Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin - Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
J Urban Health. 2024 Aug;101(4):692-701. doi: 10.1007/s11524-024-00864-w. Epub 2024 Jul 2.
Urban communities in the United States were transformed at the end of the twentieth century by a rapid decline in neighborhood crime and violence. We leverage that sharp decline in violence to estimate the relationship between violent crime rates and racial disparities in birth outcomes. Combining birth certificate data from US counties with the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting statistics from 1992 to 2002, we show that lower crime rates are associated with substantially smaller Black-White disparities in birth weight, low birth weight, and small for gestational age. These associations are stronger in more segregated counties, suggesting that the impacts of the crime decline may have been concentrated in places with larger disparities in exposure to crime. We also estimate birth outcome disparities under the counterfactual that the crime decline did not occur and show that reductions in crime statistically explain between one-fifth and one-half of the overall reduction in Black-White birth weight, LBW, and SGA disparities that occurred during the 1990s. Drawing on recent literature showing that exposure to violent crime has negative causal effects on birth outcomes, which in turn influence life-course outcomes, we argue that these results suggest that changes in national crime rates have implications for urban health inequality.
20 世纪末，美国城市社区的邻里犯罪和暴力迅速减少，发生了巨大转变。我们利用暴力犯罪的急剧下降来估计暴力犯罪率与出生结果的种族差异之间的关系。我们将美国各县的出生证明数据与联邦调查局 1992 年至 2002 年的“统一犯罪报告”统计数据相结合，结果表明，犯罪率越低，出生体重、低出生体重和小于胎龄儿的黑人和白人之间的差异就越小。在隔离程度更高的县，这些关联更强，这表明犯罪率下降的影响可能集中在受犯罪影响差异更大的地方。我们还根据犯罪率没有下降的反事实情况来估计出生结果的差异，并表明犯罪率的降低在统计学上解释了 20 世纪 90 年代黑人和白人之间出生体重、低出生体重和小于胎龄儿差异总体减少的五分之一到一半。借鉴最近的文献，这些文献表明，接触暴力犯罪对出生结果有负面影响，而出生结果又会影响人生轨迹的结果，我们认为，这些结果表明，全国犯罪率的变化对城市健康不平等产生了影响。
