The Effects of School Desegregation on Crime

1954年，最高法院对布朗诉教育委员会一案的裁决开启了20世纪最重要的社会政策变化之一。大多数关于学校废除种族隔离的研究都集中在学生的学业成绩上。然而，对于理解社会福利或分配后果，对非学术成果的影响可能至少同样重要。考虑到每年可能高达2万亿美元的巨大社会成本，犯罪尤其令人关注。忽视这一结果可能会严重扭曲收益-成本分析。这是第一个研究学校废除种族隔离制度对犯罪的影响的项目，它使用了一个看似合理的外部来源来确定变量。该项目旨在评估法院下令的学校废除种族隔离对犯罪的因果影响。理论给出了对预期效果的模棱两可的预测；取消种族隔离的命令可能会让少数族裔儿童接触到更具发展生产力的学校或同龄人群体，一些取消种族隔离的命令要求学区增加教育支出，这些措施加在一起，可以通过改善认知和非认知技能以及合法收入前景来减少黑人和白人青年的犯罪。另一方面，法院取消种族隔离的命令也可能加剧种族紧张局势。为了研究这个问题，该项目利用了这样一个事实，即自1954年最高法院做出变革性的布朗裁决以来，大多数最大的学区都受到法院下令的强制性废除种族隔离计划的约束。这些计划何时生效的时间是特殊的，似乎是对青年结果的其他决定因素的外生影响。支持这一说法的是对来自VITAL统计局的年度县级凶杀案受害数据的初步分析，这些数据显示，在这些法院命令生效之前，凶杀案没有预先存在的趋势。然而，初步分析表明，这些命令的实施使黑人和白人青年的凶杀案受害人数减少了约25%。请拨出资金用于：(1)审查学校废除种族隔离对杀人、犯罪和受害的影响。虽然没有逮捕或至少确定嫌疑人的犯罪，罪犯的信息是不可用的，但这些数据仍然可以帮助我们理解行为反应和分布效应。(2)考察对除杀人罪之外的其他类型犯罪的影响。由于这些犯罪更为常见，对其他犯罪的分析可以确保杀人案的结果不是由少数案件驱动的。其他犯罪加在一起也会造成巨大的社会成本。(3)了解更多关于学校废除种族隔离影响犯罪的行为机制。例如，初步分析发现，取消种族隔离对夏季几个月的凶杀案被害率的影响与学年期间一样大，对凶杀犯罪行为的影响可能会持续到成年。该项目还研究了当地学校废除种族隔离计划的设计特点如何影响。广泛的影响：自20世纪90年代以来，联邦法院终止了许多地方废除种族隔离计划，在两个重大案件中，最高法院最近推翻了西雅图和路易斯维尔的计划。关于取消种族隔离对犯罪的影响的研究结果可能有助于为随后的诉讼和立法辩论提供信息，并可能有助于激发关于学校取消种族隔离如何影响广泛的其他非学术结果的新研究。这一结果还可能揭示一个更广泛的问题，即社会政策在多大程度上能够提供具有成本效益的替代方案，以取代大规模监禁以控制犯罪。该项目将产生一篇针对顶级经济期刊的科学论文，一份可追溯到1960年的关于犯罪和逮捕的公共使用的纵向数据集，以及一份可访问的研究简报。

The 1954 decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education launched one of the most important social policy changes of the 20th century. Most of the research on school desegregation has focused on student academic outcomes. Yet impacts on non-academic outcomes may be at least as important for understanding social welfare or distributional consequences. Crime in particular is of central interest given the enormous costs to society, perhaps as much as $2 trillion per year. Ignoring this outcome may substantially distort benefit-cost analyses. This is the first project to examine school desegregation effects on crime using a plausibly exogenous source of identifying variation. This project seeks to estimate the causal effects of court-ordered school desegregation on crime. Theory yields ambiguous predictions about the expected effect; desegregation orders could expose minority children to more developmentally productive schools or peer groups, and some desegregation orders required school districts to increase educational spending, which together could reduce crime by black and white youth by improving cognitive and non-cognitive skills and legal earnings prospects. On the other hand court desegregation orders could also exacerbate racial tensions. To examine this question the project exploits the fact that since the Supreme Court transformative 1954 Brown decision, the majority of the largest school districts were subject to mandatory, court-ordered desegregation plans. The timing of when these plans went into effect is idiosyncratic and plausibly exogenous to other determinants of youth outcomes. Support for this claim comes from preliminary analyses of annual county-level homicide victimization data from the Vital Statistics, which reveal no pre-existing trends in homicide before these court orders went into effect. However preliminary analyses suggest that the implementation of these orders reduce homicide victimization by around 25 percent for both black and white youth. Funding is requested to:(1) Examine school desegregation effects on homicide offending as well as victimization. While information about offenders is not available for crimes without an arrest or at least identified suspect, these data still may help us understand behavioral responses and distributional effects.(2) Examine impacts on other types of crimes besides homicide. Since these offenses are far more common, analyses of other crimes provide assurance that the homicide results are not driven by small numbers of cases. Other crimes taken together also impose large social costs.(3) Learn more about the behavioral mechanisms through which school desegregation influences crime. For example the preliminary analyses finds desegregation effects on homicide victimization rates are about as large during the summer months as during the school year, and impacts on homicide offending behavior may persist well into adulthood. This project also examines how impacts vary by the design features of the local school desegregation plan.Broader Impacts: Since the 1990s, federal courts have terminated many local desegregation plans and in two major cases the Supreme Court recently struck down plans in Seattle and Louisville. The findings on desegregation effects on crime may help inform the litigation and legislative debates that are sure to follow, and may help stimulate new research on how school desegregation impacts a wide range of other non-academic outcomes. The results may also shed light on the broader question about the degree to which social policies can provide cost-effective alternatives to mass incarceration for crime control. The project will produce a scientific paper targeted at a top-tier economics journal, a public-use longitudinal dataset on crime and arrests going back to 1960, and an accessible research brief.