"Eliminating lead exposure from lead paint would, it has been estimated, lead to roughly a 5 percent reduction in crime. If that estimate is close to right, the annual crime-control benefits would be greater than the total one-time cost of lead elimination: that is, the rate of return on that investment would be greater than 100 percent per year. Even ignoring all the other benefits of protecting children from lead, very few criminal-justice programs can claim to be even nearly so cost-effective in reducing crime. But an office-seeker who promised to fight crime by scraping the lead paint from old houses would find it hard to get a respectful hearing for the idea; it would simply not sound like a serious crime-control measure when compared to much more expensive and much less effective measures such as building yet more prisons."

Mark Kleiman, How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (h/t phredology)

(Source: interruptions)