(This piece was written last year and the same is reproduced here.) 

In his sensational book Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner have successfully and quite revealingly argued and proved with statistics that the reason for drop in crime in New York from a peak of 1980s to a decline in the 1990s was NOT because any of the following reason  

1. Innovative Policing
2. Increased reliance on Prisons
3. Changes in Crack and other Drug
4. Aging of Population
5. Tougher Gun Control Laws
6. Strong  Economy
7. Increased Number of Police
8. Others (Gun buy back, capital punishment etc.)

But it was because of the landmark Supreme Court judgment in Roe VS Wade in January 1973 extending legalized abortion to the whole of country that the crime graph declined steeply during the 1990s! Stumped?? Well, read on.

When a woman doesnot want a child, she usually has a very good reason.She may be unmarried or in bad marriage, too poor to raise a child or too unstable, unhappy, alchoholic or drug addict. She might be too young or might not have had eucation. For any number of reasons, she can feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.

Studies have proved that childhood poverty, single parent household, teenage mother and low maternal education raises the propensity to commit crime Hence the very factors that drove millions of American women to have abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives!

In the first year after Roe VS Wade, some 750000 women had abortion in USA (1 for every 4 live births). But by 1980, the number of abortion had reached 1.6 million (1 for every 2.25 live births!) where it leveled off. The most dramatic effect of legalized abortion was that in the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe VS Wade was hitting its late teens years- the years during which young men enter their criminal prime- the rate of crime began to fall.What this cohort was missing were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminal. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted the child. Thus legalized abortion led to less unwantedness, unwantedness leads to high crime;legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime!

Now my surmise is on the similar lines.

I had argued in my post ‘Virginia Tech in India: No, Not Yet' that more the younger generation is fed on violent videogames, the more they get disjoint from reality and thus the distinction gets blurred leading to regrettable violence. After all these kinds of violent behaviors were not witnessed during the 1980s when such kind of games were not available and computer was not as developed as it is now. A virtual practice of killing removes whatever rudimentary reservations one might have had about it and thus these are the ones who might be more prone to violent behavior which has become the bane of some of the American Universities. Hence we need to take a view (ban?) on these videogames. The immediate effect might not be perceptible, but the long term effect would be just as profound as legalized abortion had on crime!

With the break up of joint family system, the avenues of quality emotional support has diminished a great deal. Earlier there were multi-layered emotional support available for the kids during their growth phases. The growth of kids took place under the watchful eyes of more trusted sources than the present ones. Notwithstanding the odd instances of abuses, the system was more oriented towards collective wellbeing rather than individual well being and inculcation of a sense of duty and respect towards others. The earlier system was suited to social harmony by cutting on some individual freedoms. It is a proven psychological fact that kids who have had more emotional warmth and physical contacts with parents at tender age tend to have more confidence and well rounded personality than the ones who were not so fortunate. Moreover with a close-knit family, any predisposition towards violence or personality disorders are detected very early in life leading to proper rehabilitation. In all these instances of killings in the schools and colleges of USA, parents did not seem to have any clue about their kids.

The cost of keeping a person in jail is about $ 25000 per annum in USA. Even in Indian situation, the cost must be somewhere about Rs. 25000 pa. Add to this the cost of policing. If per capita cost of policing is Rs. 10000, then we are likely to save Rs. 35,000 pa by preventing a child from turning a criminal. If the government were to pay, say, Rs. 30,000 (just a figure) to one of the parents to stay at home (till s/he comes of age) and be a good parent and a policeman-at-home, then we are not only producing productive and sound future generation but also reducing expenditure on policing and concomitant monetary cost of criminality, violence and disruption on society. In that case police will spend their time, energy and resources on hardcore criminals and terrorists. One Godra costs us hundreds of crores, one Gujrat Riot costs us many hundreds of crores, one Mumbai Blast costs us thousands of crores. Given the fragile social condition here, payback time for our investment in our own future might not be long.

Time to think, is it?  

PrideOfMatchingham

31.07.2007