Crime and Human Nature
Wilson, James Q. & Herrnstein, Richard J.
CRIME AND HUMAN NATURE James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein Simon and Schuster/$22.95 William Tucker On April 22, 1974, two young enlisted men from the Hill Air Force Base in Ogden,...
...His only remaining acquaintance from Trinidad, a platonic girlfriend, recalled him as a strange and distant individual who had wildly unrealistic ambitions about his future, and always met accusations against him with transparently false denials...
...Porteus soon switched the test to measure impulsiveness and a willingness to cut corners...
...As the authors note: "The argument used by social scientists to explain low crime rates among Orientals—namely, being separate from the larger society—has been the same as the argument used to explain high crime rates among blacks...
...After all, the best way to widen the time horizon of an impulsive, present-oriented individual is to get him thinking in longer periods of time—say around 20-years-to-life...
...Some key factors may also lie in the uncharted regions of the human brain and nervous system...
...The Gluecks mapped out many of the same observations...
...He may join a gang or hang around other delinquents, but does not form strong or lasting emotional attachments...
...Moreover, the test produces a continuum up and down the social spectrum...
...The connection between the second tone and the electric shock was too simple for anyone to miss, yet the psychopaths showed no physiological anticipation...
...One of the greatest remaining gaps in our scientific knowledge about crime, the authors say, is "the relationship between religiosity and criminality...
...In fact, it is Wilson and Herrnstein's clear suggestion that the high rates of crime among blacks have much less to do with poverty and discrimination than is commonly supposed...
...The sergeant was found the next day with a bayonette driven through his face...
...The authors have already anticipated one possible response—that criminal-defense lawyers will start using genetic and early-childhood implications to try to reduce punishment even further, on the grounds that criminals are not responsible for their genetic make-up or family life...
...They were tried and sentenced to death...
...The result of all this, say Wilson and Herrnstein, is that criminal tendencies are a definable phenomenon that can be substantially measured...
...Somewhat surprisingly, however, American black teenagers with criminally oriented personalities do not show that much greater delinquency when being raised in female-headed households...
...Nineteenth-century American culture worked against crime by preaching against the very qualities that are associated with it— impulsiveness, irresponsibility, and lack of concern for others and for the future...
...There is no 'crime gene,' " they write, but many of these characteristics—low intelligence, mesomorphic body types, verbal inarticulateness—are obviously part of a person's genetic makeup...
...With more than half of black children now being raised in female-headed households, the implications for the future are rather alarming...
...These environmental theories, of course, opened the way to government policies that tried to make physical and social changes that would solve crime...
...He also took the trouble to kick a ball-point pen into one man's ear...
...In fact, the total effort probably aggravated crime...
...The triumph of environmentalism came in the 1960s, when federal money was poured into "model cities," aid to schools, and "community-participation" anti-poverty programs...
...There are obviously cultural differences as well...
...The problem, say Wilson and Herrnstein, is too deeply rooted in genetics and early family life to be so easily changed...
...But there is a minority so impulsive and present-oriented that crime is a constant contingency...
...In fact, his inability to empathize with other people's feelings seems to be one of the key elements of his criminal activities...
...Pierre is typical of what James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein identify as the "criminal personality" in this exhaustive survey of what we know about crime and criminals...
...This remaking of the justice system was itself claimed to be an effort to solve crime...
...Pierre was already under suspicion for another unsolved murder involving a black Air Force sergeant who had accused Pierre of stealing his keys...
...The inmates were measured for anxiety reactions...
...Why not...
...Together the two authors have surveyed the entire field in a way that will probably serve as a prolegomenon to any future study of criminology...
...Information about the Ogden case is from Victim: The Other Side of Murder, by Gary Kinder, Dell 1982...
...Remarkably, serious psychopaths showed no anxiety...
...Some ingenious tests have been devised for measuring this sort of behavior...
...Ah, they come around and pick you up for things you did three months ago," the young man explained...
...What he soon found, however, was that certain people would continually cheat on the test by picking up their pencil or running it over the lines, even though there wasn't much at stake and infractions could easily be detected...
...Evidence from the Hi-Fi Shop murders quickly led police to Pierre and a young accomplice...
...And although Wilson and Herrnstein are somewhat low-key in their emphasis on punishment, it seems clear that we are never going to affect criminal tendencies in the broad range of the population without swifter and surer criminal sanctions...
...Obviously, the simple equation of crime and poverty is flawed...
...Net proceeds of the robbery amounted to a few thousand dollars...
...Since criminals were only ordinary people caught in unfortunate circumstances, it was argued, proving the state's good faith by making the justice system meticulously fair would win criminals over through a sense of fair play...
...The authors concentrate particularly on the short time horizons of these "present-oriented" personalities...
...In his previous book, Thinking About Crime, Wilson, who teaches political science at both Harvard and UCLA, established a reputation as one of the country's leading experts on crime...
...Top high school students, medical school applicants, business executives, factory workers, and trained nurses score very highly...
...While improving the economy and bolstering schools and neighborhoods may be worthy ends in themselves, they will not necessarily reduce crime...
...Many studies have tied high crime with broken homes and the lack 39 f a father in the home...
...Even more remarkable is the California Psychological Inventory, developed by Harrison Gough and others at UC Berkeley...
...Children adopted at very early age show criminal behavior that mimics their biological parents more than their adopted parents...
...If they catch you while you're doing it, that's one thing, but three months ago—that's bullshit...
...High crime rates have also been found in cultures where men have many wives, and children are raised by their mothers in isolation from the father...
...To others it is an opportunity...
...Although it is difficult to nail down in any controlled experiment, the mockery that has been made of the criminal justice system has certainly had a decisive effect on the expectations of all Americans—both those who depend on the law for protection and those who evade or ignore it...
...As far back as the 1940s, psychologist S.D...
...One of the holdup men, a 20-year-old Trinidadian named Dale Pierre, herded two salesmen and three customers into the basement...
...Porteus devised a simple pencil-maze test that he thought could measure intelligence...
...The authors argue this conclusion would be a misinterpretation— although criminal attorneys may not be so easily persuaded...
...Covering the whole spectrum, from genetic makeup to historical influences, Wilson and Herrnstein show that although the family obviously has its effect, the evidence is somewhat ambiguous...
...Chinese and Japanese Americans who have suffered almost identical poverty and economic discrimination have remarkably low rates of crime, and Japan itself—where national IQ scores are generally higher than in America—has only about one-tenth our crime rate...
...had simply stared back and denied everything...
...Yet crime soared by almost 200 percent...
...here the authors tread on the most controversial ground is in their almost foregone conclusion that many of these characteristics are inherited...
...The accomplice∔who had not taken part in the torture∔broke down and cried at sentencing, but Pierre remained impassive...
...Only once did 38 reality seem to dawn on him...
...Wilson and Herrnstein's work centers around a carefully drawn portrait of the criminal personality...
...They are unwilling to take responsibility for past actions, and often incapable of making realistic plans for the future...
...Interestingly enough, psychology and social-work graduate students score only in the low middle of the scale, just above high school students with "discipline problems...
...The typical criminal, they conclude, is a young male of below-average intelligence, verbally inarticulate, with a mesomorphic (muscular) body type, and—most important—a very short time horizon...
...His new book, Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime, was published in October by Stein and Day...
...As the authors speculate, increased prosperity may actually encourage crime because it makes more goods available and loosens social bonds...
...Barely even bothering to deny his guilt, he expressed a bland confidence that his sentence would eventually be overturned on appeal...
...One study has discovered that black inmates actually feel higher self-esteem as they become more hardened criminals, while the self-esteem of whites becomes lower...
...What Wilson and Herrnstein do emphasize—refreshingly—is public morality...
...They noted that delinquent boys tended to be mesomorphs with low intelligence who frequently came from broken homes and were nearly always in trouble at an early age...
...He changed his name twenty-seven times and formed his own corporation...
...After reading a book about the life of billionaire J. Paul Getty, he wrote in his notebook: "It seems that being a businessman is harder than I thought...
...As defined by Gough, the qualities that are associated with criminality emerge as overvaluation of immediate goals, unconcern for the rights of others, an inability to form lasting personal attachments, apparent lack of anxiety over social maladjustment, poor judgment, a tendency to blame others for mistakes, an almost complete lack of dependability, and "emotional poverty...
...Breslin inquired...
...The Gluecks' work went out of fashion in the 1950s arid 60s with the new wave of "environmentalism" in criminology...
...The rewards of crime are usually immediate, while the possibility of punishment is always somewhat distant...
...A loner since boyhood, Pierre already had a reputation for stealing when he was five years old...
...In addition, identical twins are more similar in their criminal behavior than fraternal twins when raised in identical circumstances...
...At the end of the second, the subject usually received a small but painful electric shock...
...Thus it seems clear that environmental policies are a hoax...
...Hired at a Texaco refinery at 17, he became the company's first apprentice ever to be fired, for stealing other workers' wallets...
...During this period the economy boomed, institutional racism was weeded out, billions were spent on anti-poverty programs, and prison populations declined by about 10 percent from 1960 to 1975...
...He found that these qualities corresponded very nicely with criminal behavior...
...Meanwhile, the justice system and family settings were essentially ignored...
...In one remarkable Pavlovian experiment with jail inmates, subjects were exposed to two different ten-second tones...
...Herrnstein, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of I.Q...
...Needless to say, none of this worked...
...These academic scholars emphasized schools, peer groups, gangs, and neighborhoods—even developing an "ecological" theory which said that crime seems to thrive in certain neighborhoods regardless of who lives there...
...Blacks regularly show up as more impulsive, and score about 12-15 points lower than the national average on intelligence tests...
...Criminals don't seem to share the same sense of time that most people do...
...The police aren't fair," the youth told Breslin...
...If the law can no longer "keep its promises," as Justice Holmes put it, then it is the deviant and impulsive people who will have the correct interpretations of reality, while the law-abiding majority will be proved wrong...
...The justice system was "deprisonized," and law enforcement was hopelessly entangled by issues of "Constitutional rights...
...An Ogden detective who had questioned the heavily muscled Pierre had found him remarkably impassive...
...As the authors say, "To some people a dark street is a source of fear...
...An outgrowth of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the CPI is a set of 480 true-false questions that measures what Gough calls the "folk concepts" of "social presence" and "self-control...
...For most of us, the possibility of punishment has been internalized enough so that the temptations of crime are not often a serious consideration...
...Just what the policy implications of Crime and Human Nature are, however, is not entirely clear...
...They are extremely impulsive, and cannot or will not postpone gratification...
...Two victims survived, although one suffered extensive brain damage...
...The test has been applied all over the world in eight different languages across almost a dozen cultures, and has consistently sorted out people with criminal records...
...More ominously, though, black teenagers without strong criminal tendencies do show higher rates of delinquency when raised in single-parent homes...
...I n many ways, Wilson and Herrnstein's effort is a revival of the path-breaking work that Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck did with delinquent boys in the 1940s...
...After all, twelve years after the Ogden Hi-Fi Shop murders, the State of Utah is still in the federal courts trying to carry out its death sentence against Dale Pierre...
...The child is father to the man," is a phrase that Wilson and Herrnstein repeat over and over...
...Faced with strong circumstantial evidence, Pierre William TUcker is The American Spectator 's New York correspondent...
...At the end of one tone, a picture of a nude female usually appeared...
...Such behavior was probably illustrated in a recent report from Jimmy Breslin about a brief conversation with a young criminal in Harlem...
...CRIME AND HUMAN NATURE James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein Simon and Schuster/$22.95 William Tucker On April 22, 1974, two young enlisted men from the Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah, robbed the downtown Hi-Fi Shop...
...Given the complexities in both personality assessment and the criminal justice system," they conclude, "it is the homogeneity of personality in criminal populations that surprises us, not the heterogeneity...
...Such a person is likely to have shown signs of troublesome behavior as early as three or four years old...
...They do not seem to suffer from the fears and anxieties that most people do...
...in the Meritocracy, brings a psychological expertise to the subject...
...This partially genetic explanation is confirmed by studies with adopted children, plus identical and fraternal twins...
...He raped one young woman, poured hydrochloric acid down everyone's throat, then shot each victim in the head...
...For others, the possibility of punishment is real enough to deter their actions...
...Awaiting execution, Dale Pierre busied himself with grandiose schemes for founding multi-million-dollar business enterprises...
...Unwed mothers score just above jail inmates...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
