This article, from a British national newspaper, caught my eye yesterday:
The article describes a study done by the UK government which compared information contained in court records and national law enforcement databases with names appearing on government assistance rolls. The results found that about 22% of people claiming unemployment-related benefits have had some kind of criminal conviction or have served prison time previous twelve years. The first thing I thought when I read the headline was that there’s no way to even begin to sort out causality with so little information. Do unemployed people commit more crime or are people who commit crimes more often unemployed? Or is there something that unemployed people and criminals have in common that is unobservable in this study? I also found it interesting that the headline (if not the original study itself, which I haven’t yet located) only mentions a portion of welfare recipients. Why is that? A higher percentage certainly gets you a jazzier, more shocking headline. Perhaps if recipients of other types of welfare benefits were included, (things like benefits for low-income parents, or disability payments) the numbers would be much lower. In fact, the article mentions that when the search was expanded to include other types of benefits – such as the state pension, the figure dropped to 7%. That was not surprising to me at all. Generally speaking, there’s a sort of “aging out” process in crime. Younger people commit the larger proportion of crimes, and once people who do commit crimes get older, they tend to cease or at least greatly reduce their criminal activity.
Another thing that that occurred to me while reading this was the different ways that information like this can be used to influence both public opinion and policy makers. The Telegraph is known for being a very conservative publication – even so, I thought that the tone of the above article was relatively even-handed. Depending on your goals, however, you could either use a study like this to demonize some groups of people and justify cuts to their assistance, or to highlight the problems that these same groups face and use it to justify increasing assistance. Overall, a study like this presents more questions that it really answers. Crime, poverty, and the State’s responses to them are so complex that they can’t be boiled down to a single headline. (Of course, that doesn’t stop media outlets from trying!)
– Brandy
