The Little-Known Violence Prevention Tool Cropping Up in Cities Across the Country

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/how-cash-transfer-programs-prevent-violent-crime.html

Cash transfer proposals are cropping up across the country. Los Angeles, for example, began allocating $1,000 per month to some of its poorest residents in January 2022. Approximately 40 other cities are considering implementing some form of guaranteed income, according to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, which supports pilot cash transfer initiatives in U.S. cities. As in Chicago, the introduction of guaranteed income in U.S. cities has been couched as an anti-poverty measure largely detached from the problem of violence. In an American political context in which violent crime is a perennial centerpiece of electoral politics that is repeatedly invoked to perpetuate commitments to oppressive policing and carceral systems, this is a wasted opportunity to realign public perceptions of violence prevention with more constructive, equitable policy agendas.

Abundant evidence shows that cash transfer programs and robust welfare systems are extremely effective policies for reducing homicide, assault, property crime, overdose deaths, and intimate partner violence. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is remotely attuned to human reality. Indeed, the logic of cash transfer programs as anti-violence policy is so self-evident that its elaboration feels redundant: Cash transfer programs reduce economic inequality. The relationship between inequality and violence is well-established. Reducing inequality alters the cost-benefit calculation of criminal acts by reducing desperation (e.g., the sense of having little to lose). Because cash transfers reduce poverty, financial need, and inequality, they decrease the perceived benefits of crime and increase its felt costs to others and oneself, fostering reductions in crime and increased experiences of shared community.

Alongside such basic explanations of how guaranteed income reduces violence, there is also the fact that the social and psychic security it affords mitigates experiences of everyday stressors, distrust, anger, envy, and resentment that can provoke violent fantasies and actions, reducing the build-up of tension that exacerbates irrational human drives towards violent outbursts.

We could additionally understand the violence-reducing effects of cash transfers through frameworks that foreground the social determinants of health––or, put more directly to underline that what is most at play is specific policy rather than vague cultural dynamics, the political determinants of health. Indeed, studies have found that not only do cash transfers decrease homicide, crime, and hospitalization rates, they also function through dose-dependent responses like those we see with the medications we use to treat our patients. In a large study of Brazil’s Bolsa Família cash transfer program, for example, for every 1 percent increase in the proportion of the target population receiving cash transfers, homicide rates decreased by 0.3 percent and hospitalizations from violence by 0.4 percent. Furthermore, the benefits of cash transfers grew over time: when at least 70 percent of the target population had received cash transfers for one, two, three, and four years, hospitalizations from violence decreased by 8 percent, 14 percent, 20 percent, and 25 percent, respectively.

[essaynnc]

1. OMG. wait for the Republicans to slant this one !!!

[Chainfire]

2. Republicans consider it Unamerican to help the poor.

They are poor by choice, it is a moral failure to be poor. Rather spend $50,000 dollars a year to incarcerate them, than half that to save them. All based on greed and fear.

[CrispyQ]

3. "Charity should only come from individuals, not government."

That's what a Christian acquaintance told me once. I reminded her that Jesus told us to feed & clothe the less fortunate, and asked why would he care if we contributed individually or collectively? This is the same woman who votes republican, claims social programs encourage laziness, but she knows every fed, state, & county program that her adult children qualify for.

[stopdiggin]

4. it goes deeper than that

at a very basic level a lot of people are opposed to somebody else 'getting' something (anything) when they are not. This sounds overly simplistic, not to mention revealing and unflatteringly selfish - but it's almost hardwired into (competitive) human social dynamics. And most sociologists will affirm that this is really the baseline motivator. Fair is fair. And "they" get something - only if "I" can have the same.

As illustration - the overriding objection to student loan forgiveness .. ? "I paid off my loans .. why should ..?" or "I didn't get any help when I .."

i.e. - "No way they should get something I didn't get!"

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R