Minors, Delinquents and my grandmother

"Menores y Delinquentes" (juvenile delinquents)

This was the name of an episode of "Policias en Accion" (ever watched Cops? It's like that) which my host mother is a big fan of. Sometimes I'll watch it with her, at which there is an odd sort of moment of bonding between us, and at which she reaffirms her belief that the country is going to hell ("va a la mierda") and that South American immigrants and "American cultural habits" like drinking and smoking dope (don't ask) aren't helping. Obviously I have some strong feelings about those views (being the American son of a Latin American immigrant) but let's set that aside for now.

Every episode they have a different theme and this one was juvenile delinquents. But unlike most episdoes, this one included, in addition to the customary Cops style video shoots, they had commentary from some media figures and ordinary people about the political issue of potentially lowering the age where you can go to jail for a crime. My feelings about the issue are in some way a yardstick of how I've shed a lot of my liberal sensibilities since coming here.

I'm not sure if I thought about this issue very much in the United States, but here I was surprised by how firm my opinion was. It seemed like the majority of the commentators (interlaced with scenes of hoodlums being pressed up against police van hoods) were basically saying that the change would be a bad thing, that it's missing the point of the real problem. It's a view I'm sympathetic with. The delinquency is just the symptom of bigger societal issues which will never really be solved until we get to the root of the issue.

It reminds me of a parable my grandmother used to tell me about the drowning babies. The story goes that a man walks down to a river and finds a young child floundering about in a river struggling to avoid drowning. Concerned the man bends down and fishes the baby out and lays it by the bank of the river. Another baby appears, and then another, all of which he carefully fishes out and lays by the side of the river. At this point a stranger walks by sees the babies, stares for a while and then starts running away from the scene.

"Where are you going!" The first man yells to him, "you've got to help me save all these children from drowning!"

"I'm going upriver" the second man yells back, "I wanna figure out who's putting all these babies in the river!"

This notion exists in the background of much of my thinking, about issues as diverse as poverty to Amerca's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (you guys didn't forget we were in Iraq did you?) Being that second man, is what my grandmother once told me that she had dreamed of being when she retired for social work, that she wanted to join the peace corps to be a part of just such a solution, and I've shared similar dreams. It's what attracted me to the Peace Corps and is what attracts to me economic development research.

But there's another side to the story. I was robbed by a pair of kids who couldn't have been older than my little brother. Their not going to jail is not doing anythin to keep them from stealing cell phones. True, because of the crime's proximity to Retiro they were probably from Villa 31 one of Buenos Aires urban ghettos (similar to Brazil's Favelas which you'll recognize if you've seen City of God or City of Men), made up of squatters who build ramshackel homes on public land. Because of the cap that said Paraguay that one of them left behind in our scuffle, I would guess that they are the children of immigrants who left their homes behind in an effort to build a better life for themselves in Argentina's biggest city. They probably lived in crushing poverty and didn't have much of a future.

But such liberal empathy becomes harder to sustain when said disadvantaged youth is busy kicking you in the face and while he tries to make off with your valuables. The resulting sensation leaves one more desirous of committing homicide than seeing some kind of elaborate social justice meted out.

Of course these kinds of feelings ought not to be the basis of public policy. But consider the logic; Steven Levitt, a Chicago economist who teaches there on the economics of crime and the author of NY times bestseller Freakonomics, found in his analysis of crime statistics that one of the main causes of the increased crime rate of the 1990's (one less controversial than Roe vs. Wade, which he found to be the principal explanation) was lighter and less frequent prison sentences, during the liberalization of the 1960's and 70's.

The question is of course on some level an empirical one, but it makes theoretical sense if you believe (as economists do) that people respond to incentives, that the demand curve for crime is downward sloping--when the price goes up the demand goes down. This seems to work pretty effectively for things like shoes, hamburgers and automobiles and there's a pretty good case for why it would work for crime. You can increase this "price" of crime in a variety of ways, whether be increasing the penalties for it, increasing the chance people get caught, or (somehow) increasing the moral burden people incur by comitting crime.

Of course making crime more expensive has its limits for all kinds of reasons--we certainly wouldn't wish the death penalty on teenagers caught drinking (actually Levitt also found that application of the death penalty did not serve to decrease crime because of how infrequently--even in states with heroic execution rates like Texas--you can atually expect to get electrocuted for comitting a crime). And it's still true what the commentators say that the root causes of delinquence go a lot deeper than the immediate reasons for the crimes. But as one commentator rightly (in my opinion) pointed out, "you have to stop the bleeding before you can heal the wound". All these nice words about fighting poverty are nice but in the short term (and unaccompanied by action by the way) they seem to wind up doing nothing more than supply these kids with lines like those of the hooligans (God I love that word) from West Side Story singing about why they're stuck in gangs instead of going to school and staying out of trouble. The kids on Policias sing the same song though less politely than Sondheim's delinquents ("Gee Officer Krupke, Krup you!") and are well aware of the rules of the system that lets them off the hook just because they're young.

"If you want to change behavior, you can't give them excuses or let them just get away with stuff"

The words are mine, but they're paraphrased from my grandmother, in explaining her skepticism about Freudian psychology and the psychoanlytic method, which she sees as excusing more behavior in young people than it fixes. She would hear a kid say "but my father drinks and abuses my mom, that's why I robbed the store/broke curfew/do drugs",
"but did you know what the consequences would be?"
"Yeah"
"Alright then"

Maybe these ideas aren't so new to me after all.
Happy Birthday Grandma (she turns 80 today)!

P.S. My grandmother should enjoy this: check out the social worker's dissenting diagnosis of the boys problems in the West Side Story video.