Local government spending tradeoffs in the Great Lakes Region: Criminal legal spending, community investments, and violent death

The murder of George Floyd led to an intense public debate about whether the United States relies too heavily on the criminal legal system to promote public safety. Existing scholarship does not directly address this debate: it has examined how investments in the criminal legal system impact crime rates, but has not addressed whether these investments better promote public safety than non-carceral investments. Using novel longitudinal data from the 50 most populous counties in the Great Lakes region and poisson regression analyses that account for county and state-by-year fixed effects, we examined whether local government expenditure tradeoffs are associated with homicide and suicide. We do not find evidence that these resource tradeoffs were associated with homicide. However, these tradeoffs do matter for the leading source of violent death, suicide. Our preferred estimates suggest that a one percentage point increase in the share of local government spending invested in health and a corresponding one percentage point reduction devoted to the criminal legal system would have resulted in 833 fewer suicides from 2013 to 2019 in the 50 counties studied.