Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime

[Karmadillo]

Interesting post by way of Metafilter.

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/809521--probing-the-link-between-slaughterhouses-and-violent-crime

Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime

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“... and as for the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting — sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”

Sinclair’s abattoir labourers get so desensitized to violence that rates of murder, rape and brawls among them rise. The book cemented the link between slaughterhouses and crime for decades to come — long before pig farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton haunted headlines.

More than a hundred years later, a University of Windsor researcher may have proven the literary classic right. Criminology professor Amy Fitzgerald says statistics show the link between slaughterhouses and brutal crime is empirical fact.

In a recent study, Fitzgerald crunched numbers from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, census data, and arrest and offence reports from 581 U.S. counties from 1994 to 2002.

“I have a graph that shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases,” she says. Fitzgerald says she was inspired by The Jungle to study crime records in U.S. communities where slaughterhouses are located.

She became fascinated by studies of the environmental effects of slaughterhouses that mentioned crime rates, without explanation, seemed to go up when the factories opened in communities.

Fitzgerald carefully weighed the figures in order to see whether a link really existed. She found that an average-sized slaughterhouse with 175 employees would annually increase the number of arrests by 2.24 and the number of reports by 4.69. The larger the abattoir, the worse the local crime problem.

She controlled for factors such as the influx of new residents when slaughterhouses open, high numbers of young men — even the number of immigrants.

more...

[patrice]

1. Wow! You know, I have also seen research that says increases in Child Abuse corelate positively

with economic booms.

[gimama]

2. interesting on MANY levels..

thanks for posting this:thumbsup:

[deaniac21]

3. I think articles on voodoo are great too!

[veganlush]

4. John Robbins (heir apparent to Baskins/Robbins ice

cream fortune, but he turned it down) indirectly mentioned this in his best selling book; "Diet for A New America" in the eighties. read the book it'll change your life for the better

[Tumbulu]

5. This is obvious, isn't it?

Of course the people who get paid to kill animals all day become desensitized. It is a horrendous job to ask anyone to do for more than very occasionally.

[1620rock]

6. Agree.