Raise the minimum wage and lower the crime rate—maybe

[Brian Howell]

A 10% increase in wages for non-college educated men can result in a 10% to 20% reduction in crime—with concomitant savings in policing, prosecutorial, and incarceration expenses. 

According to an article in The Atlantic, raising the minimum wage to $12.00 per hour by 2020 would reduce crime by 3% to 5% and yield "a societal benefit of $8 to $17 billion dollars."

The article draws an interesting conclusion that many incarcerated felons probably wouldn't be so if there'd been higher wages and more employment available at the time they committed their crimes.

 

But there are thousands of federal, state, and municipal laws regulating the hiring of persons with criminal records, which, in part, leads to a nationwide recidivism rate of 76.6%: if an ex-con cannot find a job then what options does he or she have? 

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that about 60% of prisoners are functionally illiterate, unable to read above a 4th grade level.

http://www.citylab.com/crime/2016/05/raise-the-minimum-wage-reduce-crime/481014/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlene-haparimwi/where-america-went-wrong-_b_9796530.html

[Craig Good]

> On May 4, 2016, at 07:40 AM, Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A 10% increase in wages for non-college educated men can result in a 10% to 20% reduction in crime—with concomitant savings in policing, prosecutorial, and incarceration expenses.

I can believe that higher wages result in reduced crime. It strains credulity to claim that a higher minimum wage increases wages. It’s more likely to reduce employment. That’s besides being immoral.


--
--Craig WWWAYD?
clg...@me.com http://www.craig-good.com
Work harder. Millions of people on welfare are depending on you.

[jack saunders]

The link between wage rates and crime is speculative.  Believe instead in the "velocity of money."  That is real, and it gets results.  Put an extra hundred bucks in a million California paychecks A WEEK, and you will viscerally feel the jolt beneath the floorboards.  

Now, where employers get this new money is another matter.  They will have to raise prices, and I predict we'll never notice.  A few teenagers at the margins won't get hired.  I accept that.  Their time will come, and it won't take long.  The ensuring boom will sweep them on board by Christmas.

 

---

From: Craig Good <clg...@me.com>
To: Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com>
Cc: Ipse Dixit <Ipse-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 4, 2016 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: [Ipse Dixit] Raise the minimum wage and lower the crime rate—maybe

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[Brandon Gates]

On Wednesday, May 4, 2016 at 7:40:37 AM UTC-7, Brian Howell wrote:

The article draws an interesting conclusion that many incarcerated felons probably wouldn't be so if there'd been higher wages and more employment available at the time they committed their crimes.

That is an interesting conclusion because it doesn't ring true for me.  Noting that a high percentage of incarcerated felons are there because of the War on Drugs, I'm not convinced that higher-paying service industry work would have changed much.  And let's not forget the cultural imperative that being gansta' is a thing.  Etc.

None of which is to say that a 10% bump in the minimum cost of unskilled labour is necessarily a Bad Thing.  Trickle-downers fret that such drives inflation.  I call bollocks.  If minimum wage isn't keeping pace with inflation, it puts more pressure on the welfare system, which would arguably create the same inflationary pressures at the expense of productivity of a good portion of the labour force.

Don't ask me to do the calcs.  My macroecon is only good enough to know that I'm some flavour of Keynesian and even that is mainly instinctual, and lacking any sort of rigorous self-examination or homework.