For 31 straight years, Louisiana has reported the nation’s highest murder rate.

For 31 straight years, Louisiana has reported the nation’s highest murder rate.
To solve that puzzle, first consider a wider pattern in the South: a history of violence that stretches back further still.

A New York Times article in 1998 pointed to “a divergence that has persisted for as long as records have been kept” in which “the former slaveholding states of the old Confederacy all rank in the top 20 states for murder, led by Louisiana, with a rate of 17.5 murders per 100,000 people in 1996.”

A study of judicial records from 1800 to 1860 found that the murder rate in South Carolina was four times higher than in Massachusetts. More than a century later, in 1996, the ratio was similar. And in 2018, the murder rate was 7.7 per 100,000 in South Carolina and 2.0 in Massachusetts — again, about four times higher.

In the 1800s, the South tended to have more “frontier justice,” in which people took the law into their own hands, as well as more “honor justice,” in which signs of disrespect could advance to fatal encounters like duels.

A common theme between this high rate of white violence, and later the high rate of Black violence in the same region, appears to be a criminal justice system viewed as untrustworthy. People tend not to take part in a system they don’t trust, fueling cycles of retribution outside the law. Jill Leovy’s book “Ghettoside”described Black Americans as being both under-policed (not enough effort to solve murders) and over-policed (for minor infractions).

Criminologists tread carefully in inferring causation. For example, there is no consensus on the main reason for the significant drop in crime in the United States over most of the last three decades. And there is no consensus on what caused the big national rise in murders this past year.

Many factors could help explain Louisiana’s unwelcome ranking, including disproportionate racial segregation, job discrimination and poverty. But nearby states have a lot of these problems, too. So what might make Louisiana distinct?