Crime, Juvenile Delinquency, and Dysfunctional Behavior

The connection between violent crime and welfare reform, if we can measure it properly, may have more to do with neighborhoods than with households or individuals. If welfare reform is affecting behavior or quality of life, it is probably doing so through group context and the cumulative or synergistic effects of changes in the economies of families concentrated in space. Behavioral effects correlated with being on welfare tend to disappear when you change the neighborhood context. To understand crime in relation to welfare—to understand crime and violence in this country at all—you have to disaggregate it. The following example illustrates this point. The Australian homicide rate is 2 per 100,000. The U.S. homicide rate is now about 6 per 100,000, or only about three times higher. The homicide rate in the state of Maryland is about 10 per 100,000, but the homicide rate in Baltimore is about 40 per 100,000. In the rest of Maryland, the homicide rate is lower than it is in Australiaabout 1.2 per 100,000. Most of Maryland has a homicide rate lower than Australia’s. The fact that Baltimore has a homicide rate of 40 per 100,000, or forty times that of the rest of Maryland, is an accident of political geography based on the proportion of the suburbs that is encompassed by the city limits