CRIME AND THE CONSERVATIVES
Currie, Elliott
To understand why we've arrived at our present impasse in dealing with crime, we must first reconsider the assumptions that have guided the dominant policies on crime in America through most of...
...D. W. Steenhuis et al., "The Penal Climate in the Netherlands: Sunny or Cloudy...
...In a society that ranks among the most punitive in the developed world, it blames crime on the leniency of the justice system...
...Wilson's only source of evidence for his contention that the United States is relatively 430 sparing in its use of prison is a 1978 study by the Yale economist Kenneth I. Wolpin...
...yet not only did the crime rate refuse to fall in some reasonably corresponding fashion, but at the end of the '70s it surged sharply—and by the logic of the conservative model, incomprehensibly—upward...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...during the '70s, conservatives often ridiculed the very idea of searching for the causes of crime...
...British Journal of Criminology 23, no...
...But, as Wilson admits, "it is quite difficult to say much about the changes in child-rearing that occurred, and it is almost impossible to say anything about how these changes might have affected the behavior of the young...
...In short, contrary to Wilson's claims, we do indeed incarcerate more of those arrested and convicted than do the English and Japanese— who, in turn, use incarceration more readily than, for example, the Swiss or the Dutch...
...Wolpin's later, more inclusive study compared robbery in the United States (specifically in California), to England and Japan...
...The latter is especially true in Holland, where the average time served in the late 1970s was an astonishing 1.3 months, versus about 5 months in Britain and about 16 in the United States...
...One such change—the weakening of long-standing social norms justifying racial inequality— probably had an important influence...
...Moreover, we have become dramatically more punitive over time...
...The links between these broad cultural shifts and crime—particularly serious, violent street crime—are not at all evident, even if we accept Wilson's assessment of our recent moral decline...
...Why this should be so is a difficult and unresolved question...
...And here the argument collapses...
...and Luis Salas, Social Control and Deviance in Cuba (New York: Praeger, 1979...
...Most conservative writers regard these lurking appetites as a fundamental part of "human nature...
...And while the difficulty in convicting them once caught may have some relation to American court practices, the evidence indicates that any effects of this on the crime rate are quite small...
...and over 20 for every Dane...
...The first is that it makes no sense to talk about the social or "root" cause of This article is adapted from the forthcoming book Confronting Crime: An American Challenge by Elliott Currie...
...THE ARGUMENT FROM HUMAN NATURE, then, is really too general to be of much help...
...This advice shifted the aims of child-rearing away from the 19thcentury emphasis on guarding the child from "evil within and evil without"—that is, from a view of the child as "endowed by nature with dangerous impulses that must be curbed"—to one in which the child was seen as equipped with "harmless instincts that ought to be developed...
...13 Kenneth I. Wolpin, "An Economic Analysis of Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1894 –1967," Journal of Political Economy 86, no...
...disproving the need for hospitals by saying that the United States already hospitalizes a larger fraction of its population than any other nation," for it "implies that we are sending people to prison without any regard to the number of crimes committed (or sending them to hospitals without regard to whether they are sick...
...But that is very different from saying that young people from the ghettos and barrios of America's inner cities go astray because their parents 434 have taught them bohemian values learned, at some distance remove, from the writings of elite, liberal intellectuals.* Iv THE OVEREMPHASIS ON CONTROL to the exclusion of other issues appears even in some more thoughtful writers who have moved beyond this simplistic reliance on "permissiveness" as an explanation of America's unusually high crime rates...
...such low levels that to emphasize the similarities between those countries and the United States obscured the much more compelling and dramatic point—the scale of the differences...
...The "proper question," Wilson insists, is "whether we imprison a higher fraction of those arrested, prosecuted, and convicted than do other nations...
...For most conservative writers, crime still represents a weakening of controls over what is solemnly regarded as an obdurate and fundamentally wicked human nature...
...Although we have no hard quantitative measures, many careful observers at the time were convinced that this momentous change helped turn minority anger fueled by decades of injustice and deprivation outward against whites and their institutions...
...9 Ernest Van den Haag, "Could Successful Rehabilitation Reduce the Crime Rate...
...nor do they today...
...The internal contradiction in Wilson's reasoning is painfully clear...
...But there is an even more immediate difficulty with Wilson's argument—its facts are wrong...
...but more often, their opposite—conformity, constraint, and unquestioning obedience, sometimes enforced by violence...
...In fact, everything we know from social research about the values usually found in the social strata that produce most severely violent criminals tells us something very different...
...If "individualism" and a cultural penchant for "autonomy" are indeed the problem, why do the notoriously individualistic Yankees of New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die") or the ruggedly individualistic Scandinavians of Minnesota have rates of serious criminal violence that compare well with those of Western Europe, or of Japan...
...It is a cast of mind that inevitably detracts attention from those few things that government can do reasonably well and draws attention toward those many things it cannot do at all.' On closer inspection, however, it's clear that Wilson's statement confuses two quite different arguments...
...Wolpin's study covered the years from 1955 to 1971—well before the prison "boom" of the '70s that doubled the American incarceration rate...
...Copyright by Elliott Currie...
...in fact, they are usually remarkably free of it...
...The crucial question is whether the ethos of "rights, not duties," a preference for "spontaneity over loyalty, conscience over honor, tolerance over conformity, self-expression over self-restraint," which animated the salons of the '20s and the campuses of the '60s, also accounts for the brutal violence in the streets and homes of the '60s, '70s, and '80s...
...Louis so much more "prone to 427 crime" than those in Stockholm or, for that matter, Milwaukee...
...92,246...
...That theory has never been carefully articulated, but it is always some variant of the idea that crime is caused by inadequate "control," that we have a great deal of crime because we have insufficient curbs on the appetites or impulses that naturally impel individuals toward criminal activity...
...where the world's most sophisticated advertising industry devotes itself day in, day out, to promoting just that ethos...
...Wilson, Thinking About Crime, p. xiii...
...Thus, in Thinking About Crime, Wilson made a point of caricaturing the belief that crime was "an expression of the political rage of the dispossessed, rebelling under the iron heel of capitalist tyranny...
...A sober view of man," he wrote in 1975, "requires a modest definition of progress...
...But to make the basic argument stick as an explanation of variations in crime rates—why a particular country or period has more crime than others —it is necessary to go further: to show that the "costs" of crime are, in those instances, actually lower than in other times or places with less crime...
...Not much...
...and since the advice appeared in popular magazines, it reached a wide audience, whether in fact it influenced anyone or not...
...In this model, whether a potential offender commits a crime or not is determined by calculated choice based on a rational weighing of the relative costs and benefits (or utilities) of committing the crime versus not doing so...
...Indeed, Wilson and Herrnstein appear in this book to come close to abandoning the search for workable policiei against criminal violence altogether...
...Certainly, some of what went on in the name of self-expression and liberation was at best silly and at worst destructive and inhumane...
...Wilson's description of this literature is something of a caricature...
...3 (August 1980...
...The shorter sentences are not simply a reflection of the less serious range of offenses in Holland...
...s This is little more than the stock theme of insidious moral decline that has predictably been invoked to explain not just crime and delinquency but nearly everything the contemporary conservative finds wrong with American society—from the divorce rate and the decline in the growth of productivity to the much-lamented weakening of America's will to impose military solutions on a recalcitrant world...
...Robert J. Smith, Japanese Society: Tradition, Self and the Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983...
...To understand why we've arrived at our present impasse in dealing with crime, we must first reconsider the assumptions that have guided the dominant policies on crime in America through most of the past decade...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Note that these figures do not include the rising population in local jails...
...For one thing, as he himself makes clear, the moral and cultural changes that he says explain America's current crime problem started decades before our recent rises in crime...
...q To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...crime at all, either because such causes do not exist or because no one knows what they are or how to find them...
...After more than 450 pages of analysis of research on the causes of crime, they are able to conclude only that their argument is not one "from which many (possibly any) clear policy recommendations can be deduced" (p...
...Indeed, he concedes that "it is not clear that this shift in the dominant ethos of the social and intellectual elites had immediate and important practical consequences...
...The second half of the explanation for the delay of more than four decades between the onset of the disease of self-expression and the sudden, explosive manifestation of its symptom of criminal violence is that—as Wilson puts it—in the early years these cultural shifts affected only "elite," rather than "mass," attitudes...
...we have learned to "exalt rights over duties, spontaneity over loyalty, tolerance over conformity, and authenticity over convention...
...about 15 American men died for every Swiss or Englishman...
...David Downes, "The Origins and Consequences of Dutch Penal Policy Since 1945," British Journal of Criminology 22, no.4 (October 1982...
...I am not suggesting that cultural changes had nothing to do with the rising crime rates of the '60s...
...Cultural anthropology further undermined the moral order of American society by promoting the view that "this culture was wrong, or at the very least no better than several competing cultural forms...
...This time he found that convicted robbers were considerably more likely to go to prison or jail in the United States than in either England or Japan...
...460...
...The evolution of James Q. Wilson's views reflects this change of emphasis...
...These cultural attitudes surely have some relationship to the severity of our crime problem...
...But that isn't the issue...
...IS Wilson, Thinking About Crime, p. 236...
...indeed, the Danish and Norwegian homicide rates had been "fairly constant" for 40 or 50 years...
...II THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL DIFFICULTY for the conservative argument: it is hard to maintain that our high rates of crime are caused by insufficient punishment when our penal system is one of the most punitive in the developed world...
...I've argued that, from an international perspective, America cannot plausibly be considered a "tolerant" or "lenient" society...
...If we want to understand why so many people here have become criminals, we will need to look at other factors that distinguish us from more fortunate countries...
...Because, Wilson insists, despite our lack of evidence, we can still say "something about" how elites advised mothers to bring up their children...
...Cited in James Thompson et al., Employment and Crime: A Review of Theories and Research (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, 1981), pp...
...Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 73, (Fall 1982), pp...
...The hint here, never fully articulated, is that at some point, by some mechanism, destructive ideas about authenticity and selfexpression filtered down from the avant-garde to a wider audience...
...In his more recent work, Wilson acknowledges that several factors—the effects of "real and imagined" racism, the "sharpening of consumer instincts through the mass media," the increased availability of handguns, and the abandonment of the inner city by "persons with a stake in impulse control," among others— may have a special impact on crime in America...
...The fundamental point at issue here remains: the United States is indeed the most punitive of advanced Western industrial societies toward those offenders who are brought to the stage of sentencing...
...Property crimes include burglary and other forms of theft not involving force...
...19 Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), pp...
...In between lay most of the rest of the world's industrial societies, many clustered toward the lower end of the scale: Japan's rate was 44 per 100,000, Norway's 45, Sweden's 55, West Germany's 60, Denmark's 63, France's 67, Great Britain's a relatively high 80 per 100,000...
...After what Wilson and others described as nearly two decades of unremitting increases in crime "throughout the world," by the late '70s (in per capita terms) about 10 American men died by criminal violence for every Japanese, Austrian, West German, or Swedish man...
...Yet— aside from the incessant references to the noxious influence of liberal permissiveness—conservative writers don't identify the forces that might foster such an "ethos...
...See Marshall B. Clinard, Cities with Little Crime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978...
...As Steinfels has also noted, this stance fixes our attention on a "realm of ideas and ethos" that seems to float free of its moorings in the economic and social changes that have transformed American society, and as a result obscures the interconnection between them...
...q Notes ' James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York, Random House, 1975), p. xv...
...The central theme is still that our society is insufficiently punitive and controlling, especially of children and youth...
...Elite" and intellectual communities are not where violent crime is common...
...6 Wilson, "Crime and American Culture," Public Interest, Winter 1983, pp...
...10 In part, these low rates reflect some countries' use of prison as only a last resort, for the most dangerous offenders...
...nor are they likely to in the foreseeable future...
...But if we want to understand either why so many people are ill to begin with or how we could prevent these excessive levels of illness in the future, we will need to look at other aspects of the country —sanitation, nutrition, environmental hazards, perhaps even cultural values—or we will be fruitlessly building hospitals forever to accommodate the ever-increasing flow of the sick...
...Once again, this line of argument combines a blend of truisms with dizzying leaps of inference that, on close inspection, lack support...
...Suffice it to say that the difficulty in apprehending criminals has little to do with the leniency of American justice...
...in part they reflect a common practice of incarcerating criminals for relatively short periods...
...The rate of imprisonment was rising much faster than the crime rate...
...by mid-1984, more than 450,000...
...Wilson merges a common critique of the '60s youth-culture shenanigans with another matter altogether: the serious criminality that wracked the United States in the late '60s and the '70s...
...It might be argued that these huge increases only reflected a desperate race to keep up with the crime rate—or to cope with a much more serious mix of criminals coming before the courts...
...furthermore, they don't correlate even remotely with the trends of serious criminality in American history...
...to claim that we "overimprison" people in the United States, he writes, "is like * The rate is higher now, but I'll use the earlier figure to make comparison with other countries possible...
...In 1970 there were fewer than 200,000 inmates of state and federal prisons in the United States...
...Armed with this conveniently simplified view of human motivation, conservatives have generally blamed the crime rate on the lack of punishment—crime is common because it's "cheap"—although they could just as plausibly argue that where crime rates are especially high, the "comparative net advantage" of lawful behavior must be particularly low...
...But the argument fits uneasily with the facts...
...but they are prepared to argue (on p. 88) that "distribution of crime within and across societies may, to some extent, reflect underlying distributions of constitutional factors...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Several countries did not experience rapidly rising crime rates in the '60s and '70s, most notably Japan and Switzerland...
...and where, in contrast to many other advanced industrial societies, the search for the highest and fastest short-term profit at the expense of longer-term economic stability—the corporate version of instant gratification—is enshrined as the overarching principle of economic life...
...James Q. Wilson took this stance to its most adamant extreme in his influential book, Thinking About Crime...
...To those who contended that crime could be dealt with only by attacking its root causes, Wilson said he "was sometimes inclined, when in a testy mood, to rejoin: stupidity can only be dealt with by attacking its root causes...
...A similar, unhelpful abstraction lies at the heart of the most systematic conservative theory of the causes of crime—something called, I think misleadingly, the economic model of crime...
...It collapses partly because it makes the wrong prediction about where serious criminal violence takes place...
...in fact, it is hard to find any child-rearing literature in this period that totally ignores discipline and supervision in the name of developing "harmless instincts...
...This "institutionalization in all parts of society of the natural desire of youth for greater freedom," Wilson suggests, "may well have given legitimacy to all forms of self-expression--including, alas, those forms that involve crime and violence...
...The conservative argument, at its most suggestive part, points beyond to what Peter Steinfels, in The Neoconservatives, aptly calls the "murkier and more trying questions of culture and spirit"—and, I would add, of family and community...
...David Bayley's analysis of the causes for Japan's low, relatively stable (and at some points declining) crime rate in recent years leads to a fashionably pessimistic conclusion: The levels of criminal behavior that Americans find so disturbing may be the inevitable consequence of aspects of national life that Americans prize—individualism, mobility, privacy, autonomy, suspicion of authority, and separation between public and private roles, between government and community...
...During the '60s and '70s, murder rates increased in some of those countries and didn't in others—but in none of them, when Wilson wrote, did they begin to approach those of the United States...
...But this is not the case...
...One is simply to ignore or deny the difference between our crime rates and those of other industrial societies...
...His position seems to be that the real problem isn't that "elite" values led to violence among the elite themselves, but that, in a wonderful parallel with supply-side economics, they "trickle down" to the lower orders, who promptly go out and put guns to people's heads...
...20 Daniel Bell, "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," in Capitalism Today, Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, eds...
...His answer is that we do not...
...The average Dutch robbery sentence fell to 19 months in 1981 from 32 months in 1950...
...One problem with this statement is that, stated so flatly, it is simply untrue...
...There are two things wrong with Wilson's argument...
...Obviously, this stubborn reality causes tough problems for a criminology that blames crime on a vaguely defined and immutable "human nature...
...Wilson's answer has two parts...
...in 1984, about 195 of 431 every 100,000...
...some kinds of crime are almost by definition the expression of a search for immediate gratification...
...The wide cross-national variations in crime to which he alludes completely undercut the explanatory power of a "sober view of man"—for "man" is presumably no worse in the United States than in Denmark or Switzerland...
...2 The difficulty with this as an explanation for crime is not exactly that it is untrue—but that, at this sweepingly general level, it is unhelpful...
...5 (October 1975...
...In a world of dramatic national variations in criminal violence, it blames crime on an invariant human nature...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Some of that anger was expressed in formal protest, some in rebellion, and some in street crime—which may help explain the rising incidence of interracial robbery and of "stranger-to-stranger" crime generally in the '60s...
...Kenneth I. Wolpin, "A Time-Series Cross-Sectional Analysis of International Variations in Crime and Punishment," Review of Economics and Statistics 62, no...
...Margaret Mead comes in for a special drubbing for having claimed that "the greater happiness of Samoans arose from their being granted greater sexual freedom and from being raised in more nurturant, less repressive families...
...The first argument is difficult to take seriously...
...To be published late this fall by Pantheon Books...
...This is surely a remarkable omission in a society where, more than in any other, an ethos of ever-increasing consumption for the sake of impulse gratification has become indispensable to our economy and has penetrated almost every corner of our life...
...Instead, that assertion, coupled with these authors' continuing skepticism about the possibility of reducing crime through intervention in the labor market or the larger community, seems to be mainly invoked to support the curiously passive stance toward the possibilities of concerted social action against the roots of crime that has characterized Wilson's work from the beginning...
...Moreover, many West European countries deliberately decreased their use of imprisonment during the '60s and '70s, while beginning in the '70s we moved relentlessly in the other direction...
...Possibly...
...In practice, conservative criminology has concentrated on increasing the "cost" of crime...
...Public Interest, Summer 1974, p. 105...
...Our incarceration rates fell for several years, and didn't rise even as the crime rate began to do so in the '60s...
...31-32...
...Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison Admissions and Release, 1981 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Justice, 1984...
...There, tolerance and individual expression in child-rearing practices are not encouraged...
...Popular versions of Freudian theory (Wilson acknowledges they may be distorted) proclaimed that "repressing one's instincts was bad, not good...
...But such generalizations cannot help us understand why crime is so much worse at some times or places than others...
...In this context it was at least possible to argue that crime might be rising because criminals had it easier than before...
...In a country noted for its harsh response to social deviation, it blames crime on attitudes of tolerance run wild...
...The simplest way to measure these changes is to look at the national incarceration rate...
...Places like Madison or Ann Arbor, which led the campus counterculture in the '60s, maintained the low rates of serious crime that we rightly associate with communities of fairly affluent young people and professionals...
...it is, however, an acquisitive and hedonistic one...
...that we allow too much easy gratification of the darker impulses and actively encourage a destructive "self-expression," instead of the virtues of sobriety, self-restraint, and the curbing of appetites...
...If there ever were "years of neglect" in the punishment of criminals in America, they are long past...
...But more importantly, the demand for causal solutions is, whether intended or not, a way of deferring any action and criticizing any policy...
...What has ultimately corroded social life in the United States during the 20th century is the triumph of "self-expression over self-control as a core human value...
...Nonetheless, Wilson continues to insist on the curious argument that since the recent increase in crime "is not a peculiarly American phenomenon, but a feature of virtually every industrialized society," a "true understanding of crime depends on what these nations have in 428 common, not what differentiates them...
...If we already imprison people at a higher rate than other countries, we cannot blame our own uniquely high crime rate on the underuse of imprisonment, without reasoning in a circle...
...For Wilson, America's moral downfall can be traced back to the 1920s, when "we see the 432 educated classes repudiating moral uplift as it had been practiced for the preceding century...
...The second is an essentially political, rather than conceptual, argument— that government either cannot or should not intervene in the conditions that many criminologists had held to be root causes of crime...
...In some places at least, we made less use of imprisonment than we had some years before...
...One attempt to maintain the argument is to turn it on its head and claim that, given the severity of the American crime problem, we make relatively limited use of incarceration— so that the likelihood of punishment for convicted offenders is actually smaller here...
...An "ex433 planation" contending that both good times and bad had similar restraining effects on the movement toward "self-expression" is not easily grasped...
...What makes this book different from most of his earlier writing is the prominent place it gives to "constitutional" factors in explaining crime...
...2 Wilson, Thinking About Crime, p. 235...
...These are difficult issues to grasp, and especially hard to frame in the manageable terms of quantitative social science, but I do not think we will really understand crime without paying them respectful attention...
...Why are people in Houston not only far more likely to kill each other than people in London or Zurich, but also much more likely to do so today than they were 25 years ago...
...To begin with, it is not at all clear why this is the "proper question...
...And, in fact, beneath their rhetoric about the futility of looking for the causes of crime, conservatives have offered at least the elements of a causal theory...
...But we have been steadily and massively increasing the "costs" of crime for many years...
...330-34...
...The number of persons engaged in any activity, lawful or not [Van den Haag writes], depends on the comparative net advantage they expect...
...First, the deadly suffusion of the ethos of self-expression was "cut short" by the Great Depression...
...A 20 percent reduction in robbery would still leave us with the highest robbery rate of almost any Western nation but would prevent about 60,000 robberies...
...Thus the number of practicing dentists, grocers, drug dealers, or burglars depends on the net advantage which these practitioners expect their occupations to yield compared to other occupations available to them.' Human behavior, criminal or otherwise, is assumed to be like any other exchange in the marketplace...
...On the whole, I don't think the new work contains much that changes the assessment of Wilson's views I've drawn here...
...Wilson himself vacillates between acknowledging that he isn't sure they have anything at all to do with it, and speculating that these cultural and intellectual shifts somehow created a moral climate that must be held responsible, albeit 40 years later, for the crime rates of the late '60s...
...Gordon Tullock, "Does Punishment Deter Crime...
...There could, of course, be as many economic models of crime as there are economic theories, but in fact the conservative model is based on just one: the brand of neoclassical economics developed by the "Chicago School...
...The institutions that ought to keep wayward impulses in line— and, according to this argument, once did— have lately lost much of their influence...
...This analysis showed that in the 1960s—when American incarceration rates were much lower than they are today—the chance of imprisonment for convicted robbers was higher in England than in the United States (although the American sentences were more severe): between 1961 and 1967, a convicted robber's chance of going behind bars was 48 percent in England and 31 percent in the United States (for an average sentence of 2.9 years in England, 3.5 years in America...
...The same logic ought to apply in the case of criminal justice...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...In all three countries, as Wolpin's later study showed, convicted robbers were less likely to go to prison at the end of the period than at the beginning...
...12 James Q. Wilson, "Dealing with the High-Rate Offender," Public Interest, Fall 1982, p. 68...
...To the extent that the criminological right offers an explanation of American crime patterns vis-a-vis those of other countries (or other periods in our own history), it is that the costs of crime are peculiarly low here and, at least by implication, lower than they were in the past...
...and in at least one "socialist" developing country, Cuba, the rates of criminal violence fell rather dramatically.' Moreover, although many other industrial societies did suffer rising levels of crime in the '60s and '70s, the rises were in property and drug offenses, not in violent crimes like homicide.* In the mid-'70s—just as Wilson was portraying every country as wracked by rapidly rising crime—it was still possible for two respected Scandinavian criminologists to conclude that the risks of victimization by criminal violence remained quite low in Denmark and Norway...
...On the most abstract level, it certainly isn't unreasonable to believe that perceptions of "cost" have some weight in determining the course of individuals' behavior...
...Then why should we continue this unpromising line of investigation...
...What should we make of it as an explanation for American crime rates...
...The conservative model turns out to be shot through with contradictions...
...IS David H. Bayley, "Learning About Crime: The Japanese Experience," Public Interest, Summer 1976, p. 68...
...Granted, these changes are real, and Wilson is entitled to his jaundiced view of them...
...Consider Wilson's remarks on the prospects for reducing robbery rates...
...No one would deny that wicked people exist or that human beings have destructive and predatory impulses against which others must be protected...
...This means taking a hard look at the conservative argument about the causes of crime...
...Wilson and Herrnstein are more restrained than some other commentators in their claims for the importance of genetic and biological factors in explaining the crime rate...
...This remarkable conclusion allows Wilson to retain intact what turns out to be his central premise: that an "ethos of self-expression" common to most modern societies is the fundamental cause of the industrial world's crime problems In the process, the uniqueness of the American situation simply drops out of sight...
...Wilson, Thinking About Crime, p. 223...
...As Wilson puts it in Thinking About Crime, a "sober" or "unflattering view of man" tells us that "wicked people exist" and that "nothing avails but to set them apart from innocent people...
...On the surface, these figures lent some credence to the notion that the British might be "tougher" on robbers, if only in the sense of greater consistency, not severity, of punishment...
...How then can we argue that the two are strongly and closely related— or explain why the new ethos skipped a generation before causing the crime rates of the '60s and '70s...
...that this view was thoroughly misguided, he asserted, was proved in part by the fact that "virtually every nation in the world, capitalist, socialist, and communist, has experienced in recent years rapidly increasing crime rates...
...One way in which they could have influenced crime, he suggests, is by prompting changes in child-rearing, which might "alter the behavior of the young by making them more daring and more impatient of restraints...
...Because the country's population grew during the same years, the change in the rate of incarceration is slightly smaller, but not much: about 96 of every 100,000 Americans were in a state or federal prison in 1970...
...Youths in particular were forced by grim economic reality into hard work and "traditional" attitudes, and the crime rate went down...
...Conservative writing on crime, for example, has often focused on the spread of an ethos of "immediate gratification," a concern voiced even in the pages of the report of the Reagan administration's Task Force on Violent Crime...
...It is important to acknowledge that even with all its rhetorical excesses, the conservative argument about the links between crime and culture raises important questions—questions that liberal criminology has sometimes sidestepped...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...After all, in the '20s and the early '30s criminal violence was high (a phenomenon often considered an unfortunate side effect of Prohibition, a program of "moral uplift" that Wilson apparently admires), but it was lower thereafter until its rise during the '60s...
...New York: New American Library, 1971), p. 53...
...increasing the relative "benefits" of lawful activity has taken a distinctly subordinate place...
...If we want to understand the 436 American experience of criminal violence, we must look elsewhere for the elements of an explanation, particularly to those features of our social life that distinguish us—in fact rather than in fantasy—from more fortunate societies...
...after all, it is hardly possible to say anything very compelling about crime—or any other social problem—without working from some assumptions about why the problem exists...
...In the, absence of that sort of analysis, the conservative emphasis on culture, values, and tradition degenerates into wistful nostalgia or, worse, into a self-righteous, punitive demand for more corporal punishment, harsher discipline in the family and the schools, and the indiscriminate use of the prisons as holding pens for an urban underclass we have decided "to give up on...
...Given these huge and growing disparities between our rates of imprisonment and those of otherwise comparable societies, how can one argue that our crime rate (as the Wall Street Journal's editors recently put it) "has undoubtedly resulted from the absence of punishment...
...THE EDITORS q 437...
...This is usually blamed either on long-term shifts in the norms and values common to "modern" societies or on the naivete (or malevolence) of the liberal shapers of contemporary opinion...
...But the differences in robbery rates between these places are staggering...
...federal prisons and 68 months in the state prisons...
...III SOME CONSERVATIVES have come to recognize the inadequacy of the declining-cost argument, especially given the depressing results of a decade of getting tough with criminals...
...And in some states, the rise was even more rapid — South Carolina went from 105 per 100,000 in 1970 to 268 in 1982...
...If one country already possesses more hospitals per capita than any other but still produces more sickness, it is implausible to blame its comparative ill health on the relative lack of hospitals...
...Indeed, Wilson barely tries to make its logic clear to us...
...10 Eugene Doleschal and Anne Newton, International Rates of Imprisonment (Hackensack, N.J.: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 1981...
...The same is true of the urban and suburban concentrations of the "new class" that Wilson holds responsible for many of the social problems of the past 20 years...
...Wilson does not claim that the rise of an ethos of "self-expression" had any observable, direct connection with crime rates...
...For if it is offered as an explanation of high crime rates in America, the argument is perilously close to circular, since it does not tell us why so many crimes are committed here in the first place...
...A pervasive and, Wilson believes, largely effective 19th century effort to control "self-indulgent impulses" was increasingly derided by the "educated elite" as narrowminded, fundamentalist, and provincial, and replaced by the "self-expression ethic...
...This choice of strategy rests, in part, on a set of arguments about the inability of social policy to do much to boost the "benefit" side of the ledger...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...38-39...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...Wolpin's studies do bring up an important distinction: the Japanese and the British catch criminals more often than we do, and generally convict them more frequently once caught...
...This transformation was facilitated by an imposing, if unusual, array of villains, including Freudian psychology, cultural anthropology, and the women's magazines...
...But this is not the same as the vague argument that the values of "tolerance" and "authenticity" were what motivated the youth of the New Orleans or Detroit ghettos to inaugurate the rising curve of urban violence in the late '60s...
...In his recent revision of the book, Wilson still insists that "deterrence works," but he has moved further away from believing that much can be accomplished by increasing penalties— and even less by improving "benefits...
...But even then, a convicted robber had a 63 percent chance of going behind bars in California, versus 48 percent in England and 46 percent in Japan...
...We had "trifled with the wicked," Wilson thundered, and "encouraged the calculators...
...The trouble is that Wolpin's analysis—as he pointed out himself in a later study—neglected to include in its estimates of incarceration rates the great numbers of convicted offenders sent to local jails in the United States —a crucial omission indeed, since including them in the calculations completely reversed the outcome...
...Conservative analysis has steadfastly shied away from confronting—or even naming—the underlying forces that shape cultural, communal, and family life...
...Why do black Americans, who presumably do not value "individualism" any more than white Americans (or Hispanic Americans, who may value it less), have rates that are so much higher...
...But we must understand that they are indissolubly linked to an economy dependent on the incessant stimulation of mass consumption...
...Faced with these questions, the criminological right has countered with a number of intellectual ploys...
...At first blush, that may seem a contradiction in terms...
...In the '60s, apparently, this resulted from a "celebration of the youth culture in the marketplace, in the churches, and among adults...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...Certainly, it doesn't help us understand the relationship between levels of crime and levels of punishment...
...Why are people in St...
...Still more recently, the philosopher Ernest Van den Haag put the same argument in terms of the "comparative net advantage" of crime over other activities...
...Yet this experience has not generally altered the underlying premises of the conservative argument-only shifted its ground...
...By shifting the explanation of the causes of crime onto an amorphous, ill-defined realm of culture or values detached from the social and economic context that nourishes or undermines them, such reasoning conveys a vague sense—more a mood than an argument—that the roots of crime are beyond human control, thus encouraging inaction and passivity...
...Obviously, parents' efforts to instill these values often fail...
...I'll come back to those arguments in later chapters...
...Meanwhile, according to official statistics, California's robbery rate averaged over 17 times the British rate and over 28 times the Japanese...
...We are not offered evidence for that suggestion—or even an argument, however speculative—about why those concentrations of constitutional predispositions to crime should turn up when and where they do...
...Developments over time are also revealing...
...1025,1035...
...See Wilson's article, "Thinking About Crime," Atlantic, September 1983, p. 88...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...No doubt, there was a connection between these attitudes and a wide range of youthful behavior that violated the law, especially with regard to drugs and sex...
...32-38...
...The criminology of the '60s too often focused on the simpler malfunctions of what was viewed as an otherwise smoothly functioning social and moral order: it implied that a little income support here, a summer-job program there would, by themselves, stop crime...
...A closer look at the medical analogy reveals the logical problem...
...In the 1960s, those who believed that the "softness" of American justice was responsible for our crime rate had a more plausible case...
...To be sure, a country with a lot of illness will "need" many hospitals, just as a country with a lot of crime will "need" many prisons...
...1 (January 1983...
...His Thinking About Crime was a fairly conventional mid'70s statement of the economic model of crime...
...But what do they have to do with crime...
...Wilson, for example, draws an analogy with medical care...
...Some persons become "criminals," therefore, not because their basic motivation differs from that of other persons, but because their benefits and costs differ.' Similarly, the conservative economist Gordon Tullock wrote some years later, "If you increase the cost of committing a crime, there will be fewer crimes...
...But this consistent decline in the "costs" of robbery had completely contradictory effects on robbery rates in the different countries: robbery increased in California and still more in England, but declined rather dramatically in Japan...
...An even more important difficulty with the Wilson argument is that the industrial countries whose rates of criminal violence did rise in the '60s and '70s usually began (and ended) at * Throughout this essay, I will observe the standard American practice of defining homicide, forcible rape, robbery (theft with at least the threat of force), and assault as violent crimes...
...If we have a lot of crime in America because we're Americans, there isn't much we can do about it...
...between 1951 and 1975, the Dutch prison population as a whole dropped by half...
...England's robbers, furthermore, spent only about half as much time behind bars as those in Japan or in California...
...7 The following paragraphs are based on Wilson, "Crime and American Culture," pp...
...The United States may have relatively high levels of criminality because it is inhabited by Americans.'s * Since this was written, James Q. Wilson and the psychologist Richard Herrnstein have published a new book, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985...
...Though this is a vastly oversimplifed rendering of what the evidence says about crime in the Depression, it isn't altogether far-fetched...
...We lock up offenders at a far greater rate than any other advanced society (except the Soviet Union and South Africa—where the comparison is not wholly appropriate, since many prisoners are political, not "street" criminals...
...There is reason for this concern...
...In the hands of conservative writers, however, these issues have usually been raised in terms so mired in ideology and so beholden to 435 political agendas as to obscure the questions they suggest...
...As Daniel Bell writes in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, "the one thing that would utterly destroy the 'new capitalism' is the serious practice of 'deferred gratification.' "20 If we have moved away from a less grasping, more cooperative culture in recent years—and I believe we have—we must look, as Bell does, to the social and economic forces that have brought about this shift...
...Even then, Wilson—unlike some of his less restrained colleagues—did not argue that we could expect great reductions in crime through increasing its "costs," but this was still the main policy recommendation in what was generally an admonition that we would have to "learn to live with crime...
...I have yet to see a root cause," he continued, 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...
...This argument does point to something important about the American experience—but in this form it obscures more than it illuminates...
...See Downes, "Dutch Penal Policy" (see Note 4), pp...
...More crucially, it is difficult to detect any convincing chronological relationship between the cultural changes that did take place in the 1920s and the course of serious crime over the next 60 years...
...in the Dutch prisons, it was 19 months...
...The finger of blame points more often these days to a range of institutions outside the criminal-justice system —the schools, the family, and American culture as a whole, along with a wide gamut of "misguided" liberal social policies and the malignant influence of "government...
...For the moment, though, we can focus on the merits of the "cost" argument itself...
...For American sentences, see U.S...
...But it wasn't grim economic reality that kept the crime rates low in the prosperous postwar period— precisely the years that witnessed both the emergence of the "youth culture" Wilson deplores and the spread of the child-centered approach to upbringing whose pernicious impact Wilson singles out for blame...
...average sentences handed down for a given class of offenses also differ greatly...
...Thus the average maximum sentence for robbery was 150 months in the U.S...
...In an oftenquoted formulation, the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker argued that someone commits a crime if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could get by using his time and other resources at other activities...
...The deeper, more intractable sources of crime, Wilson now insists, are the effects of "discordant homes, secularized churches, intimidated schools, and an ethos of self-expression...
...At the beginning of the '80s, the incarceration rate in the United States was about 429 217 per 100,000.* At the opposite extreme, the Dutch rate was about 21 per 100,000...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
