Conscription and Crime

• Profession: Washington University in St. Louis. Universidad de San Andrés. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
• Pages: WPS4037

Contenidos

• I. Introduction
• II. Literature Review
• III. Data
• IV. Econometric Methods
• V. Results
• VI. Conclusions
• References.

Conscription and Crime. Sebastian Galiani, Department of Economics, Washington University in St Louis, Campus Box 1208, St Louis, MO 63130-4899, US, galiani@economics.wustl.edu; Martn Rossi, Universidad de San Andres, Vito Dumas 284, B1644BID, Victoria, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina, mrossi@udesa.edu.ar; Ernesto Schargrodsky, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Saenz Valiente 1010, C1428BIJ, Buenos Aires, Argentina, eschargr@utdt.edu. We are grateful to Horacio Tarelli and Fernando Michelena for crucial help throughout this study. We also thank Rut Diamint and the Argentine Army for their cooperation. Maximiliano Appendino and Florencia Borrescio Higa provided excellent research assistance; and the World Bank provided financial support.

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I Introduction

The initiation in criminal activities is, typically, a young phenomenon. Most criminals begin their participation in illegal activities as juvenile or young adult offenders. The study of the determinants of entry into criminal activities should pay particular attention to major events affecting youth. In many countries one of these important events is mandatory participation in military service. In particular, a hypothesis that is worth studying is whether military training affects negatively or positively young men?s propensities toward violent and criminal behavior. Specifically, the objective of this study is to estimate the causal relationship between mandatory participation in military service (also called conscription) and crime. Military training could affect young men?s involvement in violent and criminal behavior through a variety of mechanisms: (i) military training teaches young men obedience and discipline, which could affect their rates of criminality; (ii) military service can affect the labor market prospects of young men positively or negatively. By delaying the insertion of young men into the labor market, it might affect future labor market prospects negatively, increasing their likelihood of committing property crimes. On the other hand, by improving their health and nutrition and also by extending their social network, it might affect labor market prospects positively (preventing them from committing property crimes); (iii) military training might permanently break down the mind?s natural barriers to committing violent acts (Grossman, 2000; Grossman and Siddle, 2000); (iv) military service provides firearm training that can reduce the entry costs into crime, increasing the participation in arms-related crimes; and (v) military service incapacitates the commission of crime for long periods of time by keeping young men in military facilities and out of the streets.

In order to identify a causal relationship between conscription and crime, we need to identify a variable that affects participation in military service but does not affect crime through other mechanisms. To solve this problem we take advantage of the Argentine conscription lottery, which randomly assigned eligibility of young males to provision of military service based on the last three numbers of their national ID. Hence, for reasons totally unrelated to their underlying levels of aggression or criminality, some men were selected for conscription service whereas others were not. We then analyze the causal effect of this randomly assigned eligibility variable on the likelihood of having a criminal record.

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Our results suggest that participation in military service did not reduce and, probably, increased the likelihood of developing a criminal record in adulthood. Perhaps the firearm training received during military service reduced the entry costs into crime or the natural barriers to committing violent acts. In particular, our regressions by type of crime suggest a small, but significant, positive impact of military service on participation in arm-related crimes. It may also be the case that military service delayed the insertion of the young into the labor market, affecting future opportunities. Our results by type of crime also indicate a significant positive impact of military service on participation in property crimes.

Although military service in Argentina was interrupted in 1995, the conclusions of our study can still be relevant for several other countries. For example, Brazil, China, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, and Turkey have mandatory conscription and there have been discussions on the convenience of its interruption. Other countries, instead, have been discussing the possibility of reimplementing conscription. For example, as a response to the violent crisis in the Paris suburbs in 2005, French president Jacques Chirac announced the creation of a voluntary civil service of six to twelve months duration aimed at youngsters "who failed school and are in the process of social marginalization".¹ Our results do not encourage the reintroduction of military service for anti-crime purposes. Section II reviews the literature, Section III describes the data, and Section IV presents our econometric methods. The results are reported in Section V, while Section VI concludes.

II Literature Review

Previous studies have exploited the random assignment by draft lotteries to provision of military service in war times. The evidence shows that being drafted into the military can actually hurt future earnings. Angrist (1990) uses the Vietnam-era draft lottery to show that military service in the Vietnam era reduced the civilian earnings of white veterans in the US, and probably had no effect on nonwhite veterans. Angrist andPage 4Krueger (1994) used a similar strategy to show that even though simple comparisons suggest that World War II veterans earn more than non-veterans of the same age, the causal effect of military service in World War II is probable negative.² The natural experiment generated by the Vietnam draft lottery has been also exploited to analyze the impact of military service on alcohol consumption (Goldberg et al., 1991), and mortality (Hearst, Newman, and Hulley, 1986).

The impact of being a Vietnam War veteran on criminal and violent behavior has been analyzed by Rholfs (2005), who finds that...