"Torture" in Germany

In October 2002 (from the WSJ):

"Deputy Police Chief Daschner fears that Jakob's life may be in danger. In a memorandum, he writes: "We need to ascertain without delay where the boy is being held. While respecting the principle of proportionality, the police have an obligation to take all measures in their power to save the child's life."...

n the interrogation room, Ennigkeit tells Gäfgen that a "special officer" is on his way. If Gäfgen does not tell Ennigkeit where the boy is, the "special officer" will "make him feel pain that he will not forget." On Gäfgen's own account, the formula is still more menacing: the officer "will make you feel pain like you have never felt before." "Nobody can help you here," Ennigkeit tells him, according to Gäfgen's testimony. "We can do whatever we want with you." On Gäfgen's account, moreover, Ennigkeit already begins to rough him up: shaking him so violently that his head bangs against the wall and hitting him in the chest hard enough to leave a bruise over his collarbone....

In June 2005, the child-murderer and law student Magnus Gäfgen lodged a complaint against Germany with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In his complaint, Gäfgen accused Germany of having violated his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights and, more specifically, of having violated the prohibition on torture contained in Article 3 of the Convention.

On June 30, 2008, the European Court of Human Rights rejected Gäfgen's complaint and cleared Germany of the charge of tolerating torture."

Also in October 2002, interrogators at Guantanamo Bay asked for permission to use similar methods on al Qaeda terrorist Mohammed al-Qahtani. The Pentagon said no.

Now that Barack Obama has won the presidency, perhaps it is time for American interrogators to revise their practices to bring them into line with European ones.

Child Services, the Prosecutor, and the Bloomington Planned Parenthood Case

From the IDS:

The Indiana Department of Child Services will take no legal action against the employee who was suspended from Bloomington’s Planned Parenthood on Wednesday.

The employee was suspended without pay after an online video was released of her advising a woman posing as a 13-year-old girl to cross state lines to get an abortion without parental consent. When the woman posing as a 13-year-old girl said the man who got her pregnant was 31 years old, she agreed not to report what would, if it were true, be statutory rape.

Steve Vaughn, director of the Indiana Department of Child Services, said child services does not plan to do anything to the employee because there was not an actual minor involved in the incident.

...The county prosecutor’s office could also file charges, but no one from the office could be reached for comment by press time.

Maybe this is just jurisdictional. I am wondering whether this case is different from, say, a pedophile who is caught by someone posing to be a 13-year-old on the Internet.

Vice in the Netherlands

"Amsterdam to close many brothels, marijuana cafes"

Amsterdam unveiled plans Saturday to close brothels, sex shops and marijuana cafes in its ancient city center as part of a major effort to drive organized crime out of the tourist haven.

The city is targeting businesses that "generate criminality," including gambling parlors, and the so-called "coffee shops" where marijuana is sold openly. Also targeted are peep shows, massage parlors and souvenir shops used by drug dealers for money-laundering.

"I think that the new reality will be more in line with our image as a tolerant and crazy place, rather than a free zone for criminals" said Lodewijk Asscher, a city council member and one of the main proponents of the plan.

Loony Indictments

We must expect county prosecutors to go insane (literally) once in a while. What is more depressing is that a lunatic could get a grand jury to indict. See this story on the indictment of VP Cheney and AG Gonzalez, among others.

Five of the indictments - against two district judges, two special prosecutors and the district clerk - were dismissed because Guerra was the alleged victim, witness and prosecutor. The indictments accused the five of abusing their power by being involved in a previous investigation of Guerra.

The Value of Human Life in Pennsylvania

It seems economist Rafael Robb has gotten 5 to 10 years in prison for killing his wife. He gave a talk here a couple of years ago, and did seem a tough guy-- is he the one who was an Israeli paratrooper? In any case, I expect he will be a model prisoner and be out after 5 years. As an economist, I can see then that the value put on a human life by the Pennsylvania state government is a 5-year prison term.

He admitted he "just lost it" during an argument that erupted at the couple's Upper Merion Township home in December 2006. Ellen Robb had been planning to end their 16-year marriage, and her husband feared he would see less of their daughter and possibly suffer financially if they divorced.

I wonder if Professor Robb has gained financially, overall? He has lost 5 years of salary completely, plus a hard-to-estimate reduction in future salary. He will lose his tenure at Penn, but he can get a job somewhere else-- he's a good economist, and he can keep publishing while in prison-- indeed, he will have more time for research, and he's a theorist, so lack of RA's, computers, etc. won't hamper him. He has gained alimony he would have had to pay-- say, 20% of income for a 30-year period. He has also gained his half of the household assets-- perhaps 6 times his annual income.

Ratio Variables in Regressions

I was reading Gibbs and Firebaugh (Criminology, 1990) on ratio variables in regressions. Suppose you regress Arrests/Crime on Crimes/population using city-by-city data, and in fact there is no causal connection. Will they be negative correlated anyway, since CRIMES is in both variables?

No, so long as all relevant control variables are in the regression. Here is a way to see it. Suppose we regress 1/Crime on Crimes/Population. Suppose too, that Crime and Crimes/Population are uncorrelated--- that bigger cities do not have a higher crime rate. Then 1/Crime and Crimes/Population will be uncorrelated.

If, of course, bigger cities do have higher crime rates, then 1/Crime and Crimes/Population will be correlated, but if we suspect that to be true, then in our original regression we should have regressed Arrests/Crime on not only Crimes/Population but on the control variable Crimes.

There is some issue of measurement error-- of false correlation arising if Crime has measurement error. Then we are regressing Arrests/(Crime+Error) on (Crime+Error)/Population. I think if we use (Crime +Error) as a control variable that will fix the problem, though.

Crime in England and the USA

The International Crime Victims Survey's conclusion is that England and Wales (Scotland has separate data-- with higher crime, I think) has higher crime rates than the US even for violent crime. Murder (not covered by the survey) is the only exception. From Table 1, section 9.1, the 2004 and 2005 numbers for England and the US are, per person per year:
Car theft: 1.8, 1.1
Burglary (home):3.5, 2.5
Robbery (face to face): 1.4, 0.6
Theft of personal property: 6.3, 4.8
Assaults and threats (similar ratio for just assaults): 5.8, 4.3

Illegal Immigrants Cause 6% of Crime , which Costs$24 Billion

David Wilson pointed out flaws in my earlier post on crime and illegal immigrants. My numbers were way off, but even when cut they support my ultimate conclusion: the cost of crime by illegal aliens wipes out the economic gains from them. And this is true even if it were to be the case, as Mr. Wilson suggests, illegal aliens have a lower propensity to commit crime---adjusting for age, sex, ethnicity, etc. --- than citizens do. (That's because for the question of how much they harm the U.S. , one shouldn't adjust: what matters is how much crime they commit in total, not how much crime they would commit if they were old and female.)

Note that even corrected, my estimates are still just a weblog estimate, not up to the standards for first draft for an academic working paper, though that doesn't mean they aren't the best available (somebody *should* do a serious study of this). What would be really useful would be a survey of a random sample of those imprisoned in state and federal prisons and jails.

My numbers were indeed way off. The big problem was my use of the SCAAP numbers for the number of illegal aliens in jail during the year. I compared that to the number of people in jail measured on one particular day. Since jails are for terms of less than one year, there will be a lot more people in and out during the year than are in jail during any one day.

My latest estimate is that 6.1% of crime is by illegal aliens, and it imposes a cost of 24 billion dollars per year. The reasoning is below. (The percentage is exactly the same as David Wilson's but that is an odd coincidence; he includes jails and gets 6.1% as 131,000/ 2,135,335).

Here are some numbers on inmates of "prisons" (a term of art which means state and federal prisons, places where criminals serve sentences of one year or more, as opposed to jails, which are run by cities and counties for lesser offenders). K means "thousand".

From the Justice Dept. source on prison data: Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/p06.htm, or http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim06.pdf Appendix Table 6: In prisons: 33K federal, 57K state noncitizens on June 30, 2006. Total: 90K. Table 12: Prisoners in custody: 181K federal, 1290K state. Total: 1471K. Fraction noncitizen: 90/1471= 6.1%.

If there are 10.5 million illegal aliens, then their imprisonment rate is 90/10500 = 0.85%. There are 308 thousand Hispanics in prison p06t07.csv out of a population of 44.3 million (Stat Abs. Table 6), about 0.69%. Thus, illegal aliens aren't much different from hispanics in percentage imprisoned. That is surprising, since I would think the illegals would have fewer women and children to bring down the criminality rate. The overall US imprisonment rate is 1471/297000=.50%. The white (nonblack, nonHispanic) rate is .27% (= (478+49)/198000 ) and the black (nonhispanic) rate is 1.56% (=(534+28)/36000).

The prison data has some problems. It is not just for the 10 million or so illegal aliens, but for all noncitizens, which includes the 12 million or so legal aliens (people with green cards, tourists, etc.) (10.5 million illegal aliens from the Statistical Abstract: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/08s0046.pdf The total population was 296,639,000, That's about 3.4% illegals.) (Legal aliens in 2005: 20.7-10.5 million. Table 44 SA http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/08s0044.pdf) Also, (1) some states don't report, (2) some states report jails as well as prisons, and (3) some states report all foreign-born, not just illegal aliens.

Also, from GAO report number GAO-05-337R, ‘Information on Criminal Aliens Incarcerated in Federal and State Prisons and Local Jails’ which was released on May 9, 2005, criminal aliens incarcerated in federal prisons were 49K at year-end 2004, a lot more than the 33K above; and in fiscal year 2002-SCAAP reimbursed states for 77K criminal aliens. The 77K is compatible with the 57K above, since it's 4 years apart and not just year-end (some people even with sentences of over a year will have left by year-end).

Anyway, if illegal aliens are 6.1% of crime (making the further assumption that the percentage in prisons is equal to the percentage of crime generally,including less serious crime), then if crime costs $400 billion per year, crime by illegal aliens costs 24 billion dollars per year. That is about equal to the June 20, 2007 CEA report Immigration’s Economic Impact, which says immigration has a net benefit of $30 billion per year, which includes both legal and illegal immigrants.

May 3: A survey of illegal immigrants who applied for amnesty around 1989 found that of working-age adults, just 57% were male and 12% worked in agriculture. 37% had 9 or more years of schooling, which is below the American average, but above the Mexican average (p. 884 of Illegal Migration from Mexico to the United States Gordon H. Hanson, Journal of Economic Literature, Page 1. The Journal of Economic Literature Vol. 44, No. 4, December 2006)

A Summertown Brothel. Who would have thought it just a half-mile from our house? An Oxford Times article says:

A BROTHEL in a quiet Oxford street was run so professionally it was "like a restaurant", a court heard today.

Mother-of-two Elaine Konopka, 39, admitted helping run the brothel in Middle Way, Summertown....

"Konopka admitted working at the address on approximately ten occasions over an 18-month period. She said she was responsible for answering phones, making appointments and greeting customers." ...

"She was not a part-time receptionist, she was a fill-in receptionist. The brothel was open from 10am to 10pm seven days a week. ...

District judge Brian Loosley looked at the brothel's menu, which had services ranging from £50-£140, while considering the sentence.

Ordering her to carry out 60 hours' unpaid community work and pay £100 costs, he said: "It is quite clear this was run almost like a restaurant, with menus and various services being offered....

Neighbours tonight said they were pleased the brothel had been closed.

One neighbour, who asked not to be named, said she thought Konopka's sentence was too lenient.

She said: "I think it is disgusting she only got 60 hours' community service.

"It is so nice not having so many strange men going in there. It was really unpleasant. It certainly attracted all sorts of men - not very nice people at all.

"Some had children's car seats in the back. You just felt upset for the wives."

Wicked Judges. Oxford has a number of bad judges. Here is a Julian Hall story:

... a 58-year-old former teacher at the Cothill School in Oxfordshire was charged recently with abusing a number of boys in the 1970s. But the judge, Julian Hall, declared earlier this year that "this is the stalest case I have been asked to try" and threw it out.

"I think the best thing that should happen to people who behave in this way," Hall told Oxford Crown Court, speaking of the former teacher, Jeremy Malim, "is that they should get a very brisk elbow in the ribs at the time or be rejected."

And here's more about Julian Hall:

Judge Hall, criticised last year for saying a 10-year-old rape victim dressed provocatively, gave a Berinsfield teenager three years' probation for molesting a five-year-old girl.

The 17-year-old - who Judge Hall banned the Oxford Mail from naming - had also abused a seven-year-old boy....

Last year, Judge Hall sent Blackbird Leys window cleaner Keith Fenn to prison for just two years after he raped a 10-year-old.

He also told a 71-year-old man who sexually abused a six-year-old to compensate her with money for a new bike....

Judge Hall told lawyers in court: "At the moment, the defendant is probably not dangerous."

The girl's mother, who was sitting in the public gallery, shouted out: "Tell that to my daughter!"

Judge Hall told the teenager: "What you did was dreadful and it is the sort of behaviour which affects people rather badly and for a long time.

"You are going to have to attend courses to help you sort out your attitude to sex and children younger than you."

He granted the teenager anonymity and said that he was too young to be identified publicly for his crimes.

And here's a story about Charles Harris:

A JUDGE who likened growing cannabis to tomato plants criticised Oxford City Council as he dismissed an Antisocial Behaviour Order.

The city council had wanted Phillip Pledge thrown out of his home and banned from Blackbird Leys for two years after police seized £3,400- worth of cannabis from a flat in Evenlode Tower where he was temporarily living.

But Judge Charles Harris - who caused controversy last week during the Asbo hearing when he said it was no more offensive to neighbours to grow cannabis than tomato plants - threw out the case.

Judge Harris said at Oxford Crown Court: "Oxford City Council applied for the order because the defendant caused harassment, alarm or distress.

"I have considerable reservations. There is no evidence at all to show anyone had been caused alarm, had been harassed or could be distressed. "It is not appropriate to seek orders with potentially very serious consequences without producing evidence to justify them.

"It is alleged the defendant was growing and selling cannabis in his flat. This is a criminal offence and he could have been tried in the criminal courts.

"For some reason the Crown Prosecution Service has not charged Mr Pledge, although the police have reason to justify charging him.

"It is not for the local housing authority in civil proceedings, via an Asbo, to provide a substitute for criminal proceedings."

The court heard Mr Pledge was jailed in 1998 for possession of cannabis and fined in 2000 for cultivating it.

Mr Pledge, of Strawberry Path in Blackbird Leys, had been living in the flat temporarily due to an arson attack on his home.

The 38-year-old was in rent arrears of £1,479.64, but told Judge Harris he had arranged to pay that back. ...

Judge Harris did not give leave for the council to appeal against his decision against an Asbo or to evict Mr Pledge.

Illegal Immigrants and Crime. Steve Sailer has recent posts on that topic here and here, with sources. He doesn't have much that's new to me, but I'll make a note of it. I have an earlier weblog post that can be searched for that has more on the topic, which needs to be investigated.

Immigrants and Crime: Switzerland.The Independent had an article a while back on discontent with immigration in Switzerland. Here are a couple of interesting facts from it:

* More than 20 per cent of the Swiss population, and 25 per cent of its workforce, is non-naturalised.

* At the end of 2006, 5,888 people were interned in Swiss prisons. 31 per cent were Swiss citizens – 69 per cent were foreigners or asylum-seekers.

I wish it said how many of those "interned" were there for immigration crimes. None of them, or most of them?