Many states have passed mandatory arrest laws, which require the police to arrest abusers when a domestic violence incident is reported. These laws were justified by a randomized experiment in Minnesota which found that arrests reduced future violence.
Using the FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports, Iyengar found that mandatory arrest laws actually increased intimate partner homicides. He hypothesized that this increase in homicides is due to decreased reporting.
Iyengar investigate validity of this reporting hypothesis by examining the effect of mandatory arrest laws on family homicides where the victim is less often responsible for reporting. For family homicides, mandatory arrest laws appear to reduce homicides.
This study provided evidence that mandatory arrest laws may have perverse effects on intimate partner violence, harming the very people they were seeking to help.
Finding that mandatory arrests deters victim reporting rather than perpetrator abuse provides valuable insight into the intricacies facing attempts to decrease intimate partner violence.
Source: Radha Iyengar “Does Arrest Deter Violence? Comparing Experimental and Non-experimental Evidence on Arrest Laws” in The Economics of Crime (2010) Chapter 12.
But see “Explaining the Recent Decline in Domestic Violence” by Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler in Contemporary Economic Policy (2003) who found that three important factors were likely to have contribute to the decline in domestic violence in the USA in the 1990s:
(1) the increased provision of legal services for victims of intimate partner abuse,
(2) improvements in women’s economic status, and
(3) demographic trends, most notably the aging of the population.
Years ago, I read a newspaper article in the Sydney Morning Herald about how forensic statistics was used to detect drugs in sport through the differences in athletic performance between men and women in track and field.
Drugs in certain sports make women disproportionately stronger, and therefore reduces the disparity between them and men in sports that require pure strength.
In the 1980s, the gap between men and women in track and field performances had been narrowing. In 1992, major improvements were made in drug testing. In consequence, the gap between men and women in athletic performance started to widen again.
In about 1992, as I recall, athletic records for women that used to be broken several times in one major international meeting such as the Olympics suddenly stood for years before they were broken again.
We were driving home the other night when the two cars in front of us came to a stop after we left the roundabout near the airport.
When they had slowly cleared the left lane of the highway, a young man was walking towards the traffic. He was obviously on drugs – the glazed look and strange walking.
I moved the car around him slowly and locked the car without much thought.
Half a second later, I hear the outside door handle on Luz’s side of the car. This lunatic was trying to break into moving cars on the highway.
I immediately sped away. I did not care about him. I wanted to get away as quickly as possible
We drove home, which is about two minutes away, then we rang the police. After a little bit of time working out the exact name of the street, they said they had received a number of reports about a man on the highway and police had been sent.
If I heard any bump or other evidence that he was actually injured as I sped away, I would have still sped away. There is a difference between leaving the scene of an accident and fleeing a carjacking by a crazed drug fiend.
If there was any suspicion that I had injured the carjacker while speeding away, I would have driven to the nearest police station, which is nearby, given them a summary of the facts and then postponed further comment pending legal advice.
Traffic offences are example of the punishment dilemma: there but for the grace of god I as the offender.
That makes voters, most of who drive a car, reluctant to support strong punishments for crimes they might happen to commit somewhat accidentally rather than through some malicious intent.
Traffic offences are the breaches of the law where ordinary citizens are most likely to have encounters with the police and the courts.
This is where the punishment dilemma between obeying the law and brute self-interest are at their sharpest. Everyone wants other people to obey the law , but they are not so sure about themselves, especially when the punishments are harsh.
Juries would not convict drivers for manslaughter so new offences such death by dangerous driving and by negligent driving were introduced with lighter prison terms. People would get a few months for killing people when drunk.
That has changed in recent decades with a hardening of community attitudes to dangerous driving and drunk driving.
An important reason is that with rising incomes, more people can afford a taxi so they a less likely to go down the steps because they are less likely to be caught in a situation of drink-driving or dangerous driving.
Norway has the strictest drink driving laws in Europe:
The maximum blood alcohol content is equal to a small glass of a weak drink and heavy punishments with few second chances.
The blood-alcohol limit for impaired driving is .02, with stiffer penalties for every point over that.
Driving under the influence of alcohol is punishable by at least 1 day in jail, a heavy fine and the loss of the driver’s license for a year.
Driving with a blood alcohol level of over 1.5 may lead to one year of prison.
Many Norwegians take a taxi to parties while others make arrangements to stay over with the hosts.
How can prison numbers be too high? There are unsolved crimes: murders, robberies, sexual assaults and burglaries to name a few.
There are people out there who should have been arrested, convicted and sent to prison for serious crimes. Many of them are repeat offenders and career criminals.
I have never understood the reasoning behind the notion that prison numbers are too high.
Concerns about prison numbers being too high is exclusively a concern about the criminals who were sent to prison. Their victims are never mentioned nor are victims of unsolved crime who have been denied justice.
There is an economic literature on the efficient level of crime. Those that are concerned about prison numbers being too high explicitly reject the economics of crime literature for the purpose of framing public policy about criminal justice. The reason is obvious from this passage by David Friedman:
The economic analysis of crime starts with one simple assumption: Criminals are rational.
A mugger is a mugger for the same reason I am a professor-because that profession makes him better off, by his own standards, than any other alternative available to him.
Here, as elsewhere in economics, the assumption of rationality does not imply that muggers (or economics professors) calculate the costs and benefits of available alternatives to seventeen decimal places-merely that they tend to choose the one that best achieves their objectives.
If muggers are rational, we do not have to make mugging impossible in order to prevent it, merely unprofitable.
If the benefits of a profession decrease or its costs increase, fewer people will enter it-whether the profession is plumbing or burglary.
If little old ladies start carrying pistols in their purses, so that one mugging in ten puts the mugger in the hospital or the morgue, the number of muggers will decrease drastically-not because they have all been shot but because most will have switched to safer ways of making a living.
If mugging becomes sufficiently unprofitable, nobody will do it.
Putting more offenders in prison should decrease crime by both incapacitating incarcerated offenders and deterring potential offenders.
The massive re-deployment of police after the July 2005 London bombings is a test of whether more police reduce crime.
There was a 34% increase in hours worked by police in central-inner London in the six weeks that followed the attacks.
Draca, Machin and Witt in Panic on the Streets of London found a 11% fall in crime. A 10% increase in police leads to a 3% fall in crime. This is broadly consistent with previous casual estimates of the impact of police on crime.
Klick and Tabarrok (2005) found that increases in the Terror Alert levels in the Mall area of Washington, D.C cut crime. A 10% increase in police leads to a 3% fall in crime.
The rationality postulate is under attack from the other people are stupid fallacy: not you, not me, not present company, of course, but the nameless them over there; the perpetually baffled, every man jack of them.
These no-hopers are deemed competent to vote and DRIVE CARS, but they cannot get their head around a credit card. How the them over there find their way to work every morning must be a mystery to behavioural economists. One summary of behavioural labour economics is this:
The key empirical findings from field research in behavioural economics imply that individuals can make systematic errors or be put off by complexity, that they procrastinate, and that they hold non-standard preferences and non-standard beliefs
The tokens were for spending money at the hospital canteen and trips to town and other privileges. They were earned by keeping you and your area clean and helping out with chores.
The first token economies were for chronic, treatment-resistant psychotic inpatients.
In 1977, a major study, still considered a landmark, successfully showed the superiority of a token economy compared to the standard treatments. Despite this success, token economies disappeared from the 1980s on.
Experiments which would now be unethical showed that the occupational choices and labour supply of certified lunatics responded to incentives in the normal, predictable way.
For example, tokens were withdrawn for helping clean halls and common areas. The changes in occupational choice and reductions in labour supply was immediate and as predicted by standard economics.
Some patients would steal the tokens for other patients, so the token individually marked, and the thefts almost stopped. Crime must pay even for criminally insane inpatients.
Kagel reported that:
The results have not varied with any identifiable trait or characteristic of the subjects of the token economy – age, IQ, educational level, length of hospitalization, or type of diagnosis.
Behavioural economics is an excellent example of how engaging in John S. Mill’s truth that engaging with people who are partly or totally wrong sharpens your arguments, improves their presentation and deepens your analysis.
People have a better understanding of rationality such as through the work of Vernon Smith on ecological and constructivist rationality and of how people deal with human frailties and correct error through specialisation, exchange and learning.
George Stigler in his Existence of X-inefficiency paper opposed attributing behaviour to errors because error can explain everything so it explains nothing until we have a theory of error.
Kirzner in “X–Inefficiency, Error and the Scope for Entrepreneurship” wrote that error is pervasive in economic processes. Rational Misesian human actors are human enough to err.
What is inefficient about the world, said Kirzner, is at each instant, an opportunity for improvements, in one way or another and is yet simply not yet noticed. The lure of pure entrepreneurial profits harnesses the systematic elimination of errors and points the way to the market generated institutions necessary for steady social improvements to emerge. Brand names are an obvious example of an institution to overcome doubts about product quality. Middle-men and brokers specialise in performing much of the calculation burdens in their markets.
Many still compare real-world marketplaces to idealised regulation overseen by bureaucrats free of the very biases they are nudging us along to overcome. There are real constraints that limit the options available to fix what are seen as problems to be solved.
Vernon Smith when asked about behavioural economics, wondered how so cognitively flawed a creature made it out of the caves. Vernon Smith argued that the answer had a lot to do with the institutions that emerged to overcome human limitations:
Markets are about recognizing that information is dispersed in all social systems and that the problem of society is to find, devise, and discover institutions that incentivize and enable people to make the right decisions without anyone having to tell them what to do.
Smith and Hayek both posit that market institutions rather than individuals bear the primary cognitive burden in coordinating economic activity. To quote Vernon Smith:
What we learn from experiments is that any group of people can walk into a room, be incentivized with a well-defined private economic environment, have the rules of the oral double auction explained to them for the first time, and they can make a market that usually converges to a competitive equilibrium, and is 100 per cent efficient—they maximize the gains from exchange—within two or three repetitions of a trading period.
Yet knowledge is dispersed, with no participant informed of market supply and demand, or even understanding what that means.
This strikingly demonstrates what Adam Smith called ”a certain propensity in human nature . . . to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”
These double oral auctions converged to the competitive price even with as few as three or four sellers with neither the buyers nor sellers knowing anything of the values or costs of others in the market. Price-taking behaviour was not necessary to reach these competitive outcomes.
Behavioural economics is a clumsy way of discussing the pervasiveness of errors because insufficient attention is paid to decentralised, emergent market processes that correct them, often long ago.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
The massive re-deployment of police after the July 2005 London bombings is a test of whether more police reduce crime.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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