Watch any murder mystery, any reality court case, or any murder case on the news, the prime suspects are always the family, friends, and acquaintances of the deceased. While this may be true for murder mysteries (cases where no identifiable motive can be detected by the killing) generalizations from the “known aggressor theory” have been wrongly applied to murder as a whole. Now certain arguments in the crime prevention policy arena are standing on some shaky foundations.
Using stricter punishment policies to influence crime is a two sided debate. First, there’s the rational choice advocates who argue that increases in the degree and probabilities of punishment raises the costs to crime in the minds of calculating criminals. The other side of the argument claims that the majority of murders and violent crimes are performed by people who know the victim, they are crimes of passion or momentary intense emotions, the criminals themselves often quickly regret it. To the second group, raising the punitive level of law enforcement is not going to have a significant influence on these criminals, and it is often expensive.
While doing some reading today John Lott in More Guns Less Crime takes the second group to task on the empirics of their claim.

In interpreting the numbers, one must understand how these classifications are made. In this case, “murderers who know their victims” is a very broad category. A huge but not clearly determined portion of this category includes rival gang members who know each other. In larger urban areas, where most murders occur, the majority of murders are due to gang-related turf wars over drugs… While I do not wish to downplay domestic violence, most people do not envision gang members or drug buyers and pushers killing each other when they hear that 58 percent of murder victims were either relatives or acquaintances of their murderers.

While this insight does not tell us whether changes in the harshness or probability of punishment is more of a deterrent against crime, it certainly does insist that crime levels are influenced by sound policy and the institutional context created by legal policies rather than psychological or sociological factors.

If family members are included, 17 percent of all murders in Chicago for 1990-95 involved family members, friends, neighbors, or roommates remained virtually unchanged. What has grown is the number of murders by non-friend acquaintances, strangers, identified gangs, and persons unknown.

Ever look at your favorite economists CV, your own, or make a list of several papers that you want to write? Well I do this all the time, and the one thing that jumps out are the clumps of papers that all look like they’re on the same topic. For example, I’ve been reading a lot of books on the history of Ancient Greece as I am trying to fill out a case study on the rise of prisons as a tool of law enforcement (the Greeks seem to be the first). Now when I make a list of the papers that I want to write I notice that there are several papers on ancient Greece cluttering it up.
At first I was concerned. “Geez! I don’t want to look like some nutcase who only thinks about ancient Greece,” I said to myself. “Not to worry,” said my inner economist, “it’s the rational thing to do.”
When you’re doing qualitative research, you have to read a lot of books and sometime sniff out leads on information that may turn up useless for the focused topic at hand. It’s only natural that you’re going to find a few of those tangential topics to be worthy of their own attention and should be turned into another independent paper. So after you finish what you’re working on, what comes next on the list? In terms of effort writing one of the extra related papers before a whole new research project seems cheaper. What could make them more expensive? If you’re burned out at looking at the same old topic, then the cost of writing yet another paper in the same old area may seem too costly compared to starting fresh somewhere else.
Research that requires investigating topics or fields of study that you don’t know a lot about are likely to spark more extra papers than research areas that you have been hanging around in for a while. These relatively newer areas are going to give off more of those holy cow! moments that keep you wanting to write more and more papers.
Academic CVs might signal more specific things amongst academics than just what a scholar happens to be interested in. Someone with clearly defined chunks of research that fit loosely together under broader methodologies or schools of thought are going to signal that they find a research path and plow through pumping ideas out wherever they go. CVs that have an apparently unrelated hodge podge are going to signal that their author’s have relatively short attention spans or don’t get those holy cow moments very often.

Given that my father is one of my most active readers. I thought he’d get a kick out of the recent post over at The Austrian Economists on fatherly economic wisdom. On a side note I think this is one of the best posts Pete has put up in terms of “blogability.” It’s a quick prompt to all of his readers to participate on the blog in a cheap and easy way. See my comment on the thread for the economics of the phrase, “don’t shit where you eat.”
Love you Dad…