Flutterby™! : Healthcare reduces violent crime

Brookings: New evidence that access to health care reduces crime:

The authors found that when Medicaid expanded, both violent and property crime rates fell. The authors argue that the effect is driven primarily by increasing access to substance abuse treatment: they find that Medicaid expansions increased the number of people receiving such treatment by 20 percent. It’s possible that Medicaid expansions affect criminal behavior through other channels as well — for instance, it also increases access to mental health care and reduces financial instability. But assuming that substance abuse treatment was the main driver of effects on crime in this setting, the authors estimate that a ten percent increase in such treatment (at an annual cost of $1.6 billion) yielded an annual benefit of $2.9 to 5.1 billion in avoided crime. That’s a big return on investment.

The paper is National Bureau of Economic Research: Substance Abuse Treatment Centers and Local Crime Samuel R. Bondurant, Jason M. Lindo, Isaac D. Swensen:

In this paper we estimate the effects of expanding access to substance-abuse treatment on local crime. We do so using an identification strategy that leverages variation driven by substance-abuse-treatment facility openings and closings measured at the county level. The results indicate that substance-abuse-treatment facilities reduce both violent and financially motivated crimes in an area, and that the effects are particularly pronounced for relatively serious crimes. The effects on homicides are documented across three sources of homicide data.