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posted by mrpg on Friday December 29 2017, @03:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the weak-lead dept.

One popular theory has linked declines in crime rates to the elimination of leaded gasoline. A study of New Zealanders suggests that this is not the case:

Lead exposure during childhood has been tied to a variety of developmental problems, but a new study suggests it may not be associated with higher odds of criminal behavior later in life.

The study set out to address a flaw in much of the previous research linking lead and crime: mainly that it's hard to determine how much of this connection might be explained by poverty and other socioeconomic circumstances that can influence both criminal activity and lead exposure. Researchers followed 553 people born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1972 and 1973, when lead exposure was common among children of all economic backgrounds because of widespread use of leaded gasoline. All of the kids were tested for lead exposure when they were 11 years old, and the study team followed them until age 38 to see how many of them were convicted of crimes.

By the end of the study, 154 participants, or 28 percent, had at least one criminal conviction, the researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics. But the odds of this happening were barely influenced by the amount of lead exposure people had during childhood. Just being male had a stronger effect than lead levels, the researchers note. "Many studies have shown that higher exposure to lead could predict more criminal behavior, but our study actually found that there isn't a clear connection between the two," said lead author Amber Beckley, a researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The reason for the different results this time is that the current study found children from all walks of life had high lead levels, Beckley said by email.

The Need to Include Biological Variables in Prospective Longitudinal Studies of the Development of Criminal Behavior (open, DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.4237) (DX)

Association of Childhood Blood Lead Levels With Criminal Offending (open, DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.4005) (DX)


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday December 29 2017, @07:13PM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday December 29 2017, @07:13PM (#615612) Journal

    I think it supports the lead-crime hypothesis fairly well.

    One of the reviewers (second link in story) also believes this, and spends a lot of time explaining why even small differences have major consequence.

    For example, Derzon11 concluded that the weighted mean effect sizes for predicting criminal behavior were r = 0.10 for broken homes, r = 0.10 for large family size, r = 0.13 for low socioeconomic status, r = 0.13 for urban housing, and r = 0.15 for antisocial parents. Admittedly, Derzon11 also found some larger effect sizes, such as r = 0.21 for child maltreatment and r = 0.26 for child rearing. However, the main point is that r = 0.10 is not necessarily a small effect size.

    Pretty much validates the observations that all these housing projects for the proletariat that the socialists are fond of creating are killing us.

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