Link Banana

Tyler Cowen points to a paper with an interesting contention: that criminal activity — especially financially motivated — is roughly synchronized with the timing of welfare payments.

This paper tests the hypothesis that the timing of welfare payments affects criminal activity. Analysis of daily reported incidents of major crimes in twelve U.S. cities reveals an increase in crime over the course of monthly welfare payment cycles. This increase reflects an increase in crimes that are likely to have a direct financial motivation like burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and robbery, as opposed to other kinds of crime like arson, assault, homicide, and rape. Temporal patterns in crime are observed in jurisdictions in which disbursements are focused at the beginning of monthly welfare payment cycles and not in jurisdictions in which disbursements are relatively more staggered.

Jake Adelstein has a fascinating Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post about his time covering the impotent policing of organized crime in Japan. A snippet:

Most Americans think of Japan as a law-abiding and peaceful place, as well as our staunch ally, but reporting on the underworld gave me a different perspective. Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians. And as far as the United States is concerned, Japan may be refueling U.S. warships at sea, but it’s not helping us fight our own battles against organized crime — a realization that led to my biggest scoop.

(via brijit)

The detail I found most interesting among Gabriel Kahn’s annoyingly indignant profile of Italy’s broken justice system was this:

The sorry state of Italy’s prison infrastructure plays a role, too. Prosecutors have charged Salvatore Ferranti for being a henchman of one of Sicily’s fiercest crime families. But last month he was released from the slammer and given house arrest. The reason: He was too fat. The prison system didn’t have beds big enough to accommodate his 462-pound frame.

(via brijit)

Sudhir Venkatesh has some answers from Mindy and Dorothy, two sex workers, about their profession. They had some interesting things to say; this bit about legalization surprised me:

DOROTHY: I think legalization is really bad for the women because they will just get exploited. They’ll get paid a lot less and be forced to do a lot more.

I don’t condone prostitution, but I do understand survival.

Women sell their bodies for survival — I don’t care how much money they make. You don’t want to make that a permanent thing.

A interesting/troubling study:

A new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that three-strikes laws like California’s, while discouraging criminals from doing things like smoking pot or shoplifting, may push those who do continue in a life of crime to commit more violent offenses. The study’s author, Radha Iyengar, argues that this is because under such laws, felons with a pair of strikes against them have little to lose (and often much to gain) by committing serious crimes rather than minor offenses.

Last week’s New York magazine had an interesting story examining what it would take to reduce New York’s murder rate — currently lower than it’s ever been — all the way to zero.

There is ultimately no such thing as an irreducible level of violence in the city—violent crime can always go lower. It’s a matter of deciding what costs we’re willing to incur, how much Big Brother we’re willing to let into our lives, how much faith we put in science to curb the excesses of human behavior. Trying nothing new would be the easiest way forward. Surprisingly, that’s a strategy worth deeper consideration.

Jennifer Gonnerman has a very interesting piece in New York about a sex-offender cluster in Long Island. The piece offers some insight into their daily life, the nature of sex crimes, and their consequences.

Mickey wanted to live in a house where nobody drank or used drugs. But how could he create a sober house in a drug-infested neighborhood? The answer, he decided, was to fill it with men on parole, who have to submit to regular urine tests. “I decided I’d make it a parole house and let them watch ’em.”

He didn’t set out to fill the house with sex offenders specifically. It just worked out that way because there were so many sex offenders who needed housing.