A new report from a US political science professor examines the causes and impacts of murders in Mexico, arriving at a handful of new policy prescriptions, says InSightCrime.org. The report, “The Local Educational and Regional Economic Foundations of Violence,” was written by State University of New York professor Matthew C. Ingram for the Woodrow Wilson Center. Ingram examines all of Mexico’s murders in 2010 — a particularly violent year — categorized by municipality.
Mexico had 24,374 murders in 2010, a 23 percent increase from the prior year. Ingram points out that the majority of the murders were concentrated in a relatively small number of Mexican cities. He explores education and economics as factors in the violence and reaches a counterintuitive conclusion: that high unemployment tends to decrease the homicide rate.