The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

"The big implication of this is the idea that environmental policy can serve as social policy," Reyes said. "We need to think about the large scale effect of environmental policies."

Reyes' journey to "out" lead as a criminal instigator began in the late 1990s, a time when criminologists and social scientists were pondering a surprising drop in violent crime.

According to FBI crime statistics, violent crime fell by 35 percent between 1993 and 2003, Reyes said. This drop followed a sharp increase in brutal behavior.

"With the increase in crime, everyone was predicting social collapse under the increasing burden of increasing crime," Reyes said. "When it (crime) started going down, it was just inconceivable. People had no idea what to make of it."

For answers, Reyes decided to look at lead, a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in soft tissues and bone over time, that had been banned from gasoline in the 1970s. It was curious to Reyes that this ban coincided with the reduction in crime just as children of the late 70s and early 80s were reaching adulthood.

In 1970, the average child had 18 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.

Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is concerned about any child with 10 or more micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. In the 1990s the average child had about 3 micrograms, Reyes said.

Lead poisoning can affect nearly every system in the body without providing obvious symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead poisoning or long-term exposure can cause learning disabilities, behavioral problems and, at very high levels, seizures, coma and even death.

Before the Clean Air Act of the early 1970s, gasoline used in cars carried lead. Car fumes were the leading source of lead in the air, Reyes said.

"You had an entire population exposed, breathing it in," Reyes said.

The lead effect was particularly chilling on children, who are more susceptible to the harm of lead exposure because they are still developing neurologically.

Reyes compared the rise and fall of lead-exposure with violent crime rates, but with a 20-year lag. The delay was used to account for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early 1990s.

Reyes made her state-by-state comparisons using a model that considered 12 factors including local economy, poverty rates, higher education and number of prisons.

"When you reduce lead exposure by 10 percent in childhood then 20 years later those adults can expect their violent crime rate to be 7 to 8 percent lower," Reyes said.

"That scales up to a pretty big effect because it's such a big reduction in lead exposure."

In addition to reducing crime, Reyes also asserts that the decrease in lead exposure may have had an affect on the overall intelligence of the nation. On average, children who took IQ tests in the 1990s scored seven to 10 points better than children tested in the 1970s.

"The Clean Air Act is just an amazing public health policy success," Reyes said.

Reyes acknowledges there are some nay-sayers to her theory, but she contends time and more research will bolster her find.

"People will ask, "How can this be? We're not all committing violent crimes?'" Reyes said.

"But maybe the effects are not always as obvious as that. Maybe I'm a little more compulsive than I would have been if I had not been exposed to lead."

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