Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (20 page)

Although many states immediately re-approved the death penalty after the Supreme Court lifted the ban in 1976, executions were relatively rare until the 1990s, when execution rates spiked dramatically. This elicited a flood of new research on capital punishment. Moreover, the new studies drew upon much more extensive data than had previously been available, allowing researchers to study crime rates over many years and across every state.

This research was conducted as violent crime rates were plummeting while executions were rising sharply. Between 1991 and 2000, there were 9,114 fewer murders per year, while the number of executions per year rose by seventy-one. The fresh studies resurrected Ehrlich’s earlier conclusions that the death penalty greatly deters murder. The vast majority of recent scholarly research confirms this deterrent effect.
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Generally, the studies found that each execution saved the lives of roughly fifteen to eighteen potential murder victims.
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Overall, the rise in executions during the 1990s accounts for about 12 to 14 percent of the overall drop in murders.

Despite the generally beneficial effect of capital punishment on crime, there are exceptions. One particular kind of crime where the death penalty shows no significant deterrent effect is multiple victim public shootings. This was the conclusion of a study I performed with Bill Landes at the University of Chicago.
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This exception stems from the unique circumstances of these kinds of crimes: the vast majority of these killers either commit suicide or are killed at the scene of the crime. The threat of legal punishment, including the death penalty, doesn’t really affect their actions since so many of these criminals expect to die in the course of their crime.

The death penalty has a beneficial effect even beyond deterring murders. Because capital punishment can be imposed if a victim dies in the commission of a rape, robbery, or aggravated assault, statistics show the death penalty also acts as a deterrent to these crimes as well.
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This, however, doesn’t mean that the death penalty should be applied directly to these crimes. There is such a thing as “too much” deterrence. For example, utilizing the death penalty too broadly can create some perverse incentives. Suppose the death penalty is used against robbers and rapists. These criminals would then become more determined to kill their victims and any potential witnesses since they would already be facing the death penalty. There would likely be fewer robberies and rapes, but those crimes would probably result in much higher numbers of dead victims.
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Polls consistently show that the vast majority of Americans support the death penalty. A 2006 ABC News/
Washington Post
poll found that 65 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, with 32 percent opposed.
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There is even majority support for the death penalty in such unlikely places as Brazil, Eastern Europe, Japan, and South Africa.
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A plurality in Britain also supports it.
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This should not be too surprising; as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted, the death penalty was abolished in many countries by judicial fiat, despite widespread support for it among the general populations.
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A lot of people grasp intuitively an idea that economists only now are building a consensus toward: that the death penalty helps deter violent crimes and saves lives.

Is it really surprising that the number of prisoners increased while crime rates fell?
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Apparently it is to those who disregard incentives, a group that includes many criminologists as well as writers for the
New York Times.
Although these observers somehow doubt that locking up more criminals can deter crime, a large number of studies indicate that the more certain the punishment, the fewer the crimes committed.
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Arrest rates of criminals are usually the single most important factor in reducing every type of crime. Sensational topics like the death penalty may
get the most media attention, but it is everyday police work that really makes a neighborhood safer. Changes in the arrest rate account for around 16 to 18 percent of the drop in the murder rate.
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Conviction rates explain another 12 percent. Arrest and conviction rates have an even larger effect on other types of violent crime. And their effect on property crimes is still greater, often two or three times larger than for violent crime overall.

While boosting arrest rates indisputably increases deterrence, the evidence on longer prison sentences is less clear. The reason is simple: methodologically, it’s surprisingly difficult to measure how long criminals expect to be in prison. The actual time served is often much shorter than the official length of a criminal’s sentence. Furthermore, the time that is served varies widely, even for a single type of crime, and depends on such factors as a suspect’s criminal history and the severity of the offense. Unfortunately, this kind of data is not readily available to researchers.

Arrest and conviction rates and expected prison sentence lengths all deal with deterrence—the cost to the criminal of committing a crime. But some people commit crimes despite those threats. Obviously, locking up the most crime-prone individuals will further decrease crime by keeping habitual criminals off the streets. Indeed, putting more people in prison explains another 10 to 12 percent of the drop in crime rates.
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Simply being arrested or convicted, even without a prison sentence, carries its own substantial penalties. As we noted in Chapter Two, these reputational penalties are the worst penalties that many criminals face.

Allowing citizens to defend themselves with guns may no longer be as controversial as the death penalty. There has been a remarkable change in attitude toward the benefits of concealed handguns over the last
twenty years as thirty additional states have become right-to-carry states, bringing the total to forty by 2007. These states grant permits to people of a certain age (either eighteen or twenty-one) once they pass a criminal background check and, in some states, take a handgun training class. Of these states, Alaska, Vermont, and nearly all of Montana have no regulations at all. Eight additional states allow applicants to obtain concealed weapons permits if they can demonstrate a need for the weapon. Today, only Illinois and Wisconsin completely ban citizens from carrying concealed handguns.
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States have clearly found a societal benefit over the last few decades in expanding their citizens’ rights to carry concealed handguns. It is revealing that no state that has relaxed its rules for obtaining concealed handgun permits has reversed course and instituted new restrictions.

The impact of these permits on crimes is no trivial matter; conservatively, there are over 4 million concealed handgun permits in the United States.
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While relatively gun friendly states such as Pennsylvania and Florida have alone issued 1.1 million permits between them, even some places with strict gun regulations have a surprisingly large number of permit holders. This is certainly true for New York City (38,500) and Massachusetts (203,000).
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While concealed weapons allow people to protect themselves from criminals, there are obvious possible drawbacks to increasing the number of gun carriers. People can get hurt in accidents, or gun carriers may use their weapons irresponsibly. The main question is: do concealed handguns save more lives than they put at risk?

It is abundantly clear that legal gun owners themselves pose few risks.
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The type of person who is willing to go through the permitting process tends to be law-abiding by nature. Most criminals, in contrast, aren’t the type to go through the approval process, submit to a criminal background check, and pay their fees. For example, during the nineteen years between October 1, 1987 and December 31, 2006, Florida issued 1,228,284 concealed weapons permits but revoked just
158, or .01 percent, for any type of firearms violation. Even this figure exaggerates the risks, as almost all of these revocations were for non-threatening incidents such as unknowingly carrying a gun into a restricted area.
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What’s more, the rate of permit revocations in Florida has fallen over time, with zero to one revocations for firearms violations being recorded in each of the last five years.
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Studying the issue, the
National Journal
found that permit holders “turn out to be unusually law-abiding, safer even than off-duty cops.”
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It is also clear that legally owning a gun makes a person less likely to get hurt by a criminal. While police are, of course, extremely important in fighting crime, officers almost always arrive at the scene only after a crime has been committed. So what can individuals themselves do to deter criminals? Having a gun, in fact, is by far the most effective course of action. This is the finding of the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, an annual survey conducted since 1973 of about 77,000 households comprising nearly 134,000 people.
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This holds true whether the criminal is armed or unarmed and regardless of the location of the attack.

During the 1990s, for example, assault victims who used a gun for self-protection were injured 3.6 percent of the time. This contrasts with 5.4 percent of those who ran or drove away, 12.6 percent of those who screamed, and 13.6 percent of those who threatened the attacker without a weapon. Those who took no self-protective action at all fared the worst—55.2 percent of them were injured.
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Gandhi’s strategy of peaceful resistance may have worked against British imperialists who could be embarrassed by public attention, but criminals require other methods of persuasion.

Economist Stephen Bronars and I found significant evidence that criminals move out of areas where concealed handguns are legalized.
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Our study analyzed counties that border each other on opposite sides of a state line. In such cases, counties in states that adopt right-to-carry laws see a drop in violent crime that is about four times larger than the
simultaneous increase in violent crimes in the adjacent counties without such laws. Violent criminals may be brutal, but they’re not necessarily stupid. At least they’re smart enough to leave towns where they risk running into citizens carrying concealed handguns.

Concealed weapons clearly help to reduce crime. Overall, for the first eight to nine years that concealed-carry laws are in effect, murder rates fall by an average of 1 to 1.5 percent per year, while robbery and rape rates decline by about 2 percentage points.
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The benefits of gun ownership also outweigh the drawbacks such as accidental deaths. These do happen, but they are relatively rare, with 649 cases reported among the nation’s 100 million gun owners in 2004. What’s more, academic research finds that accidental death rates do not increase with the passage of right-to-carry laws.
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Some analysts, however, continue to dispute the deterrent effect of concealed handguns. But even much of the research done by these supposed critics ends up showing substantial safety benefits associated with concealed weapons. For instance, in arguing that more guns create more crime, Mark Duggan provided thirty estimates of the impact of right-to-carry laws.
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But after correcting for four typing mistakes, sixteen of his thirty estimates actually show statistically significant drops in crime, while only one shows a significant increase.
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Some similar problems are found in the other major studies denying that right-to-carry laws reduce crime rates.
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