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Example research essay topic: Violent Crime Consume Alcohol - 1,722 words

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... Violence by Consumers The most plausible mechanism linking drug use to violent crime, and one routinely observed in the context of alcohol use, is as a side effect. People who are drunk often have less control over themselves than they would when sober, so quarrels can become violent. In terms of economic analysis, this means that there is a desired output the pleasure from alcohol consumption that is produced by two costly inputs.

One input is alcohol, the other is risk of violent confrontation and the associated costs. If we assume a production function such that a given amount of alcohol necessarily produces a certain amount of pleasure and a certain amount of risk, then increasing the cost of alcohol via prohibition unambiguously reduces consumption, hence reduces risk, hence reduces violent crime. The same argument would apply for any other drug with similar effects. Risk, however, is not a function only of consumption, since there are precautions that consumers can take to reduce the risk of violence, such as consuming their alcohol alone or with friends with whom they are unlikely to quarrel, rather than in a rowdy bar. Casual evidence suggests that much of the low level violence associated with alcohol use is actually viewed by consumers not a cost but a benefit, and occurs for that reason.

People go to a bar to get drunk and have fights. To the extent that violence from the use of alcohol (or other drugs) depends on choices other than whether to consume the drug, it can be reduced by enforcement mechanisms that target the violence rather than the drug use. Doing so reduces violence in two ways. Most obviously, it makes it in the interest of people who consume alcohol to do so in contexts where consumption is unlikely to lead to violence. Less obviously, it makes it in the interest of people not to consume alcohol at all, because doing so may result in violence, which may result in punishment. Consider a very simple model in which one act of drinking leads to a ten percent probability of committing assault, in which all assaults are due to alchohol, and in which the only cost of law enforcement is the cost of imposing punishment, and in which everyone is risk neutral.

We can spend law enforcement resources imposing an expected punishment of Pd for drinking or Pa for committing assault or some mixture thereof. Suppose we decrease the penalty for drinking by one dollar per act of drinking and spend the punishment costs saved on increasing the penalty for assault. Since each act of drinking leads to a tenth of an assault, we can increase the penalty for assault by ten dollars. Someone deciding whether to drink now faces one dollar less expected punishment for drinking, but he also faces a. 1 chance of committing assault, for which the punishment has increased by $ 10. So the combined expected cost of the penalties is unchanged. Now modify the model by allowing drinkers to reduce, at some cost, the chance that they will commit assault.

It is then straightforward to see that the same expenditure on punishment will produce a greater reduction in assault if used to punish assault than if used to punish drinking. Why? Individuals who drink, faced with penalties for assault, will bear some cost, call it Cp, in precautions against committing assault. [ 8 ] The result will be to reduce the probability of assault say to. 05 instead of. 1. The legal system then imposes an expected penalty of (say) $ 100 for assault instead of an expected penalty of $ 5 for drinking; the enforcement cost is the same either way, since the smaller penalty must be imposed on twenty times as many offenses. With a penalty of $ 5 for drinking, the cost to the individual of drinking is the price of the drink plus $ 5 in expected penalties for drinking.

With a penalty of $ 100 for assault, the cost of drinking is the price of the drink plus $ 5 in expected penalty for assault (. 05 chance of an assault, which leads to an expected penalty of $ 100 if it happens) plus Cp in cost of precautions. So the total cost of drinking is now higher than before, leading to less drinking. But, because drinkers are taking precautions, the probability that a drink will lead to an assault is also lower than before. We are spending the same amount on enforcement, and reducing the number of assaults in the example, to less than half what it was under the previous strategy. [Add more explicit mathematical treatment of this? ] This is not a new argument, merely a new application of an old argument for one advantage of ex post punishment, punishing the undesirable output, over ex ante punishment, punishing one of the inputs to that output. [ 9 ] I have demonstrated the result for a simple model, but it holds more generally. It is not, however, true in all circumstances.

It would not be true if the cost of imposing penalties on someone guilty of assault happened to be substantially higher than the cost of imposing penalties on someone guilty of drinking. An obvious example is a tax on alcohol, since that both penalizes drinking and brings in revenue. And one could imagine circumstances in which prohibition of alcohol penalized drinking at a lower cost per unit punishment than laws against assault penalized assault. [ 10 ] Another reason the result might not hold is that not all violence is due to alcohol. If much violence is due to other sources, and if for some reason the demand for such violence is relatively inelastic (the amount of violence does not fall very much as we increase the penalty), while the demand for alcohol is relatively elastic, then a policy of punishing assault rather than drinking wastes most of the enforcement resources on punishing people who will not be deterred by punishment (people whose violence is not due to drinking). [ 11 ] In this situation, resources devoted to punishing drinking can produce a greater reduction in violence than the same resources devoted to punishing violence.

These arguments suggest that if the objective is to reduce violent crime, there is a presumption, although a rebuttal presumption, that drug prohibition is an inefficient way of achieving that objective -- that one can get a greater reduction at the same cost by targeting violent crime directly. Of course, drug prohibition may have other objectives as well, in which case the conclusion, although interesting, does not settle the question of whether we should have it or how strongly we should enforce it. We are then left with the observation that if violent crime is occurring as a side effect of the consumption of a drug, reducing that consumption via enforcement of prohibition of that drug can be expected to produce some benefit in the form of a reduction in violent crime. This result must be qualified once we consider a world of multiple drugs. Different drugs are to some degree substitutes for each other. Different drugs are likely to have different side effects; some (alcohol) may make violence more likely, some (heroin) less.

Enforcement of prohibition of the latter sort of drug may result in a substitution of the former sort and thus an increase in violent crime. In a world of many alternative drugs, the argument for targetting violent crime rather than drug use becomes stronger, because one of the "precautions" that users can take in order to avoid committing violence and being punished for it is shifting to a drug less likely to produce violence. Reducing or eliminating enforcement of drug prohibition makes that more likely to happen, since it increases the range of alternatives faced by the user, and increases the incentives for producers to create and market drugs less likely to produce violent behavior. So far I have been discussing violence by consumers of drugs as a side effect of drug usage. Similar arguments would apply to the closely related case where the violence is deliberate and the drug use facilitates it where drugs are in input to (desired) violence, rather than violence an (undesired) effect of drug use. Here again, there are grounds for a presumption that targetting the violence reduces it more than targetting the drug use, but the presumption is again rebuttable.

The general result is that any enforcement strategy that increases the cost to users of drugs whose use is associated with violent behavior can be expected to reduce such behavior, although it is likely to be a less cost effective way of achieving that particular objective than directly targetting the behavior. We are left with the case of violence committed by users in order to obtain money for drugs. To the non-economist, this seems like an obvious and plausible scenario. For economists the situation is not quite so clear. The problem is the central economic assumption of rationality. If mugging people produces a higher income for me than alternative occupations driving a cab, scythe I ought to be mugging people already, whether or not I need the money for drugs.

There are, after all, plenty of other things to spend money on. That argument suggests that the existence of expensive but desirable drugs should simply result in an increase in effort. I have more uses for money, so I work harder to earn more. If my best paying activity is driving a cab, I work harder at that; if my best paying activity is mugging people, I work harder at that. The result is an increase in mugging with increased expenditure on drugs only if there is some reason why drug users are already supporting themselves by mugging people. To get a stronger result than that, we need stronger assumptions about the production functions associated with alternative ways of making money.

We might assume, for example, that the cost of earning more money driving a cab is more time, and that there is an upper limit to how many hours a day you can drive without being to tired to do so safely. We might also assume that part of the cost of earning more money mugging people is an increased risk of getting kille...


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Research essay sample on Violent Crime Consume Alcohol

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