditions of children growing up in high-poverty, inner-city neighborhoods by offering families an opportunity to move to more affluent neighborhoods. The well-being of children in families offered such an opportunity is compared to that of otherwise similar children who did not move. Boys in the families that moved engaged in fewer problem behaviors and less crime than those who remained in public housing.

Trends in the concentration of poverty in the nation's cities are not encouraging. Paul Jargowsky of the University of Texas at Dallas shows that from 1970 to 1990, the number of people living in high-poverty urban census tracts—defined as those with poverty rates of 40 percent or more—nearly doubled, from 4.1 to 8.0 million. If growing up in a high-poverty area compromises children's development, then this burden falls most heavily on minority children. Figure 1 shows that the chance of living in high-poverty urban neighborhoods is a function of race as well as social class: some 3.5 percent of poor whites were living in high-poverty areas in 1990 as compared with 18.4 percent of poor hispanics and 25.1 percent of poor blacks.

A direct way of improving the neighborhood environments of poor children is through housing-mobility programs, such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Section 8 tenant-based rental subsidy programs. These Section 8 programs provide low-income families with a financial subsidy if they move to a private-market apartment or house that meets certain program requirements. While the specific subsidy formulas and other details vary a bit across the Section 8 programs, for simplicity we refer to this set of policies as "housing vouchers."

Currently, around 1.6 million low-income families receive housing vouchers, nearly a ten-fold increase from the mid-1970s. Housing vouchers hold some appeal to both conservatives and liberals: they rely on the private market rather than the government to provide housing services to the poor, and at the same time improve housing quality for low-income families and provide them with greater choice over where they live.

Yet housing vouchers, and the increased residential mobility that they engender among poor families, are controversial. Residents of working- and middle-class neighborhoods fear that the arrival of low-income neighbors will lower property values and increase their own children's social problems. And for some, the notion of government intervention to reduce economic residential segregation seems like "social engineering," which violates their sense of fairness and may, in their view, reduce the incentives for poor families to work hard and improve their economic standing.

Do Neighborhoods Matter?

At the heart of many of these policy debates is a simple factual question: Can the changes in neighborhood environments generated by housing vouchers improve the developmental outcomes of poor children? To many people, the existence of such "neighborhood effects" is self-evident. Thirteen-year-old LeAlan Jones, who lived around the corner from the Ida B. Wells public housing projects in Chicago, thought the sudden change in his sister's behavior could be traced directly to her peer group. As he notes in the book Our America: "She was in the spelling bee, she was in the Academic Olympics, she was the salutatorian of her class. Then she started hanging with these girls—their house was filthy, they were filthy—and they just kept dragging her down and down and down. She had a baby, starting staying out of school, started coming home late. But she chose her own path—let her walk it."

Yet not everyone accepts the idea that neighborhoods or peer groups are important determinants of how children turn out. Some people believe that the family environment is ultimately responsible for most aspects of a child's development. Others are convinced that much of what determines how children turn out is shaped by more complicated or idiosyncratic factors than family or neighborhood environments. For example, Northwestern University sociologist Mary Patillo McCoy, who grew up in a middle-class, African-American community in Milwaukee, writes: "Of my group of neighborhood and school friends, some had children young, were sporadically employed, or were lured into the drug trade, while others had gone on to college or worked steady jobs and earned enough to start a family. We started pretty much at the same place, but we ended up running the full gamut of outcomes."

Because each of these arguments is plausible, sorting out the actual effects of neighborhood context on poor children requires empirical evidence. Yet this task is more complicated than it might initially appear.

Neighborhoods versus Families

There is very little debate among social scientists that family characteristics are highly predictive of how children will turn out. There is also widespread agreement that most families have at least some degree of choice over where they live. These two facts together make it surprisingly difficult to disentangle the effects of neighborhoods on children's developmental outcomes from the effects of families. When we observe higher dropout rates for children living in high-poverty neighborhoods compared with those in more affluent areas, are these differences due to neighborhood factors, or instead to family factors that led some families to wind up in high- rather than low-poverty neighborhoods?

For many years, policy analysts have attempted to disentangle the effects of neighborhoods from the effects of family characteristics by using statistical methods to "control" for differences in observable family attributes. The results of these studies suggest that neighborhood factors are likely to play a surprisingly small role in affecting children's outcomes. But because even the best social science data are unlikely to capture fully all of the family characteristics that matter for children's outcomes, there remains the possibility that most or all of these studies confound family with neighborhood effects.

One of the most intriguing studies of how neighborhood conditions might affect the life chances of poor children was conducted by sociologist James Rosenbaum of Northwestern University, as reported in his book Crossing the Class and Color Lines (co-authored with Northwestern University law professor Leonard Rubinowitz). Rosenbaum followed Chicago public housing residents who were relocated to other parts of the metropolitan area as part of a court decision (Hills vs. Gautreaux, 425 U.S. 284, 306, 1976). The key to the Gautreaux program, as the relocation effort was known, was that most participants had little choice over where they moved. Families were placed on a waiting list for a new, private-market apartment, and if the family turned down the first available unit, they were moved to the bottom of the list. According to the administrators of the program, almost all families took the first apartment that was offered them.

Gautreaux thus generated a sample of Chicago public-housing residents who were essentially randomly assigned to both city and suburban neighborhoods. Since the family backgrounds of Gautreaux families living in different types of areas should on average be quite similar, comparing the outcomes of Gautreaux children whose families were assigned to different neighborhoods provided important evidence on the independent effects of neighborhoods. Analysis of the Gautreaux families suggested that compared with children who had moved to other parts of the city of Chicago, suburban movers had lower dropout rates (5 versus 20 percent) and were more likely to attend college (54 versus 21 percent).

Testing Gautreaux

The Gautreaux results are provocative: If millions of poor children in America start life disadvantaged by their neighborhoods, shouldn't the government or private sector do something? Yet questions remained about whether the assignment of Gautreaux families to neighborhoods was actually random, and the use of survey data to measure outcomes inevitably raises questions about whether the surveyed families are truly representative of the full sample of participants. Nevertheless, the Gautreaux findings were sufficiently impressive to motivate HUD, under the stewardship of Secretary Jack Kemp, to fund a five-city demonstration project known as Moving to Opportunity (MTO) to formally test the Gautreaux hypothesis.

MTO was launched in 1994 in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. In each city, some 600 families with children living in public housing within these cities' worst neighborhoods volunteered for the program, and were then randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first, "experimental," group received housing vouchers that enabled them to relocate to private-market housing, but by the program's design these subsidies could only be redeemed in very low-poverty neighborhoods (census tracts with poverty rates less than 10 percent). Families assigned to this experimental group also received services from a local non-profit that included counseling in basic life skills, such as how to negotiate a lease and balance a checkbook, and assistance in locating and renting an apartment.

Another group of families were randomly assigned to the "Section 8-only comparison" group. These families also received the offer to relocate to private-market housing, but under the conditions of the Section-8 program, which did not restrict their relocation choices to very low-poverty neighborhoods. Nor did this group receive additional counseling or relocation assistance. The remaining families were assigned to a "control" group that did not receive any assistance through the MTO program, but did not lose access to any services to which the family had been entitled previously.

Although most MTO families have only been in their new neighborhoods for three or four years, the initial data from the program are striking. Figure 2, based on research by economists Lawrence Katz, Jeffrey Kling, Jeffrey Liebman, and ourselves, compares differences in outcomes according to each family's MTO assignment. The most dramatic differences across groups are those most directly relevant to the well-being of children.

There are striking differences across groups in criminal or problem behavior among adolescent males (the group responsible for most serious juvenile delinquency, and at highest risk for injury from such behavior). Parent-reported rates of problem behavior among boys in the experimental and Section 8-only group are one-third lower than among boys in control-group families, while the proportion of boys whose parents report that they are cruel towards others is three-quarters lower. Similarly, the arrest rate for violent crimes among experimental teens is only around one-third that of the control group. Nearly half of the difference in arrests for violent crime comes from robberies, which impose costs to society on the order of $8,000 per crime. The one less encouraging finding is that there may be an increase in property crimes among experimental teens. However, most of this increase comes from more larceny thefts, which by definition do not involve contact between the perpetrator and the victim (and thus entail no risk of injury to either party) and have average social costs of about $400.

These comparisons highlight the average effects on those families who were offered the chance to move through the MTO program. The actual effects on families who do move will be even larger than those shown in Figure 1, since not all families relocate through the MTO program. For example, in the Baltimore site, just over half of the families assigned to the experimental group relocated to low-poverty areas, while about three-quarters of those assigned to the Section 8-only comparison group moved through MTO.

More Residential Mobility?

Given the available evidence, what are the net effects of housing vouchers, and are such programs worthwhile? These questions are of more than academic interest. Since 1993, HUD's Hope VI program has provided more than $3.7 billion in funding to 119 housing agencies in 32 states to demolish some of the country's most notorious high-rise, public housing buildings. Some of the most visible demolitions have occurred in Chicago, with the destruction of a number of buildings in the Cabrini-Green projects on the west side of the city and the Robert Taylor Homes on the south side.

Housing agencies face pressing questions about how to provide housing services to the thousands of families who are displaced by these programs. Should we view a move from high-rise public housing to any other situation as an acceptable improvement? Or should cities make efforts to move displaced families into substantially higher quality neighborhoods? The question will grow in importance over time as these housing agencies face long-term questions about whether to invest resources in rehabilitating the rest of their public housing stock.

One problem with drawing inferences from the Gautreaux and MTO research is that because these programs are voluntary, the sample of families who participate may not be representative of all public housing residents. If those families who stand to gain the most from relocation are the ones most likely to volunteer for the program, then evidence from Gautreaux and MTO may overstate the gains from residential relocation that would be experienced by the typical public housing family. Nevertheless, our best guess is that expanding housing voucher programs to offer more public housing residents the opportunity to relocate would improve the life chances of a large number of poor children.

But there are limits to the effectiveness of any mobility program. Most important are the political constraints on any changes to current housing policies. Political considerations may mean that expansions of housing voucher programs must provide participants with the opportunity to relocate to whichever neighborhood they would like (like the MTO Section 8-comparison group), rather than coerce them into moving to neighborhoods with particular socioeconomic or demographic characteristics (like the MTO experimental group). Yet the consequences of this political constraint for the well-being of program participants may be minor. First, a larger proportion of participants are likely to actually relocate when their relocation decisions are unconstrained by the program design, as evidenced by data from MTO. Second, for the outcomes that bear most directly on children's developmental outcomes, data from MTO suggest that the effects of offering families the chance to make a move unconstrained by the program design are, on average, fairly similar to those from the offer to relocate to very low-poverty areas. As seen in Figure 2, the average rates of teen violent arrest and problem behaviors are quite similar for families assigned to the experimental and the Section 8-only comparison groups.

The success of such a program will depend on a number of important design features. First, the programs should be voluntary, thereby limiting participation to those families who are motivated and believe they stand to gain from relocation. Second, the program should be limited in scope (at least for the near future). Reports from the field suggest that low-cost housing is scarce in many urban housing markets, which imposes a natural constraint on the scale of any program. Substantial expansions may also lead to the "clustering" of program participants within the same neighborhoods, which may have the effect of simply re-creating the poverty concentrations that characterized the public housing buildings from which families have moved. Moreover, the degree of political opposition to such a program will presumably be related to the number of families who are given the chance to relocate.

Such a program could improve the well-being of the poor families who participate. This fact alone, however, does not necessarily mean that housing vouchers are good public policy. Suppose, for example, that every child (regardless of family background) has the same response to neighborhood poverty rates. Redistributing poor families from high- to low-poverty neighborhoods would reduce the rates of social problems among the relocated children, but would produce offsetting increases in social problems among children in the host neighborhoods that are of the exact same magnitude. Residential mobility programs only work to reduce the overall volume of social problems in the society if disadvantaged children are more sensitive to neighborhood conditions than more affluent children. Alternatively, residential mobility programs may reduce the prevalence of social problems if there are "tipping points" in the ways that neighborhoods affect children's outcomes, where "epidemics" of problem behavior only break out when the prevalence of social problems exceeds some cutoff level.

More generally, some consideration must be given to the costs of housing vouchers. The net financial costs to the overall housing budget may be relatively modest, since the cost difference to the government between rental subsidies and the direct provision of public housing units does not seem to be very large. The more important costs may stem from the program effects on the non-participants who live in both the original and new neighborhoods. The baseline public housing complexes could conceivably lose community leaders when housing-voucher programs are expanded. And, as noted above, there may be effects on host neighborhoods as well. Whether or not residential mobility programs reduce the overall volume of social problems within the society, they will presumably have the effect of redistributing problems from the central city to the suburbs.

The desirability of housing vouchers hinges on a number of factual questions, only some of which have been addressed by existing research. While even the best available evidence is somewhat limited, it suggests that moving very low-income families out of public housing and into more affluent neighborhoods may improve the well-being of poor children. Unfortunately, little is currently known about the effects of these moves on other residents in the original neighborhood or on children and adults in the receiving neighborhoods. Yet even when all of this factual evidence is available, overall judgments about whether such programs should be undertaken rest in large part on value questions that can only be answered through the political process.

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Authors

Greg J. Duncan
Jens Ludwig