Lead exposure and violent crime in the early twentieth century

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn the second half of the nineteenth century, many American cities built water systems using lead or iron service pipes. Municipal water systems generated significant public health improvements, but these improvements may have been partially offset by the damaging effects of lead exposure through lead water pipes. We study the effect of cities' use of lead pipes on homicide between 1921 and 1936. Lead water pipes exposed entire city populations to much higher doses of lead than have previously been studied in relation to crime. Our estimates suggest that cities' use of lead service pipes considerably increased city-level homicide rates.

Environmental Inequality: The Social Causes and Consequences of Lead Exposure

“…7 Four recent studies use different sources of exogenous variation in lead exposure to identify its effect on crime. Feigenbaum & Muller (2016) use several strategies to isolate the effect of lead exposure in US cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including instrumenting a city's use of lead pipes with its distance from the nearest lead refinery and comparing cities with more or less acidic water. They find that cities that used lead pipes in the late nineteenth century had higher homicide rates in the early twentieth century than cities that used iron pipes.…”

Flight From Urban Blight: Lead Poisoning, Crime and Suburbanization

“…The positive relationship between lead and criminal behaviour has been also found by Reyes (2015a), who also exploits variation coming from the phase-down of leaded gasoline. Feigenbaum and Muller (2016) show that water pipe lead exposure increased homicide rates in the 1920s and 1930s, instrumenting lead exposure by city distance from lead refineries. A second strand of works found a negative causal effect of early childhood lead exposure on academic achievement (Aizer et al, 2016, Reyes, 2015b, Grönqvist et al, 2016, and Ferrie et al, 2012.…”

Poisoned Development: Assessing Childhood Lead Exposure as a Cause of Crime in a Birth Cohort Followed Through Adolescence

“…At the county level, crosssectional associations were found between air lead levels and homicide rates (Stretesky and Lynch, 2001) as well as between air lead levels and violent and property crime rates (Stretesky and Lynch, 2004), after accounting for socioeconomic and racial composition. At smaller units of analysis, cities' use of lead water pipes in the late nineteenth century increased homicide rates in the early twentieth century (Feigenbaum and Muller, 2016), and city-level air lead concentrations in the mid-to-late twentieth century were found to predict assault rates a little more than 20 years later in the United States (Mielke and Zahran, 2012) and Australia (Taylor et al, 2016). Furthermore, children's rates of elevated BLL were found to predict increased violent, nonviolent, and total crime rates at the census tract level in St. Louis, Missouri (Boutwell et al, 2016).…”

“…Once exposed, young children absorb lead more efficiently than do older children or adults (Ziegler et al, 1978), and young children's rapidly developing brains are more vulnerable to lead's effects than are older individuals' more mature brains (Needleman, 2004). Once in the body, lead mimics calcium, impairing brain development and neurotransmitter systems in ways that disrupt executive functioning and mood regulation, which in turn reduces impulse control and the inhibition of aggressive behaviors (Cecil et al, 2008;Feigenbaum and Muller, 2016;Lidsky and Schneider, 2003;Needleman, 2004;Winter and Sampson, 2017). Through the same age-graded mechanisms, lead exposure is associated with reduced cognitive ability (Lanphear et al, 2005;Reuben et al, 2017) and increased attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Goodlad, Marcus, and Fulton, 2013), both of which are predictors of delinquent behavior in the criminological literature (Farrington, 1998;Moffitt, 1993).…”

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Exposure to dangerous levels of lead was extensive for long stretches of the twentieth century (Feigenbaum and Muller, 2016;Troesken, 2006). Although environmental reforms such as the bans on lead in gasoline and paint in the 1970s were deemed victories for public health at the time (Markowitz and Rosner, 2013;Needleman, 2004), lead toxicity is far from a hazard of the past.

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