The Impact of Increasing Community-Directed State Mental Health Agency Expenditures on Violent Crime
- PMID: 34800243
- DOI: 10.1007/s10597-021-00911-9
The Impact of Increasing Community-Directed State Mental Health Agency Expenditures on Violent Crime
Abstract
Violent crime remains a prevalent threat to population health within the United States. States offer varying policy approaches to prevent violent crime and support behavioral health, such as community-based programs that include substance use disorder prevention and treatment. Using state mental health agency data, we construct a panel of U.S. states over nine years and apply an instrumental variables empirical model with state and time fixed effects to adjust for policy endogeneity, omitted variable bias, and time trends. We find that a 10% increase in community-directed state mental health agency expenditures yielded nearly a 4% reduction in violent crime rates. Larger magnitude reductions in violent crime rates were associated with the presence of gun control regulations and increases in the proportion of the population completing secondary education. Policymakers should consider the added benefit of violent crime reduction when considering budgetary allocations of community-directed state mental health agency expenditures.
Keywords: Public health; Public policy; Public sector spending; Substance use; Violence.
© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
Similar articles
-
Surveillance for Violent Deaths - National Violent Death Reporting System, 39 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, 2018.MMWR Surveill Summ. 2022 Jan 28;71(3):1-44. doi: 10.15585/mmwr.ss7103a1. MMWR Surveill Summ. 2022. PMID: 35085227 Free PMC article.
-
Surveillance for Violent Deaths - National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 States, 2013.MMWR Surveill Summ. 2016 Aug 19;65(10):1-42. doi: 10.15585/mmwr.ss6510a1. MMWR Surveill Summ. 2016. PMID: 27537325
-
Surveillance for Violent Deaths - National Violent Death Reporting System, 27 States, 2015.MMWR Surveill Summ. 2018 Sep 28;67(11):1-32. doi: 10.15585/mmwr.ss6711a1. MMWR Surveill Summ. 2018. PMID: 30260938 Free PMC article.
-
Housing Relocation Policy and Violence: A Literature Review.Trauma Violence Abuse. 2016 Dec;17(5):601-610. doi: 10.1177/1524838015603211. Epub 2015 Sep 6. Trauma Violence Abuse. 2016. PMID: 26346748 Review.
-
Why have we been more successful in reducing tobacco use than violent crime?Am J Community Psychol. 2000 Jun;28(3):269-302. doi: 10.1023/A:1005155903801. Am J Community Psychol. 2000. PMID: 10945118 Review.
Cited by
-
"We know what's going on in our community": A qualitative analysis identifying community assets that deter gun violence.SSM Qual Res Health. 2023 Jun;3:100258. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmqr.2023.100258. Epub 2023 Mar 28. SSM Qual Res Health. 2023. PMID: 37483654 Free PMC article.
References
-
- Alegría, M., Frank, R. G., Hansen, H. B., Sharfstein, J. M., Shim, R. S., & Tierney, M. (2021). Transforming mental health and addiction services: Commentary describes steps to improve outcomes for people with mental illness and addiction in the United States. Health Affairs, 40(2), 226–234. - DOI
-
- Andresen, M. A. (2012). Unemployment and crime: A neighborhood level panel data approach. Social Science Research, 41, 1615–1628. - DOI
-
- Baum, C., Schaffer, M., & Stillman, S. (2007). Enhanced routines for instrumental variables/GMM estimation and testing. The Stata Journal, 7(4), 465–506. - DOI
-
- Bertrand, M., Duflo, E., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). How much should we trust differences-in-differences estimates? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119, 249–275. - DOI
-
- Bronson, J., Stroop, J., Zimmer, S., & Berzofsky, M. (2017). Drug use, dependence, and abuse among state prisoners and jail inmates, 2007–2009. United States Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Publication types
MeSH terms
LinkOut - more resources
Full Text Sources