Nothing Stops a Bullet Like……Lead Abatement??? – UPDATED

UPDATE: FREAKONOMICS‘ guru, Stephen Levitt, weighs in on the lead controversy HERE. And sentencing expert, Michael Connelly offers comments here.
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The award for the weirdest and, in some ways, the most intriguing story of the weekend goes to…. the Washington Post for it’s article titled: Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity.

It seems that, in the last few years, an economist named Rick Nevin has published a series of studies linking children’s exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives. Here’s how the article begins:

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001….

SNIP

Athough crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani’s tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the “New York miracle” was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

Bill Bratton and Guilani have each labeled the study, “absurd.”

But before you too wave the notion away with a dismissive guffaw, it should be noted that Nevin’s work—conducted over a ten year period—is supported by an earlier study published in the 1996 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association by a research team headed by Herbert Needleman, a professor of child psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh., suggesting that teenage boys with higher than normal lead levels, were more likely to engage in bullying, vandalism, arson, shoplifting and the like, than their non-lead exposed counterparts. Needleman and his team presented an expanded study suggesting much the same thing at a 2000 joint conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Pediatric Academic Societies.

The idea of both the Nevin and the Needleman studies is that elevated blood-lead levels cause significant damage to the development of the prefrontal lobe of the brain, leading to a lowering of the IQ, poor impulse control and increased aggression once a kid hits adolescence.

Nevin got on to the whole lead issue after he was hired as an economic consultant by HUD to study the cost of removing lead paint from public housing. While Nevin was calculating the cost, he became curious about the correlation between lead exposure and violent crime.

The study that resulted, published in 2000 in the scientific journal Environmental Research, concluded that lead-exposure rates of children across the U.S. between 1941 and 1986 correlated precisely with national fluctuations in violent crime rates. As Nevin continued to analyze he became increasingly convinced that lead poisoning was having an effect that was too great to be dismissed as merely coincidental.

Of course, nobody’s suggesting that all of violent behavior can be swept away by, shall we say, getting the lead out. Yet, it’s another illustration of the fact that the best and most efficient way to find a “cure” for crime is to start with a good diagnosis—–something, say, a bit more nuanced and complex than “tougher sentences” and “build more prisons.”