You are here: Home / Archives for crime

Study: School choice prevents crime

February 12, 2012 by

Low-income black males admitted by lottery to better schools were more likely to stay in school and less likely to be arrested compared to similar students who lost the transfer lottery. So concludes a study in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina by David Deming, a Harvard education professor, in Education Next.

In general, high-risk students commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning a school choice lottery.  Among male high school students at high risk of criminal activity, winning admission to a first-choice school reduced felony arrests from 77 to 43 per 100 students over the study period (2002-2009).  The attendant social cost of crimes committed decreased by more than 35 percent.  Among high-risk middle school students, admittance by lottery to a preferred school reduced the average social cost of crimes committed by 63 percent (due chiefly to a reduction in violent crime), and reduced the total expected sentence of crimes committed by 31 months (64 percent).

The highest risk group was identified based on test scores, demographics, behavior, and neighborhood characteristics.

The study finds that the overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among the top 20 percent of high-risk students, who are disproportionately African American, eligible for free lunch, with more days of absence and suspensions than the average student.

All students had applied to transfer from their low-performing neighborhood school. Lottery winners moved to schools of average quality as measured by test scores, teacher experience and other factors.

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The 'mean girl' myth

April 2, 2010 by

Despite the South Hadley High bullying case, there is no epidemic of “mean girls” attacking other girls, write Mike Males and Meda-Chesney Lind in a New York Times op-ed.

We have examined every major index of crime on which the authorities rely. None show a recent increase in girls’ violence; in fact, every reliable measure shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years. Major offenses like murder and robbery by girls are at their lowest levels in four decades. Fights, weapons possession, assaults and violent injuries by and toward girls have been plunging for at least a decade.

If one group is more prone to violence, it’s middle-aged men and women, they write, but you don’t hear about “mean middle-agers.”

Of course, Males and Lind are looking at criminal acts, which are easier to track than the typical girl-on-girl harassment, which is mean but not criminal.

Filed Under: Violence Tagged With: , , ,

These overreaction stories just never get old, do they?

March 9, 2010 by

I confess to being of two minds about this university student’s predicament:

The 19-year-old University of Central Florida theater student whose fake bomb led to the evacuation of the Hollywood 16 movie theater has been released from the Marion County Jail after posting a $5,000 bond, and a top prosecutor said he’s not sure what his office will do with the case.

Matthew F. Pye, 19, was arrested Saturday on a charge of manufacture, possession and display of a hoax weapon of mass destruction. The bogus bomb, which Pye created for a UCF theater class, consisted of five tightly wrapped sticks of “dynamite” attached with wires to a white timing device.

There are two main issues here that I see: the legal issue, and the common sense issue.

First the common sense issue.  Context is important.  If he was in the parking lot of a federal building, I could understand the reaction.  But he was at a movie theatre.  In all honesty, if I saw something that looked like a bomb in my local theater’s parking lot, I’d probably ignore it.  It’s just really, really long odds that it presents any danger.  It’s far more likely that it’s a fake (for any of a thousand reasons) or that it’s a legitimate possession of TNT.

But teenagers see the bomb.  Being teenagers, they freak out a little (they might even know it’s a fake and just be having fun), and someone calls their dad.  Their dad listens to his son or daughter describe a “bomb in a car” and instead of thinking what’s most likely (legitimate possession or a prop) goes for the worst case scenario and calls the police.  The police, instead of sending someone over to look at the situation before going nuclear, send everyone and a bag of chips in on the word of, at best, a 15-year old.

I’m willing to entertain the notion that maybe the university student was being careless in his judgment.  But I’m pretty certain that the father and the police are being a little careless.  Now I know that some people are going to say, “But you can’t be too careful…”  But that’s just false.  You can be too careful — there’s the old security-liberty trade off to think about — and you can also be careless in how you go about being careful.  That’s the common sense issue.

The legal issue is more interesting.  This purports to be the relevant Florida hoax weapon statute.

When I first read the story, I thought it odd that people were talking about weapons of “mass destruction.”  And indeed, the statute concerns only nuclear, radiological, biological, or chemical weapons and their knock-offs.

Second, the hoax clause requires a very specific intent:

Any person who, without lawful authority, manufactures, possesses, sells, delivers, displays, uses, threatens to use, attempts to use, or conspires to use, or who makes readily accessible to others, a hoax weapon of mass destruction with the intent to deceive or otherwise mislead another person into believing that the hoax weapon of mass destruction will cause terror, bodily harm, or property damage commits a felony of the second degree.

In other words, you have to intend to convince other people that it is real.  It’s not enough that people think it’s real.  This is why the local D.A. is “not sure” what they are going to do about this.  Even if the student did intend to scare people… he’s probably been arrested under the wrong statute, because dynamite-qua-weapon is neither nuclear, chemical, nor biological.

Filed Under: Culture, Violence, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , ,

School surveillance doesn't deter crime

December 8, 2009 by

Surveillance cameras, security guards and zero tolerance policies don’t deter crime in schools, concludes Torin Monahan, a Vanderbilt professor. If anything, security measures “make students feel less safe, by sending them the message that adults distrust and fear them,” reports The Tennessean.

“Columbine had armed security guards. Columbine had video cameras,” said Monahan, referring to the notorious 1999 high school shootings in Colorado that took 15 lives and sparked a nationwide campaign for heightened school security.

“Generally speaking,” he said, “surveillance is not good for preventing crime. It’s more useful for catching people after the fact.”

In Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education, researchers looked at similar schools: Those with “cameras, armed guards, frequent pat-downs and weapons checks, even some with barbed-wire perimeters” had the same crime rates as schools without those measures.

The charter high school in my book, Our School, is a small school that doesn’t let students get away with anything. Teachers enforce the rules backed by the principal. No money is spent on security. It’s not necessary.

Filed Under: "Our School", Violence Tagged With: , ,