Talk:Lead–crime hypothesis

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2018 and 10 December 2018.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:59, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Adding more content to this article
I think this is an important article that could use some expansion, so I will be adding additional content over the next few weeks. Tbeckwi (talk) 16:22, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

The last paragraph of the introductory section is problematic. As an example, the statement that an increase in abortions could explain the subsequent decrease in violent crime flatly contradicts the article by Nevin (2007): "Britain legalized abortion before the USA, but violent crime rose in Britain and across Europe and Oceana in the 1990s despite rising incarceration rates, rising or unchanged police per capita, and declines in the age 15-19 share of the population (Barclay & Tavares, 2003; U.S. Census, 2004)". In this article Nevin is specifically debunking the article cited by the Wikipedia entry (Donohue, J. J.; Levitt, S. D. (2001-05-01)) to support the claim that abortions could explain the effect.

The end of the last Introductory paragraph states, "The difficulty in measuring the effect of lead exposure on crime rates is in separating the effect from other indicators of poverty such as poorer schools, nutrition, and medical care, exposure to other pollutants, and other variables that may lead to crime" is assuming a position in favor of people minimizing the effect of lead on violent crime rates. The 2008 PLoS Medicine article by John Paul Wright is a prospective proof of dose-response between lead concentration and subsequent violent crime. The only thing missing to incontrovertibly prove causation would be randomized deliberate-exposure experiments that could never pass muster with an Institutional Review Board for human studies.

Furthermore, the Introduction states, "Individuals exposed to lead at young ages may be more vulnerable..." which is actually casting aspersion on a cited and well-established fact. To maintain a factual statement, the word "may" should be replaced with "are".

In general this article's Introduction is unnecessarily understating the strength of the peer-reviewed evidence in favor of the lead-crime hypothesis.

Pwfen (talk) 05:15, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

The paragraph starting, "According to Jessica Wolpaw Reyes..." makes numerous interpretation errors consistent with the type of errors also made in the Introduction. The strong association of abortion cited in this paragraph has no good basis for inclusion in the article on an equal footing with lowered blood lead level as a cause of drops in violent crime. The reason is that John Paul Wright proved dose-response for lead and increased violent crime 20 years later. For all we know, the association of abortion with lowered crime is a proxy for the association of high blood lead level with distressed conditions that might also lead to abortion. The whole paragraph should probably be deleted as the discussion needed is simply far beyond the introductory level of the article as a whole. Pwfen (talk) 05:36, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

Myopically American
Attempts to broaden this from the USA are undone but should be incorporated. Several people, eg Nick Ross (Visiting Prof at UCL Jill Dando Institute) have pointed out that for the theory to be correct, the correlations between atmospheric lead and crime should be consistent between violent and acquisitive offences, and certainly between dates of removing lead from petrol/gasoline and subsequent declines in crime.

Yet these do not translate from the US to other countries. In the UK the use of leaded petrol declined from 74% of lead emissions in 1990 to 1% in 1999. The theory should expect crime to fall when the 1990s cohort of babies and infants became teenagers. But the UK decline in crime started in 1995 when they were still babies and infants, or not yet born.

Undoubtedly atmospheric lead causes cognitive impairment - and the automotive industry's conspiracy to hold off prohibition was a scandal - but its relationship with crime is much more tendentious that this article suggests. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rachelgoodwin (talk • contribs) 12:40, 19 June 2020 (UTC)


 * If you would like to provide a citation rather than call people names, it would be possible for someone other than yourself to incorporate your material in the article. The paper cited above that you are calling "myopically American" is a dose-response study, which isn't so much myopically-anything as it is strong evidence in favor of the lead-crime hypothesis. Your claim that the results in the USA do not translate to other countries seems to contradict the second citation from the article page which pointedly states that the UK shows a lead-crime correlation. I made a quick check to track down your uncited material on Nick Ross and the Jill Dando Institute. If I assume you are talking about, I don't see an easy path to finding the evidence whose existence you assert. Pwfen (talk) 13:20, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Jamplevia (talk) 21:31, 11 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Did something get deleted from this talk section? I don't see Rachelgoodwin calling people names unless you count "the automotive industry" as people. I see a genuine effort to improve the quality of the article and the robustness of the argument it makes by involving the other 96% of the world that isn't America. This is important if we want to avoid Template:Over coverage and it's important to demonstrate that delinquency and violence are caused by lead specifically rather than just being American in general. 49.186.84.217 (talk) 00:06, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Application

 * Now, environmental hazards like lead poisoning are being included in the mitigation package to win mercy and a reduced sentence.
 * Much of the evidence to reduce his sentence, known as a mitigation package, is familiar to people in the criminal justice field — child abuse, abandonment, poverty and, of course, youth. One argument stands out from the rest: lead poisoning.

Considering that the so-called "hypothesis" is actually being applied, is it an NPOV violation to use the term "hypothesis"? Should the page be renamed to "Lead-crime associations" or something to that effect?

Jamplevia (talk) 11:56, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Omphaloskepsis
(The fact that this article is named "... hypothesis" not withstanding) there is an awful lot of hypothetical speculation going on here: In each of these cases, the encyclopaedia doesn't care what someone would or wouldn't have done, if given the opportunity. That's WP:CRYSTALBALL. The encyclopaedia only cares about what really actually happened. If viewers are to take this article seriously they need to see it record actual facts about what really happened and make no speculations about what would have happened.
 * Dioscorides would later report
 * the Senate hearings of Edmund Muskie[55] that would help
 * Blood lead levels would drop
 * the emergence of Clair Patterson in the 1960s would lead
 * the Consumer Product Safety Commission would help
 * direct observations would not be documented

However, because the current article is so uncertain about what objectively happened rather than what hypothetically would have happened, I am not just going to WP:BOLDly convert all the speculations into facts because there is likely a very good reason why the original author avoided making such straightforward claims in the first place. This greatly undermines any authority the article otherwise would have had.

I suggest either deleting all the conjecture as WP:OR or arduously going through and fact-checking each one to determine whether what would have happened actually happened and then bringing those predictions up to date with present-day knowledge. 49.186.84.217 (talk) 00:06, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Clearer evaluation of arguments for and against?
I'm wondering if casual, general, Wikipedia-level readers would benefit from a clearer, more NPV/even-handed evaluation of evidence for and against the lead-crime hypothesis? The (currently) final sentence of this article is an interesting addition and counterbalance that seems to undermine much of what has gone before: "A meta analysis from the University of Glasgow found that "the effect of lead is overstated in the literature" due to publication bias.[79]" - not least because it evaluates some of the studies discussed here (e.g. Nevin's). However, following up the citation reveals that this is apparently a university published report by a Ph.D. student, not a peer-reviewed paper in an academic journal. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's less credible. Having said that, it was helpful (to me - as a casual reader) to get an alternative take. I think it would be good to have a much more developed critical section at the end where arguments/evidence against the general thrust of this hypothesis is laid out? (Especially peer-reviewed material.) 45154james (talk) 13:29, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Is the Higney et al paper PR'd?
There's a meta-analysis mentioned at the end of the article, cite is a bareurl to a paper, but it's not clear from the text or the cite if the paper has been subject to peer-review, and/or published in a reputable journal. Could someone more knowledgable take a peek? --136.25.157.83 (talk) 02:03, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Nevermind, see the section above, someone is already on it. --136.25.157.83 (talk) 02:04, 1 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Yes, I also queried this! The material has since been removed from the article. The previous revision contains details of what was there before and the link to the Glasgow document. Unless it's published in a journal of some kind, I don't think it belongs here. But it is an interesting piece of work and if it is indeed peer-reviewed and/or properly published, would be good to mention. 45154james (talk) 10:12, 17 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Hello, this has now been published. many thanks. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667 AnthonyHigney (talk) 08:50, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Ableist Undertones
Is this article suggesting that learning disabilities and ADHD lead to violence? Because that just seems very icky and extremely reliant on inaccurate stereotypes. Dolfone (talk) 17:45, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

No, the article isn’t suggesting that learning disabilities lead to violence. MulucirepEclud (talk) 05:33, 8 February 2023 (UTC)