Crime is Ugly

An entertaining, if kinda sad and questionable, blurb in The Atlantic Monthly:

Dick Tracy had it right, a new study suggests: there really is a correlation between ugliness and crime. A pair of economists examined looks and lawbreaking among adults aged eighteen to twenty-six, using a longitudinal study involving interviews with more than 15,000 adolescents and young adults. Controlling for socioeconomic status, the economists found that as a person's reported attractiveness decreases, the chance of his or her having committed a crime–from selling drugs to burglary–goes up. . . The authors note that their findings may be partially explained by the fact that good-looking people tend to have higher earnings than the unattractive, who therefore have a stronger financial incentive to consider a life of crime. But other factors may be at work: the effect of unattractiveness on crime is particularly strong among women, and the study suggests that this may have to do with “human-capital formation” in high school, where good-looking females tend to have higher GPAs and fewer disciplinary problems than unattractive girls, making them less prone to crime later on in life. The authors also note that attractive women “tend to receive favorable treatment from the criminal-justice system”–that is, even when they break the law, they are less likely to be detained for it.