Checking Our Premises on Crime

...But I do not believe that, were we to have taken a correct view and as a consequence adopted the most feasible policies, crime would have been eliminated or even dramatically reduced...

...In that period, the college bars were in their shabby glory, profiting from the sternness of Chicago's curriculum and the cheapness of liquor...

...to reduce birth defects, many different things must be done, many of which involve changing the behavior of the mother rather than simply administering a drug...

...Ambassador 3cali convened an emergency session of the Security Council in the early hours of December 8. The Council entertained a resolution of the United States in condemnation of "unwarranted and irresponsible violations of the Charter...

...The Reuters correspondent in Beirut reported that a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization claimed credit for the sinking of one U.S...

...If Thomas A. Reppetto's study is correct, then residential burglaries in low-income housing projects can be deterred, to a degree, by intensive patrolling by police and citizen security units and by mobilizing citizens to report suspicious persons...

...So much for urban planning...

...Getting institutions to work as we want them to work (in this case, to impose any penalties, much less severe ones) and insuring that there exist attractive alternatives to the courses of action we do penalize are more important, and more difficult, tasks than changing a statute to read "twenty years in jail" instead of "ten years in jail...

...Indeed, if policy had been made by those who insisted that only elimination of causes is a proper object for public action, methadone would never have been approved for wide clinical use, there would have been little or no law-enforcement effort, and there probably would have been an even greater growth in the size of the addict population...

...A fight begins...

...We must think in terms of specific crimes, not "crime...

...There were others of course: ina slum neighborhood, which was what Hyde Park amounted to, before the wrecker's ball leveled the tenements, bars predominate...

...Rights are asserted and disputed, greed claimed and denied, sexual prerogatives demanded and rejected...

...Whether the addict, thus stabilized, can improve himself and avoid relapsing into euphoria-seeking drug use depends on a number of things, not the least of which are his own motivation and the support given him by employers and family...

...If the United States, despite its record in Korea and in Vietnam, despite its indifference to poverty and hunger in the world, and its refusal to admit the existence of these conditions at home—if the United States still feels that it has a moral case to.present, it should press this case before the only appropriate body—the United Nations, where the one-nation, one-vote principle would permit the developing nations to participate in the collective judgment...

...Such a theory also leaves one dissatisfied with the explanation it purThe Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 13 ports to offer for why fifteen-year-old boys tear a purse from the hands of a poor black woman on a subway train, why rioters loot each other's homes but not the bank on the corner, or why cars are stolen from parking lots and shipped, repainted, to big cities where they can be resold at bargain prices to affluent businessmen...

...and if there is no other source of income (such as a job) that would produce greater net gains...

...Those who argue than we can eliminate crime if only we have the "will" to do so, whether by ending poverty (as the Left argues) or by putting more police on the street and more gallows in our jails (as the Right believes), therefore seriously mistake what we are capable of under even the best of circumstances...

...Wilson's latest book, Thinking about Crime, published in June by Basic Books, New York, New York 10022...

...It is difficult to state in positive terms what lessons I draw from such observations...

...Where an appropriate technology exists and the self-interest of persons can be linked to its operation, there are virtually no limits to what men in organizations can achieve...

...Thus, in American college saloons are found the ubiquitous chess boards, the little five-foot shelves (usually containing Tynan, Mailer, and Dante cheek by jowl), and the eternal booming of the stereo speakers above one's head...

...One observes the constant stream of humanity, much of its poor and black, seeking police assistance for every imaginable problem, from crime to marital disputes, broken windows to electric failures, drunkenness to terminal illness...

...But those who are prepared to consider seriously the objective benefits of crime will surely give some, perhaps equal, attention to the objective costs of crime...

...Crime is not the only issue that evokes this theme, but it is one that does so dramatically and it happens to be one that I have, quite without intending it, found myself studying on and off for the last ten or twelve years...

...The cops too harassed the "landlords" for payoffs...

...We ask instead what they propose to do about polio, or cancer, or birth defects, knowing that these are very different problems with (perhaps) totally unrelated causes, and certainly wholly unrelated manifestations...

...But the Compass had quickly passed into oblivion, and Freddy was forced to move into lower quarters on 55th Street and to abandon theatricals...

...aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean, charging that the vessel was engaged in carrying planes, pilots, and bacteriological weapons to Israel...

...No doubt, very severe penalties will deter many people from stealing, if those who consider stealing believe the penalty is likely to be exacted...

...There is more crime in most poor neighborhoods than in most well-off ones, but even in poor communities most people do not steal...

...Both resolutions were introduced by Syria and seconded by Sweden...

...It might be restated thus: Man is refractory enough to be unchangeable but reasonable enough to be adaptable...

...The ensuing spirited debate was seen by millions on television...

...Most of those charged with offenses can be divided into two groups: those for whom arrest is an embarrassment and those for whom it is a mere inconvenience...

...Therefore, it cannot be simply the case that "men steal because they are poor...

...Indeed, those who use poverty as an explanation are largely among the ranks of those who vehemently deny that crime can be deterred...

...I have two memories of the place: meeting a writer, formerly a student, who was on the brink of suicide (and took the leap a month or so later...

...The institutions of governance created by man reflect his nature...

...In Europe, most university saloons are resorted to for pure drinking and fun...

...Taverns were not included in urban renewal, and most of the fabled places have been razed...

...The arrested person is usually released within a few hours, will probably not come to trial for months, and, even if his guilt is determined, has an excellent chance of being returned to societypromptly without any penalty at all...

...when Freddy refused to offer the usual bribe one month, the lads in blue waited until they caught him drinking after hours with his bartenders and arrested him...

...The Secretary of State in Washington was said to have privately expressed particular annoyance at the abstentions of Britain and France...

...Someone picks up a knife or a gun...

...rather, we say that to prevent polio, a drug can be taken...

...Nor do we say that to "fight illness" we need to put "more doctors on the street...

...There is a night of drinking...

...I am sometimes inclined, when in a testy mood, to rejoin: "Stupidity can only be dealt with by attacking its root causes...

...The University Tap attracted a more genteel crowd, and it was there one was likely to find one's professor drowning his sorrows...

...What is left today is but a few memories of a neighborhood famous for its muggings and saloons...

...In the New York Times, an unusual joint column by Anthony Lewis and Tom Wicker emphasized that the essential issue in the crisis was the moral one...

...to cure cancer, almost nothing can as yet be done...

...In the 1960s a massive law-enforcement effort was made to reduce the availability of heroin, and doctors began supplying addicts with methadone as an alternative...

...but members of the University did well to avoid them...

...Like all tavern owners on 55th Street—and much of Chicago, for that matter—Freddy had to contend with the Mafia...

...Freddy however remained contentious and never joined the $100-a-month club...

...A sober view of man requires a modest definition of progress...

...analogy to make the point...

...If objective conitions are used to explain crime, then tit.- full statement must be: "Men steal I, cause the benefits of stealing exceed the costs of stealing by a wider margin than the benefits of working exceed the costs of working...

...Expending vast energies on"helping" the one-time delinquent is not only likely to be futile, it can produce far fewer benefits for society than promptly isolating the recidivist...

...and sitting beside my old rhetoric professor, Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences...

...The intense debate over the evidentiary rules governing search and seizure, police interrogations, and the taking of confessions, while it illuminates some interesting legal and philosophic issues, has a hollow ring when recalled in the context of what actually happens in a police station house...

...Another may be that we have not only a high crime rate, but a high level of personal affluence and an abundant consumer economy...

...Many—I should say most—of those arrested, far from wishing to remain silent behind their constitutionally protected rights, are eager to talk in order to see whether, by confessing to other crimes or implicating other persons, they can lighten the charges against them...

...The United Nations in New York was, in fact, a beehive of activity...

...As I have studied, first the police and then crime itself, I have been struck by how remote from the reality I have observed is the rhetoric I have heard...

...No doubt many persons believe that crime produces higher incomes with less effort than available legitimate jobs...

...It is expected that strong support from federal, state, and local civil service employee organizations will be forthcoming...

...The American Civil Liberties Union has offered its services in all legal actions arising out of refusals to obey military orders...

...The Department of the Navy had no comment...

...A body falls, a neighbor screams, the police arrive, the culprit is enccuntered, still standing with the weapon in his hand, gazing in drunken bewilderment at his victim...

...Only his arguments with customers were dramatic...

...if they had anything in common it was their dinginess, the surliness of the barkeeps, and- the melancholy of their drunks...

...Still, a 15% reduction in crime would mean 60,000 fewer robberies and 375,000 fewer burglaries, and in absolute terms these are not trivial changes...

...UT, as it was known, had not the glamor of Jimmy's (to which we'll come, shortly) nor the raffishness of Freddy's, and it was rather too sedate for most of the student body...

...The Soviet forces naturally took defensive action in accordance with international law...

...Meanwhile, law enforcement has made heroin much harder to find and, when found, both much less potent (i.e., more heavily diluted) and much more expensive...

...A person wishing to drive a fancy car may well conclude that the slight chance of having to pay a heavy penalty should he be caught stealing is more than outweighed by the immediate pleasure he will derive from having the car, a pleasure that he would have to defer for a long time, perhaps indefinitely, if he were con-tent with the low-paying jobs available to him...

...In short, spokesmen who use poverty as an explanation of crime should, by the force of their own logic, be prepared to consider the capacity of society to deter crime by raising the risks of crime...

...Herman Goldstein and Frank Remington at the University of Wisconsin Law School use an...

...One step men in organizations can take is to stop talking and thinking about "crime...

...Public entertainments in which the climax of the mystery story is the arrest of the guilty party bewilder me .because, in the real world, an arrest rarely ends anything...

...For decades various public and private agencies tried to cure addicts, either by simply withdrawing them from heroin or, through the provision of various psychological and other services, by eliminating the "root causes" of their addiction...

...Another step is to recognize that most serious crime is committed by repeaters...

...And he grew unhappy...

...It is a cast of mind that inevitably detracts attention from those few things that governments can do reasonably well and draws attention toward those many things it cannot do at all...

...I came to the University in 1952 and lasted until 1957...

...We do not ask of doctors what they propose to do about "illness," or whether they know of ways to reduce the "illness rate" this year...

...Furthermore, crime rose the fastest in this country at a time when the number of persons living in poverty or squalor was declining...

...The atmosphere was one of ruined glory...

...The claim that slum residents despise the police and refuse their aid, often made by nonslum residents who wish, forvarious reasons, to see the police in poor neighborhoods incapacitated or removed, is a strange claim if one has spent the night in a station house or patrol car...

...I recall Reinhold Niebuhr' s modest defense of democracy: Man is good enough to make it possible and bad enough to make it necessary...

...I believe that our society has not done as well as it could have in controlling crime because of erroneous but persistent views about the nature of man and the capacities of his institutions...

...and customers who disagreed with Freddy's often eccentric notions were asked ne'er to return...

...Methadone was not a "cure" for addiction, and of course neither was law enforcement...

...14 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 Whether these prescriptions are right or wrong is less important than the evidence that these two offenses are quite different in circumstance and thus probably not amenable to identical responses, even though both are called "burglaries" and both are "crimes...

...To reduce (or at least displace) these crimes, household security systems (locks, alarms) may be more effective, coupled with longer sentences for those burglars who are caught...

...I have yet to see a "root cause" or to encounter a government program that has successfully attacked it, at least with respect to those social problems that arise out of human volition rather than technological malfunction...

...Man will not steal if the penalty is sufficiently severe...

...In addition to devising strategies tailored to check specific crimes, it is clear we must devote more of the time and resources of prosecutors, courts, and correctional agencies to identifying and incapacitating these 6...

...Remember the Twenties in Paris...

...In my days of residence at the University, there were three college bars, all along the motley length of 55th Street: the University Tap, Freddy's, and Jimmy's...

...The conversation turns to money or women...

...They were rough and tough...

...Public interest in the Security Council debate almost obscured the important and humiliating defeat of the United States in the General Assembly, which passed a sharply-worded condemnation of American imperialism, and a vote of thanks to the Soviet Union for forestalling an attempt by the United States to reestablish a colonial empire in the Mediterranean...

...Given the fact that we cannot in the short run alter many of the demographic causes of rising crime (such as the increased youthfulness of the population), and that even in the long run we will not want to alter other causes (such as our commitment to a secular, consumerist society with greater personal freedoms), I would be surprised if policies informed by such ways of thinkingas I have suggested could reduce crime by more than 15 or 20...

...Consider heroin addiction...

...Indeed, methadone had some problems of its own...

...The passionate debate over the death penalty as a deterrent to murder is difficult to interpret when one remembers the murders one has actually seen...

...Advocates of increasing the harshness of penalties commit the same error, but in the opposite direction...

...Freddy dispensed Ballantine Ale to students and local characters...

...Often they are caught right in the act of robbing or burgling...

...But they rarely do...

...The combined effect of these two strategies, coupled (as government programs often must be if they are to work) with some fortuitous changes in slum life styles, has been to accomplish a dramatic reduction in several cities in the recruitment of new addicts and the death or imprisonment of many old ones...

...Professor Weaver, on this Saturday night, was alone, and The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 15...

...It was a dark, dirty little room, the home of problem drinkers...

...The proper design of public policies requires a clear and sober understanding of the nature of man, and above all of the extent to which that nature can be changed...

...it also has the highest crime rate of most advanced Western nations...

...But more importantly, the demand for causal solutions is, whether intended or not, a way of deferring any action and criticizing any policy...

...Around the University of Chicago neighborhood, these days, drinking has gone to the dogs...

...The People's Republic of China stated that the poor farmers and working peoples of the world would not be deceived by the collusive maneuvering of the two imperialist co-conspirators, but would continue to work toward socialist liberation...

...The Soviet Union introduced a counter-resolution charging the United States with extreme provocative action against the Soviet Mediterranean Fleet, citing the destruction of three missile boats and a destroyer...

...The barclosed in the early sixties and Fredcy went into the classroom, expounding from the texts of the Chicago Board of Education...

...We pretend that, while sitting and drinking, we are all "being geniuses together...

...Freddy's had at one time been located on Lake Park Avenue, and known as the Compass...

...The theory that crime is an expression of the political rage of the dispossessed, rebelling under the iron heel of capitalist tyranny, leaves one wondering why virtually every nation in the world, capitalist, socialist, and communist, has experienced in recent years rapidly increasing crime rates...

...None of thesegains were the result of attacking the "root causes" of addiction, however...

...Eventually, he went to night school and got his teaching certificate...

...With few exceptions, these efforts failed...

...Where no such technology exists and the inducement is mere piety, there is scarcely anything an organization can do except grow and be meddlesome...

...In a study of nearly ten thousand Philadelphia boys born in 1945, Marvin Wolfgang and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania found that a few chronic offenders-6%—accounted for over half of all the recorded delinquencies and about two-thirds of all the violent crimes committed by the entire cohort...

...The Compass became a legend in Chicago, but Freddy could not pay the bills with legendary coin...

...So far we have not been consulted in this matter, nor given an opportunity to express our many reservations with regard to any attempt to seek a military solution...

...The United States has, on the whole, the most severe set of criminal penalties in its law-books of any advanced Western nation...

...The ambassadors of France and the United Kingdom made almost identical speeches in which they cautioned against haste and urged that no action be taken pending a thorough investigation of the very grave charges and counterchargesby members of the Council against each other...

...in America, they have a cloying air of pomposity...

...Crime and drug addiction can only be dealt with by attacking their root causes...

...James Q. Wilson Checking Our Premises on Crime • (This article has been adapted from Mr...

...The reason is that many of these crimes are committed by persons living in the area who move on foot, hit targets almost at random, and are young amateurs...

...The Great American Saloon Series by Philip Kirantingham Jimmy's and All That The University Saloon University bars were never as good as we remember them to be, and it does no good to go back again...

...But methadone had one powerful advantage: As a relatively benign addictive drug that suppresses withdrawal pains, it is a powerful inducement for many addicts to enter and remain in treatment programs, and is a pharmacological tool for stabilizing the addict while in treatment and in the community...

...To avoid bombings he agreed to take in a jukebox (though he had a hi-fi setup), but he kept the plug pulled on the box and glared angrily at anyone who asked to play it...

...The United States was supported only by South Africa, Israel, Bolivia, and Liberia...

...if the penalty, discounted by the chances of avoiding it, is of greater value than the proceeds of the crime, discounted by the chances of not getting away with it...

...But above all, I have found inexplicable the theories of human nature that seem to be implicit in much of the public rhetoric about crime: "Men steal because they are poor and deprived...

...The Department of State in Washington said that this allegation was without foundation...

...Mory's, The White Horse, or the Sepp'1, the world over, university taverns have an air about them, of childish indulgence, of self-importance, of hokey tradition...

...I argue that a proper understanding of man and the publicly controllable forces to which he will respond, coupled with only moderate expectations about what can be accomplished under even the best of circumstances, is the essential place to begin any discussion of crime and its control...

...Were the American public in a mood for celebrating their accomplishments rather than despairing over their failings, the modest, not unmixed, but substantial gains won in coping with heroin might be one such accomplishment...

...Residential burglaries in middle-class suburbs, on the other hand, may not respond at all to police patrols because, unlike those in housing projects, suburban thefts involve considerable planning by persons living outside the area who find it easy to evade patrols...

...And one bar, Jimmy's, which somehow had clout with Chicago's engineers (and ward committeemen), survives...

...Demands that the police "get tough" and "crack down" on crime seem incongruous given what I have learned, from hundreds of hours spent in patrol cars, about what the police actually spend their time doing...

...Most persons arrested for the more common serious crimes, such as burglary and robbery, have been arrested under circumstances such that no confession is required, no searches need be conducted, and scarcely any police interrogation occurs...

...Frequently there are witnesses to testify or stolen property that can be identified...

...It had experimented with improvisation, and its small theater company boasted such youngsters as Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Shelley Berman, and others who went on to Second City...

...One reason may be that our penalties are so high that they are rarely imposed...