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America’s incarceration rate is in decline

(www.theatlantic.com)
271 points paulpauper | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 17:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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casenmgreen ◴[25 Jun 25 18:01 UTC] No.44380132[source]▶
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.

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1. inglor_cz ◴[26 Jun 25 14:46 UTC] No.44387979[source]▶
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...