191: “. . . in newspapers, wrote criminologist Robert Reiner.” See Robert Reiner, Media-Made Criminality: The Representation of Crime in the Mass Media, in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford University Press, 2007.
194: " ’... rate that was at least six times higher than the actual rate.’ ” See Julian Roberts and Loretta J. Stalans, Public Opinion, Crime and Criminal Justice and Julian Roberts and Mike Hough, Understanding Public Attitudes to Criminal Justice.
203: “. . . the prison population soared from 400,000 in 1980 to 2.1 million by 2000.” The latter half of that explosion coincided with a major decline in crime, and people on both sides of the political spectrum concluded that stuffing prisons to the rafters is an effective way to reduce crime. Most criminologists disagree. In The Great American Crime Decline—the most exhaustive look at the causes of the crime drop of the 1990s—University of California criminologist Franklin Zimring noted that Canada had not followed the American approach in the 1980s and 1990s and, as a result, a canyon opened between the two countries’ incarceration rates: In 1980, the United States imprisoned people at double the rate Canada did; in 2000, the American incarceration rate was six times higher than the Canadian rate. Despite this, Canada’s crime trends over that entire period were remarkably similar to American trends. In the 1990s, Zimring writes, Canada experienced a drop in crime in the 1990s that “almost perfectly matched the timing of the United States decline and [was] about 70 percent of its relative magnitude.” Zimring rather understatedly concludes this fact is “a challenge” to the conventional view that American politicians not only won elections with promises to “get tough” but won the war on crime, too.
204: “. . . to commit another crime after release than other sorts of criminals.” See, for example, Recidivism Released from Prison in 1994, U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003.
204: “. . . less frightening than that unadorned number.” See Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later, The Crimes Against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire, 2006.
206: “. . . civil servants handling the file. ‘It’s politics,’ he told them.” This was personally communicated to the author by one of the civil servants present.
208: “. . . the research does not mean what people naturally assume it means— that one in five children on the Internet have been contacted by pedophiles. ” It’s hard to believe these agencies are not aware that the statistic they disseminate is leading people to a false and frightening conclusion. A quick Google search turns up countless blogs and Web sites where the figure is cited as proof of the threat posed by pedophiles. It appeared in the same context in an article by journalist Caitlin Flanagan in the July/August 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. And John Walsh cited the figure as proof of the pedophile menace in an interview on CNN: “The Justice Department says that one in five children receive a sexual solicitation over the Internet. And I think all Americans have seen the Dateline stings with all the different type of pedophiles, doctors, rabbis, priests showing up to have sex with children.” As for UNICEF, when I asked a spokesperson for the source behind the agency’s statement, he cited the University of New Hampshire study and provided me with a Web link to it—even though anyone who actually looked at the document would see that it does not say what UNICEF says it does.
216: “. . . the homicide rates today are among the lowest in eight centuries.” Property crime is trickier to track simply because with murders there is usually a corpse and a big fuss, but historians such as James Sharpe of the University of York have investigated the possibility that violent crime was merely transformed into property crime and they are confident that, no, that did not happen. In the seventeenth century, as homicide was plummeting in England, property offenses fell along with it, Mr. Sharpe has concluded. See Manuel Eisner, Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime, in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Volume 30, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2003.
CHAPTER TEN
223: " ’... only form of cancer which shows so definite a tendency,’ ” the report noted.” See Ronald Bailey, Silent Spring at 40, Reason, June 12, 2002.
223: “The research linking smoking to cancer was fairly new . . .” Suspicions started to mount in the 1940s. In 1950, British scientist Richard Doll studied 20 lung cancer patients and concluded smoking was the only thing they had in common. Doll quit smoking immediately and warned in a paper that the risk of cancer “may be 50 times as great among those who smoke 25 or more cigarettes a day as among non-smokers.” In 1954, a study of 40,000 British doctors came to the same conclusion and the British government officially advised that smoking and cancer may be related. In 1957, the U.S. Surgeon General Leroy Burney stated his belief that smoking caused cancer. In March 1962, the Royal College of Physicians in Britain issued a report saying the same and, shortly afterward, the Surgeon General created a committee that ultimately resulted in the famous declaration of 1964 that smoking kills.
226: “. . . thanks to differences in lifestyle.” Some important lifestyle factors are far from obvious. The risk of breast cancer, for example, is increased by the hormones involved in ovulation. Thus, a woman whose period starts later—perhaps as a result of poor nutrition in childhood—is likely to have a reduced risk of breast cancer. A woman who has her first pregnancy earlier will further reduce her risk. So will a woman who has many babies. Conversely, a woman who received good nutrition in childhood and is in excellent health may start menstruation earlier, which will raise her risk, while a decision to delay having children until later in life, and having only one or two babies, or none, will boost it further. And that description fits most modern Western women.
227: “. . . who didn’t, and so it became hardwired instinct.” Psychologists Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff have conducted a series of ingenious exposures demonstrating just how tenacious this feeling is. See “Sympathetic Magical Thinking: The Contagion and Similarity ‘Heuristics’ ” in Heuristics and Biases. Any contact with a contaminated object taints the thing, no matter how brief the contact, and neither washing nor even sterilization can entirely remove the taint.
229: “. . . on the list actually cause cancer in humans.” For a good overview of these studies and the controversies surrounding them, see Aaron Wildavsky, But Is It True?
234: “. . . are falling but ‘much more so for cardiovascular disease.’ ” See Statistics Canada, Mortality, Summary List of Causes, 2004, released April 27, 2007.
240: " ’... it forbids the very steps that it requires.’ ” Another example: Nothing could be more in line with the sentiment of “precaution” than doing a biopsy on a growth. After all, the growth may be benign. Surgery would be an unnecessary risk. So a needle is inserted and some cells removed to make sure it’s cancerous before treatment proceeds. But in removing cells, there is a tiny risk that cancerous cells may be dislodged. These cells may follow the needle track and attach to other tissue. In effect, the biopsy will spread the cancer. This is very unlikely, but it can happen. So if you don’t do the biopsy, you may undergo risky treatments unnecessarily, but if you do the biopsy, you could spread the cancer. What does “precaution” mean under those circumstances?