Heavy Metal

Posted on May 27, 2008

Are kids exposed to excessive amounts of lead early in life more likely to be law-breakers as adults?

Lead contamination is found most in dust and soil, but also from lead water pipes or pollution. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine have looked statistically at how lead levels affect the risk of being arrested in adulthood.

They recruited 250 pregnant women from a poor lead-contaminated area of Cincinnati. They took blood samples from the women early in pregnancy, then sampled the blood of the children four times a year till age 5, and then twice a year until they were about 7 years old.

Years later, the researchers checked to see how many had been arrested since they reached the age of 18, and if so, how many times and for what. After accounting for factors including IQ and arrest rates of the mothers, parenting style and socioeconomic factors, they found that prenatal and childhood lead concentrations in the blood predicted likelihood of adult arrest.

A small increment of change in average childhood blood lead levels, saw an increased rate of arrest for violent crimes by 26%. And high prenatal blood levels predicted the total number of adult arrests.

Certainly, that brings into play interesting legal scenarios. No doubt, there will be a number of attempts by lawyers to plead on behalf of their defendant, ‘the lead made me do it.’ Other contributing behavioral factors have been used in the past to attempt justification of a person’s illegal behavior, but the bottom line has always come down to whether a person is deemed to have been sane at the time of the offense. If so, then historically, at least, actions are deemed to have been controllable.