Thinking about Crime
Harvey, William F.
Book Review/William F. Harvey Rehabilitating Criminology • In 1949, when the Gallup Poll asked residents of large cities to name their major worries, the most frequent answers were poor housing,...
...to stop a heroin "epidemic" from spreading, it is important to try different ways of apprehending and isolating "carriers...
...Levi, has said that "it's not surprising we have this increase," and that the "way to change it is to try to change the accepting attitude of the American public...
...Wilson knows that few of the so-called experts, "especially among the ranks of many professional students of crime, are even willing to entertain the possibility that penalties make a difference...
...These theories vary according as they consider crime a symptom of biological, psychological, or sociological "diseases" —but they all tend to advance the proposition that "we shall not eliminate crime until we remove its underlying causes...
...He should send the first thousand copies to the members of Congress and the Federal Judiciary...
...Book Review/William F. Harvey Rehabilitating Criminology • In 1949, when the Gallup Poll asked residents of large cities to name their major worries, the most frequent answers were poor housing, traffic congestion, high taxes, and corrupt politics...
...In his conclusion, Wilson goes beyond such utilitarian considerations to suggest that one of the most important ways to think about crime is to return to the question of justice...
...But, as Wilson shows, the true "urban problem" was a failure of community, a lessening observance of the standards of right and of seemly conduct which maintain community cohesion...
...He will attempt to understand what can be accomplished by government in an open, nontotalitarian society, and he will appreciate whatever progress is achieved...
...James Q. Wilson is animated by a spirit of justice and, much like Learned Hand, by a spirit of liberty...
...and he suggests that a better strategy might be to reduce the rewards of crime through more certain punishment...
...When Mr...
...In Thinking about Crime, Wilson takes pains to rebut such misconceptions...
...The proper question, he adds, may not be whether capital punishment prevents future crimes, "but whether it is a proper and fitting penalty for crimes that have occurred...
...Consider heroin addiction...
...The Attorney General should obtain funds, perhaps a categorical grant program, and buy and distribute several million copies of James Q. Wilson's great book, Thinking about Crime...
...Such a view requires an understanding of both the abilities of government and its limitations...
...The problem with this kind of causal analysis, Wilson argues, is that criminologists have been advancing their ideoLogical preconceptions about what ought :o "solve the crime problem," without engaging in any empirical study to dis:over what kinds of policies actually would reduce crime...
...As a result, according to Wilson, "when social scientists were asked for advice by national policy-making bodies, they could not respond with suggestions derived from and supported by their scholarly work...
...Wilson thinks about crime, he is almost unique in that he thinks...
...The response of the dominant forces in the media and politics to the rise in crime and violence was to deny the data, to maintain that the stunning increases were due to a lack of funds (this before the Vietnam war), or to accuse the police departments of prejudice, ignorance, brutality, and unresponsiveness...
...If just half of those are read, he will have commenced, for a federal official, the most effective and least expensive change in attitude about crime since the hanging of some of President Lincoln's assassins...
...It was not until the [960s, for example, over fifty years after :riminology began as a discipline in the Jnited States, that there was any seriousand sustained inquiry into the effects on crime rates of differences in the certainty and severity of penalties...
...Levi's focus for just a moment, there is a way to change attitudes about crime...
...Here is one of the central policy questions of law enforcement, and yet criminologists did not even bother to study it...
...Several Attorneys General, for instance...
...But prisons have never done very well at rehabilitating, and Wilson sees little evidence that any of the lavish and expensive penal "reforms" have improved matters...
...The other copies he should send to everyone—students and teachers, lawyers, doctors, social science researchers, foundation officials et al.—who has come under the influence of the criminological theories prevailing in this land...
...Almost every national commission on crime —from Wickersham in the 1930s to Katzenbach in the 1960s to Patterson in the 1970s—has advocated "prison reform" as the answer to crime, hoping that by improving "therapeutic" strategies, prisons would better rehabilitate criminals...
...Today, however, city dwellers consistently tell pollsters that crime is their community's worst problem, worse even than unemployment and the cost of living...
...In 1973, according to the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, there were 37 million victims of crime, about sixty percent of whom were victims of violent crime...
...only 4 percent mentioned crime...
...Wilson has no great expectations of eliminating or even drastically reducing the incidence of crime, for many factors influencing it are beyond public control...
...There are limits to the effect Thinking about Crime by James Q. Wilson Basic Books $10.00 that providing greater employment opportunities can have on reducing crime...
...Whatever one may do to try to eliminate the "causes" of crime over the long run, in the short run the only way to alter behavior is to assume that people act according to the costs and benefits in alternative courses of action...
...Actually, Wilson shows, heroin is spread largely through contagious peer-group contacts...
...Although hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on methadone and other treatment centers, therapeutic methods of curing addiction have had little success...
...He points out that if criminal opportunities are profitable, which, given the present unlikelihood of punishment, they clearly are, then many prospective criminals will choose not to take those legitimate jobs which exist...
...More important, the social bonds of urban communities began to come under severe strains in the early 1960s, as indicated by large rises in welfare dependency, violence, hard drug use, and other marks of community disintegration...
...He observes, in discussing capital punishment, that because our leaders are untrained in the discipline of philosophical discourse, and because we are "an increasingly secular and positivist society that has little confidence in its ethical premises, the capital punishment debate has been framed largely in utilitarian terms...
...And maybe that is the essence of this excellent book...
...Thus, he points out that one of the major reasons why the crime rate rose so steeply in the 1960s was that there was a large proportional increase in the population of young men, the demographic group which commits most violent crime...
...In the intervening years—and particularly the last ten or fifteen—the crime rate has risen enormously...
...There is little that policy analy['he Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 27 sis can do to solve this problem...
...The American public is not to blame, of course, except to the extent that it has listened too much to some federal officials who often speak on the subject...
...As for the rehabilitationist ideal of punishment, Wilson proposes not that it be abandoned but that it cease to be the "governing purpose" of punishment...
...It is probably no coincidence that in the 1960s, while crime rates were soaring, the number of state and federal prisoners actually dropped from 213,000 to 196,000, or that in New York State the likelihood of punishment fell by a factor of six during the decade...
...On the other hand, he musters considerable evidence that imprisonment has some deterrent effect on crime and, more important, that it can keep repeating offenders from repeating their offenses...
...Nevertheless, Wilson argues that small reductions in the crime rate—in the neighborhood of fifteen percent—are improvements all the same...
...Yet one can only hope they might examine his suggestion, because changing the risks and rewards of punishment, while it probably would not deter hardened criminals, might yield solid results for those marginal cases who are neither addicted to thievery nor morally vaccinated against it...
...Above all, Wilson urges that we think about crime and punishment in an empirical way, experimenting with different penalties and ways of law enforcement to find the best means of reducing problems...
...The Attorney General of the United States, Mr...
...But if one might accept Mr...
...And he feels that given an empirical approach to policy, an approach which tries to change the pattern of costs and benefits in crime, such improvements are possible...
...Wilson cites estimates that the relapse rate for addicts who have undergone treatment is between 90 and 95 percent...
...A rare understanding these days...
...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...
...It is Wilson's contention that this proposition does not "supply a plausible basis for the advocacy of public policy...
...Where there has been punishment rather than "medical" treatment, it has focused on the "pusher," under the misimpression that it is he who foists the noxious substance on unsuspecting youth...
...They tended instead to give advice deriving from their general political views—vague pronouncements that the way to fight crime was to end poverty and unemployment, or to make prisons more effective in rehabilitating criminals...
Vol. 9 • April 1976 • No. 7
