While listening to NPR in my car, I heard a report on recently published
research by Dr. Stephen Thomas and his colleagues at Harvard Medical
College. The combination of NPR and Harvard almost led me to tune my radio
to a country music station, but the report was enlightening.

Dr. Thomas’s thesis is that improvements in the quality and quantity of
medical care over the last forty years have resulted in an increasing
percentage of lives being saved when people are shot or stabbed in an
attempted murder. With improvements in emergency vehicle response time,
trauma systems, medical technology, and pharmaceuticals – all attributable
to the private sector – this is no doubt the case.

The issue at hand is the surprising decline in the murder rate over the
last decade or so. Reported crime rates have been declining during the
1990s, but most of this reduction in crime rates is the result of two
factors. First, the private sector defense industry has expanded in
response to high rates of crime to provide defense weaponry, alarm and
security systems, and private police and security services. Read Bruce
Benson’s great book, To Serve and Protect, to find out all the details, but
the conclusion is that private police defense is now larger, more
effective, and less costly compared to its public sector counterpart.
Second, many types of crimes are now routinely not reported to the police.
Most victims now realize that unless you can tell the police who the
criminal was, it’s not worth reporting crimes unless your insurance policy
requires it. In high crime areas, victims fully realize that it is not
worth reporting crimes and they usually don’t have insurance.

But with murder, it is hard to overlook the victim. I must say, that as a
researcher on drug prohibition (the number one cause of crime and murder),
I have found the decrease in the murder rate during the 1990s to be
particularly puzzling.

The most widely accepted arguments were the statist claim that the police
were getting better at their jobs and the Marxian argument that crime
recedes with the boom phase of the business cycle. Both no doubt have
marginal impact, but neither stands up against rigorous examination.
There is no doubt that the police are arresting record numbers of
Americans. We now have a criminal population of over 6.5 million (3.9 on
probation, .7 on parole, and 2 million behind bars) and millions more with
a criminal record. And it certainly is true that putting a real criminal
behind bars does reduce potential crime, though it automatically victimizes
the taxpayer to the tune of 10s of thousands of dollars each year.

Dr. Thomas and his team looked at the period from 1960 to 1999 and examined
improvements in medicine in light of the murder rate and attempted murders.
They found that improvements in medicine were responsible for saving an
increasing percentage of people who were shot or stabbed. They noted that
medical professionals with long experience in emergency room care would not
find this conclusion surprising at all, but just common sense.

The number of murders in 1993 was about 23,000. (The way in which crime
statistics are calculated was changed in 1993) This results in a
back-of-the-envelope calculation of a murder rate (number of murders per
100,000 population) of 8.5. Dr. Thomas estimates that in that same year,
that if they were still using 1960s medical technology and response times,
the number of murders would have been around 67,000, or a murder rate of
24.8. This ghastly figure gives us a much clearer picture of what is
happening in America, because the 24.8 rate is a better reflection of the
number of attempted murders that would otherwise have resulted in death.

Looking at the historical record, there is little doubt that prohibitions
have had the biggest impact on crime and crime statistics. The murder rate
prior to alcohol prohibition ranged between 5 and 6. During alcohol
prohibition the murder rate leaped higher, and continued to climb, until
alcohol prohibition was repealed in 1933, reaching a rate of almost 10
murders per 100,000 population. After the repeal of alcohol prohibition,
the murder rate declined sharply throughout the Great Depression (so much
for the Marxian view) and bottomed out around 1960. The murder rate then
began to climb beginning with Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” rising above the rate
of 10, during the 1970s and 1980s, before beginning its mysterious decline
during the early 1990s. Taking Dr. Moore’s findings into account, we would
extend the uptrend that started in the 1960s, but instead of leveling off
around 10 during the 1970s, the trend would continue increasing at that
angle until it hit a rate of 25 over the past couple of years.

Now we know, thanks to insights and research of Dr. Thomas and his
colleagues that if you factor out improvements in medicine, that the “real”
or “medical-adjusted” murder rate has continued to skyrocket during the war
on drugs. The fact the victims actually survive is a gratifying success of
the private sector, but it can no longer be used to hide the abysmal
failure of the policy of drug prohibition.

Reference: Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault,
1960-1999, Homicide Studies, May 2002, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 128-166.
—
August 30, 2002
Dr. Mark Thornton [send him mail], author of The Economics of Prohibition,
is a senior fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.