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As Jim Letten, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, relocated his office to Baton Rouge, he thought about the fact that New Orleans had just exported its most pathological citizens. "We were approached by the press repeatedly and asked, 'What happened to the bad guys?' We said, 'We don't know.'"
New Orleans police say they still don't know how many people were murdered in those first chaotic days. Certainly the figure was lower than rumors had suggested. But then, a period of remarkable calm began. By the weekend, the National Guard and police had descended on New Orleans like a Kevlar blanket. Crime dropped to an all-time low for the rest of the year. About 100 murders that should have happened never did--at least not in New Orleans. "It gave us an opportunity to have a clear picture of what peace in a city is," says Warren Riley, now superintendent of the police department. "I think even our criminal element for a short period of time had a change of heart."
One of two things can happen when people are plucked out of lawless neighborhoods and put somewhere else, criminologists have found. In the more hopeful scenario, people who parachute into better neighborhoods commit less violent crime. That theory posits that places like New Orleans, where poverty is extreme, are inherently crimogenic--which is to say, they produce deviant behavior, just like alcohol. Gangs are also crimogenic. When people leave gangs, they are generally less violent than they were as gang members. In neighborhoods and gangs, in other words, violence--and peace--is contagious.
In the mid-1990s, the Federal Government conducted a mass experiment that looked, in some ways, like the exodus following Katrina. Some 4,600 families in public housing projects were randomly assigned one of three different destinies. Families in the first group got a golden opportunity: a housing voucher good for relocation to any neighborhood with very low poverty. Those in the second group got a voucher for use anywhere. And a third set, the control group, stayed where it was.
The group that moved to better neighborhoods did not have better lives in every way. But the young people were less likely to be arrested for violent crimes, according to a 2005 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Their new, safer neighborhoods appeared to make them less dangerous.
But there is another scenario that is less promising. That one predicts that when people lose connections to their old neighborhoods, they also lose something good. They lose reasons to do the right thing. "One of the things that keeps people straight is the fact that there are people who are important to them around. They don't want to embarrass themselves," says Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon. "As you disperse people into unfamiliar environments, without these people they care about, there is less control over them, and they could become more troublesome."