America’s incarceration rate is in decline

Freakonomics argued that crime correlates to whether or not abortion is available.

If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot.

If it is, crime rates are down.

When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up.

Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults.

This is apparently the only possible theory at the moment. It's not proven, of course, but the other theories which were given have been found lacking. This is the only theory which has some evidence, and hasn't been found to be wrong.

I'd wager that the foster system is a huge factor. Poverty is likely the rest.

When you don't give a human resources, they will find a way to take it. When you force humans with no resources to have kids, well...

Why abortion and not contraceptives?

They probably aren’t using them.

Why not both

That correlation has pretty much been debunked.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...

I doubt there is a single explanation. I think it's multiple factors.

Unleaded gasoline could also be a factor. Every country has shown drops in crime rates when leaded gasoline was phased out.

If I recall, leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80ies, which fits a drop in crime rates in the 90ies.

Women's contraceptives in the states require a prescription. Which requires a doctor's appointment + insurance. If you are poor or live with strict parents (ironically), you are much less likely to seek them out.

Condoms are their own bag of worms. I think there are cultural differences in condom use here, as well as the same problem with them being a cost. This doesn't even touch on men being shady with stealthing and pressure.

On the other hand, the abortion clinic requires only an appointment and a way to get there.

Availability of pornography has cut down the rate of rapes significantly. Too bad the republicans are going to try to ban all porn pretty soon, according to their stated agenda. They do love their wealthy donors that run the prison-industrial-complex.

Yes but I'd say reduction of lead use in general.

A lot of the current drop has decriminalization of drugs as a contributing factor. Same principle.

one can be prevented by the other

not prevented… (trust me :)) but best we can do!!

And lead paint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

In the 1980s, condoms were "behind the counter" things you had to ask for and suffer the critical eye of the pharmacy worker (at least in small town USA).

It's no wonder we had so many teen pregnancies.

Maybe people who are bad at pre-planning are also potentially poor parents.

The drop in crime also correlates very well with releases of popular violent video games: http://www.gamerdad.com/blog/2008/04/08/downard-spiral/

No contraceptive method is 100% effective.

This would be a good theory if it was supported at all by data. There has been a decrease but if you squint it's a flat line. The best you can really say is that the availability of pornography is neutral.

hence "can be"

America closes a college per week and multiple primary schools per week. There are fewer youth to commit crime or otherwise.

In NYC the black community has a majority of pregnancies not end with the birth of a child. This is where abortion policy is focused.

It’s simpler and less nefarious than that. Kids have to meet up to produce offspring. If kids don’t meet up, no drugs, no sex, no kids having kids. Video games, smart phones, and chat apps are more likely the cause of this change.

That would also explain why the current administration is banning abortion. Got to keep the prison slaves flowing.

Dubunked does not mean critiqued.

Hence "both".

I have seen the data that suggests strongly that pornography lowers rapes. You've put up no data to refute that, so until you do I will continue believing the data I saw. If you do put up some actual data to support your claims (instead of just saying "nuh uhh"), I'll review it and then provide my own.

Unless abortion is considered a crime by itself?

We don’t need airbags because injury can be prevented by seatbelts.

Unfortunately, the current US administration and congress are trying to expose us to more lead: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/03/republicans-...

Please be careful about Freakonomics and the other PopSci books like it. Many of the claims it makes have either been disproven, shown to be flawed, or do not reflect consensus among serious researchers. Some examples here:

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...

For me, this is a bit of a suspicious explanation, because Europe is a patchwork of abortion laws, with some countries being traditionally strictly religious and other less so, but the crime stats don't copy that.

Communist Romania once banned even contraceptives, and yet it never became a violent crime haven, not even after Communism fell. (Which was some 25 years after the ban, so the unwanted kids should still have been in their prime criminal age.)

Maybe the correlation isn't causational, maybe it only works in specific demographic groups...

Can you share that data

It’s clearly very easy to correlate low crime with free healthcare, education, unemployment, social safety net.

Compare the US to every other OECD country.

Nobody outside the US would even waste their time on having the discussion it is so blaringly obvious, but those in the US suffering the effects will denounce it till the cows come home.

What do you mean by education? The USA has higher PISA scores than peer countries and also has high rates of tertiary education. Do you think that middle class educated people having high student debt burdens causes crime?

There are numerous articles all over the internet both supporting my claim, as well as negating it, depending on the agenda of the source - there are many people that are morally opposed to porn that would want my claim to be false (and they would still want to ban porn even if that increases rape). Here's some articles that support:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sunny-side-of...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...

The data I saw, probably about 20 years ago...

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d6f248400fd5308b6d5d0...

I can't verify the source since this data is 20 years old and I can't remember where it came from, but at the time it seemed like a good enough source, and this was before "truth" lost all meaning in the age of the conservative-bent "my feelings are as good as your facts" world we currently live in.

The "don't need" part is a fictitious part you inserted into the argument and not a claim I made.

Injury "can be" prevented by seatbelts, that is a valid claim.

Free tertiary education.

The US has vastly higher illiteracy than OECD countries.

The rate of homicides and other violent crime have also declined significantly over the same period, so unless you contend that pornography also caused that, the data shows that it does not increase the rate of rape.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-1990-vs-202...

>Availability of pornography has cut down the rate of rapes significantly.

Oh for the love of $DEITY, this is some /r/shithackernewssays. Rape is not a crime about sex. Please don't do this.

I don't know what else you could have meant when you answered the question "Why not both" with "one can be prevented by the other".

The implied meaning is: "Not both because one can be prevented by the other".

US has much higher tertiary education attainment than the OECD average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

People with tertiary education who paid a lot for it or are in debt for it do not commit large numbers of crimes!

Not sure what you mean by "illiteracy" which is measured in different ways. US PISA reading scores are higher than all but 2 EU countries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

Nice try moving goalposts, but the data I showed correlates reduction in RAPE with availability of porn, nothing more, nothing less. You can also say that people dying in car accidents reduced during the same time, and seatbelt laws enacted during that time would be the cause. Nothing you've provided disproves that access to porn has no effect on rape. You've only moved goalposts.

But sure, let's ban all porn and watch the rape cases start increasing - I'm sure that's the best way forward. /s

>Nice try moving goalposts

Uh, yep? I absolutely did that. Your goalposts were in a crazy place. If your goalposts are “rape has to be a special type of violent crime even though rapists frequently (kind of by definition) commit other violent crimes” then yes, I moved them to where pretty much everyone else has them: among other heinous, violent crimes that share the same downward trend over the same period of time.

>the data I showed correlates reduction in RAPE with availability of porn

I could also draw a graph of rapes going down from 1990 and mp3 usage going up, would that indicate that there is a causal relationship between the two?

>nothing more, nothing less.

That is factually untrue. I showed you data of another correlation. That would be the more or less.

Unless the porn and rape graph is meaningful but the rape and murder graph is not? Or the rape and assault graph? Only porn has a meaningful correlation to rape? If your assertion is that rape does not correlate with other violent crime then the onus is on you to provide data and explain why.

Also I’m not anti-porn at all. I think it’s great and consenting adults should be able to watch other consenting adults do whatever. But I have never seen a worse argument for it than “porn line go up rape line go down down therefore causality”. It is a fantastical and indefensible assertion based on anecdotes at best. It is basically what I would come up with if my specific goal was to not be taken seriously.

Someone else commented about a correlation between violent video games and reduction in crime. I feel like 'people are inside playing games' is as much of an explanation for that as is 'violent games give violent people an outlet'.

I am not a violent kid, but when I was young I would cause some mischief in the form of making fires in the forest and using pipe to blow paper darts into open windows. Then when video games came up, we stopped going outside and played video games together.

Coincidentally, cyber crime is massively rising and a lot of the perpetrators are relatively young in my experience. I feel like maybe violent crime is dropping because these people found different ways of getting what they want, like selling bogus investment schemes online.

You've proven nothing here except that you are willing to move goalposts to try win pointless internet arguments. Congrats on that!

In some cases it is, in some cases it isn't. I know this firsthand. In one case it was control, in the other it wasn't. You don't get to make blanket statements like that and be taken seriously.

The rest of the world agrees that rape and other violent crime are related. You are the one person that has a special nook carved out about it to support your own personal pet theory. And that pet theory isn’t even supported by the data you provided because none of it says that rape and other violent crime are unrelated.

You just made that up

And here you are putting words in my mouth to try to win pointless internet arguments. You're the reason the internet sucks. I feel like I won't be responding to you in the future.