ON CRIME AND THE LIBERALS

...BUT WE NEED NOT LET THE MATTER REST on what some readers may (erroneously) regard as a methodological quibble...

...Currie that this message was as strongly resisted among certain elements in the police world as it was among the enthusiasts of social spending...

...What sustained such protests, in absence of any evidence of any gains...

...We know in particular that some of the older aggregate statistical studies of deterrence were flawed, but we also know that newer statistical studies have corrected many of these flaws while coming to essentially the same conclusions and that experimental evidence (such as the Minneapolis spouse-assault project) gives dramatic proof of the capacity of even relatively minor sanctions to reduce criminality...

...Why doesn't he simply acknowledge that his original statement was incorrect...

...I still think so...

...indeed, Herrnstein and 225 I devote a large part of one chapter to considering just such a possibility...

...The odds of a given robbery resulting in the imprisonment of the robber are as follows: California, .040...

...The data from Professor Wolpin he cites refer only to the probability of going to prison if convicted...

...On the contrary, I commended the conservatives for raising cultural issues...

...First, the early evidence—as the National Academy of Sciences pointed out in its exhaustive 1978 review of the issue—simply wasn't strong enough or clear enough to be of much use in informing social policy...

...Wilson's response muddies the waters in two ways...

...Currie seems not to understand it...

...If only more money had been spent, if only it had been spent more wisely, if only the spending had gone on longer...

...q I was happy to learn that James Q. Wilson planned a response to my critique of his (and others') work in the Fall 1985 Dissent...

...Wilson is on stronger ground in arguing that the early literature on the effects of social programs on crime wasn't very encouraging (it is far more so today...

...He also observes that the more youthful the population and the higher the unemployment rate, the greater the criminality...

...1. There were many things wrong with the liberal position on crime in the 1960s, as I've argued at some length in Confronting Crime...

...second, that conservatives fail to explain why the rate of crime, especially violent crime, should be so much higher in the United States than in other nations...

...third, that the favorite conservative remedy for crime—more imprisonment— has been tried and found wanting...

...I do not reject the possibility that changing racial norms or unleashed black rage may contribute to changing crime rates...

...Currie attacks: "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...

...Consider Wilson's curious example: since these early experiences happen "long before the child can have much contact with the labor market," the labor market is irrelevant to understanding the child's early experiences...

...The view of many liberals (perhaps best expressed in the writing of Ramsey Clark) was that the cure for crime lay in an assault on its root causes, which were assumed, on the basis of the shakiest evidence, to lie in material deprivation...

...But can Wilson really believe that what happens to parents in the labor market has nothing to do with how they bring up their children, or the quality of the resources they're able to bring to that task...

...I said that "with all its rhetorical excesses," the conservative argument about the links between crime and culture "raises important questions"—ones that "liberal criminology has sometimes sidestepped...

...We still await substantial empirical evidence that a given alternative will work as well as (if not better than) jails or prisons for a given kind of offender...

...Currie will enlighten me...

...It was not hard to show the weaknesses in the conservative position...

...Currie forgets—it was true, literally true...

...But he ducks the central issue: that years of getting "tougher" on most other serious violent crimes have brought disappointing results, not necessarily because people don't respond to punishment but because devising realistic ways to increase the certainty of punishment for most violent crimes has proven difficult indeed...

...Currie views me as an ideologue, loving to punish and hating to help, but he is wrong...

...Wilson sidesteps those points, instead chiding me for rejecting cultural explanations of crime altogether...

...But what really sustained it was simple common sense...

...It seems clear that in the case of certain specific crimes—like domestic violence, the example Wilson uses—tougher sanctions against offenders can make a difference...

...Let's look closely at the original argument...

...Punishing crime was no more illiberal than rewarding virtue, and punishing criminals was no less likely to work than providing jobs to would-be criminals...

...Wilson has done some creditable writing on the police, and I suspect he understands this dilemma as well as I do...

...Many questions remain unanswered: Can the gains produced by a small number of gifted therapists and educators be reproduced by a larger number of (inevitably) less gifted or motivated workers...

...We can consult Mr...

...I do not know Professor Wilson, have never met him, and have no idea what his personal feelings are on these matters...

...Proving, by the standards of modern social science, the power of any cultural factor is notoriously difficult...

...It has since become much stronger...

...These experimental results, unavailable five years ago, offer real glimmers of hope and deserve the most careful exploration...

...He refers to the "stock theme of insidious moral decline" that is invoked to explain "nearly everything the contemporary conservative finds wrong with American society...

...Wilson also chooses to ignore the evidence—dramatically accumulating in recent years—that the deterrent effect backfires for some offenders, that the experience of incarceration makes them worse 228 —a good liberal argument that turns out to have been correct...

...But that's not what I said, nor what I believe...

...This suspicion was heightened by the number of liberals who, when asked what they proposed to do about street crime, would immediately change the subject and rail against corporate crime, as if it was ITT, not the neighborhood mugger, who was terrorizing the people—especially the poor people—in our cities...

...I am, or try to be, a pragmatist...

...Our criminal justice system, while not overwhelmingly efficient in putting away dangerous offenders, was nevertheless unusually punitive with those it was able to catch and convict—in comparison with other countries which still managed to maintain far lower rates of crime...

...Moreover, we had become much more punitive in recent years without witnessing a corresponding reduction in crime...

...I am now engaged, with others, in summarizing the more promising leads and trying to persuade policy-makers to invest substantially in replicating and enlarging these experiments...

...Why does the United States have so much higher a rate of violent crime than other industrialized democracies...

...MUCH OF THE REST OF Wilson's response amounts to a wide-ranging defense of the whole gamut of his views on crime...

...What I did say was that such abstractions, by themselves, are of little use in helping us understand variations in crime rates, or in devising specific policies that might realistically reduce crime...

...Since much in the conservative position was based on the assumption that there was a technological quick fix for crime, studies showing that the technologies did not work as hoped were sufficient to rebut the assumption...

...But if the matter is approached as a question of strategy rather than ideology, that evidence may well be forthcoming and I, for one, would welcome it...

...If my inferences are correct, and if Mr...

...Moreover, I suspected that some advocates of reducing crime by eliminating its causes knew full well that such methods would not work in a timely manner and were not in the least troubled by that fact, for their real agenda was not to reduce 222 crime but to remake society...

...LET ME NOW TURN to the specific issues Mr...

...But the Japanese do many things differently than we do when it comes to organizing their economic and social lives...

...When they are added in, the picture changes altogether, as Wolpin's later research shows...

...Wilson's writings have in fact been among the most important intellectual underpinnings of an approach to crime that has stressed incarceration at the expense of more constructive or preventive social action...

...Currie draws from them...

...We may learn whether the more effective schools produce lasting or only temporary reductions in delinquency...

...hence getting "tougher" with offenders in the courts would substantially reduce crime...

...Currie's own evidence, the cross-national study by Kenneth I. Wolpin of Yale...

...What I cannot fathom is why Wilson seems unable to comprehend that what goes on in the intimate settings of early childhood is profoundly influenced by forces outside those settings—forces which are indeed often amenable to conscious intervention...

...In his list of the things that might influence Japan's low crime rate, he includes just one—police practices—that has anything to do with public policy...

...Currie rejects the argument...

...What I did oppose were untested hopes, and the ideology that sustained them: with social policies as with police tactics, I wanted experiments conducted that would find out what works...

...Those who cling to this strategy in the face of the mounting evidence that it has been a costly failure typically claim—as Wilson does—to be on the side of crime's victims...

...Wilson and I would probably agree that a tougher approach to wife-batterers would be a good thing...

...The liberal position was a more difficult issue...

...The caricature begins with the statement that the liberal view rested on the (hardly credible) belief that "man was wholly 227 the product of his environment...

...First, that conservatives refuse to deal seriously with the root causes of crime...

...I pointed it out myself, after all, in the same article...

...To me, what this evidence tells us is that blaming judicial leniency for America's crime rate is easy but fruitless, since the problem lies primarily in the difficulty of catching criminals—not in our failure to get "tough" with them once caught...

...GIVEN WHAT WE KNEW, I argued that society should try to manage conduct by altering the rewards and penalties consequent on that conduct...

...Wilson is surely as entitled to these views as I am to mine, but it isn't helpful—or fair—to declare oneself above the political fray while dismissing one's opponents uniformly as ideologues...

...The attorney general, and the federal government as a whole, had little to do with crime control, which was essentially a local responsibility...

...But did I really do that...

...FINALLY, MR...

...This is so elementary a methodological point that I am embarrassed to mention it, but Mr...

...I hope in that book he uses evidence in a more sensible way than he uses it here and that he addresses, seriously, the very limited choices a free society faces in trying to deal with crime...

...That view was that man was wholly the product of his environment and that by making marginal alterations in that environment one could alter human behavior in predictable and desirable ways...

...Let's begin with the first problem—Wilson's treatment of those issues of culture and criminaljustice policy that my article most directly addressed...

...Well, the sleight of hand is there, all right...

...In practice, I argued, the conservative argument has usually been more specific—that the courts are soft on offenders, and—at least by implication—that they are softer here than elsewhere, softer now than in the past...

...Within those localities, the conventional policies— increased police patrol, hiring more detectives, loosening the restrictions on police—seemed to have little measurable or lasting influence on crime rates...

...In Thinking About Crime I did make that assumption but not, I think, unreasonably...

...and I did say that they are also often used to justify a certain ideological passivity, an antipathy toward attacking the roots of crime through conscious social action...

...Wilson implies that developing an effective employment policy is one of those things "government" "cannot do at all...

...failing that, criminals should be rehabilitated...

...There was little evidence that the severity of penalties (as opposed to their certainty) had an effect on crime rates...

...nor are the social strata from which most violent criminals come noted for their encouragement of tolerance or self-expression...

...The liberal position is reduced to an easily deflated caricature, a strategy that makes Wilson's own views seem by comparison most sophisticated indeed...

...We now know more than we knew then...

...We are now beginning to gain experience—again, unavailable five years ago—with alternatives to prison such as community service, house arrest, and intensive probation, experience that may make it possible to satisfy society's legitimate demand for justice and protection and at the same time minimize the human and financial costs of full-time incarceration, at least for nonviolent, relatively low-rate offenders...

...Currie is to be taken as a representative of liberal or socialist thought, then the liberal or socialist position on crime has some serious problems of its own...

...I did say that explanations of crime that detach cultural from other social and economic forces are likely to be misleading...

...2. Wilson similarly misrepresents the strength of the evidence on deterrence, in order to support the uncontroversial—but also unhelpful—platitude that people "often choose a course of action based on its likely consequences...

...It is true that most criminologists believed, in general, in the existence of some deterrent effect of punishment...

...And if neither kind can be proved, is it irrelevant that I try to show that it is consistent with a large body of historical information...

...Far from thinking that sanctions have no effect on crime, Professor Wolpin concludes that they have a very large effect...

...but in the process, most of the really tough issues about crime and what we might do about it get lost...

...Hope, I suppose, or ideology, or both...

...I have no doubt they're much more humane than that...

...The reader would immediately, indignantly, and rightly demand that I take into account differences in earnings, employment rates, age structures, degrees of urbanization, and police practices, among other things, before entertaining such a conclusion...

...q 229...

...But "alternatives to prison" has been many years a slogan around which all right-thinking progressives can rally rather than a tested policy that prudent people can endorse...

...Indeed, that sort of effort was deliberately shot down in Congress three times after World War II—in the Employment Act of 1946, the manpower legislation of the 1960s, and the revised Humphrey-Hawkins bill of the mid-'70s...

...I took issue with conservative criminologists for their insistence that the leniency or "tolerance" or "permissiveness" of American culture in general and American justice in particular was to blame for our disastrous rates of criminal violence...

...I worried that the pursuit of a distant hope was tantamount to condemning people to be victims of crimes, some of which could be avoided by different, less ambitious policies...

...Instead, Congress created a welter of scattered programs that by anyone's accounting—and especially by comparison with what went on in many other countries—were grudging and minimalist responses to a problem that demanded massive intervention...

...Given that everybody wants less crime, how do we find out what policies will make a significant difference at a reasonable cost...

...This understanding called for serious intervention in the labor market in the form of substantial training and job-creation efforts...

...But the existence of different levels of crime across nations (or cities, or states, or individuals) does not, as Mr...

...That's too bad, because a more straightforward confrontation might have advanced the discussion of crime in America considerably...

...In Crime and Human Nature Herrnstein and I summarize such evidence as we can find on the matter, but it is inconclusive, especially with respect to such dramatic exceptions as Japan...

...Currie wishes to advance his favorite cultural explanation, is it wrong for me to advance others...

...Currie claims that Professor Wolpin's data show that California is much more likely to send a robber to prison than England or Japan, yet California has a robbery rate that is many multiples of England's or Japan's...

...More leads may emerge in the future...

...In my book I call this the "fallacy of autonomy"—the belief that what goes on inside the family can be separated from what goes on outside it...

...At the time, some liberals protested that the Great Society programs were not a fair test of what could be accomplished by social melioration...

...not only does it accord with everyday experience and the teachings of psychology, it also is consistent with such evidence as we have on the responsiveness of criminal behavior to the probability of it being punished...

...That choice is not pragmatic, but political...

...Dane Archer and Rosemary Gartner have also made useful international comparisons of homicide rates...

...Liberals and socialists had long argued, with considerable evidence, that poor jobs bred crime...

...Today we know more...

...But this doesn't apply to other violent crimes where the probability of punishment is already high, such as murder or armed robbery...

...Above all," I wrote, "we can try to learn more about what works, and in the process abandon our ideological preconceptions about what ought to work...

...But his insistence that this disproved his opponents' position is unconvincing...

...it would take a book to respond thoroughly to all the points he raises...

...Consider first the argument about judicial leniency...

...And much evidence suggests that some of them may help us understand the difference between their crime rates and ours...

...Wilson suggests that I must regard him as one who "loves to punish and hates to help...

...Of late, some experimental evidence has been gathered indicating that parent-training programs can improve the ability of parents to cope with difficult children in ways that improve school performance and reduce misconduct and that certain kinds of preschool education programs can produce significant reductions in later delinquency...

...Since virtually every serious historian of 19thcentury crime rates in this country (I refer to Eric Monkkonen, Roger Lane, and Ted Gurr) believes that culture plays some significant role, and since virtually every serious observer of crime in Japan (I think of Ezra Vogel and David Bayley) assigns a very large role to culture, I am at a loss to understand why Mr...

...nothing in Wilson's response convinces me otherwise...

...To him, the fact that incarceration rates and crime rates differ, without obvious pattern, across nations is ipso facto evidence that there can be no connection between the two...

...Nowhere does he respond to the substance of my criticism— that blaming America's crime rate on "tolerance" or an "ethos of self-expression" simply doesn't fit the evidence, either from our own experience or that of other countries...

...I argued that none of this was in fact true...

...Japan, .233...

...I pointed out that Wilson had based this argument wholly on an earlier study by Wolpin which, as Wolpin himself later acknowledged, failed to count Americans sentenced to local jails...

...He's wrong...

...Wicked people do exist, and a just society cannot treat them with the leniency advocated by the dwindling but still ardent band of prison opponents...

...Professor Wolpin properly and carefully notes the limitations of his findings and the large effect that is played by culture or other hard-to-measure factors...

...presumably, he would also dismiss the role of culture in explaining differences in crime rates between, say, Japan and the United States...

...the same may hold for drunken driving, another crime for which the evidence of a deterrent effect of getting tough is fairly persuasive...

...I hope Mr...

...But if Mr...

...But to my considerable disappointment I think it mainly sidesteps them...

...I made that point in response to a direct quote from a recent article by Wilson that asserted the contrary—that we do not "imprison a higher fraction of those arrested, prosecuted, and convicted than do other nations...

...Wilson accuses me of a little sleight of hand in my use of data from a study by Kenneth Wolpin to bolster my point...

...Similarly, we were, again by comparison with many other advanced industrial countries, extraordinarily punitive in many of our cultural values and institutional practices—as evidenced by such things as our continued support for the death penalty and for corporal punishment of the young...

...To use national (or city, or state) differences in crime rates as a test of some theory, one must fully state the theory and then hold constant those variables that are not of interest while examining the independent effect on crime of the variable that is of interest...

...But how well it worked, compared to what alternatives, for which offenders, and how to better accomplish it within the confines of the criminal justice system—the early evidence couldn't say...

...What studies have tested and supported that astonishing proposition...

...The true risk of prison, given the commission of a crime, is the product of three probabilities—the chances of the crime being cleared (solved) by the police, the chances of the arrested criminal being convicted, and the chances of the convicted criminal being imprisoned...

...It was based less on faith in technology than on what I took to be a false view of human nature...

...Again, the reader would want to know what effect unemployment had after controlling on the age structure, ethnic composition, labor-force participation rates, and so on, of the various nations...

...But that's because sanctions of any kind are now so rarely enforced...

...Currie seems to think, disprove any particular theory of human nature or discredit any particular public policy...

...In his words: "It is apparent that increased crime control either through greater certainty of capture or conviction given capture, or through increased severity of punishment given conviction, is related to the reduced level of robberies...

...Currie's book, I do not know what his views are, but some of them can, perhaps, be inferred from how he criticizes mine...

...The Great Society had been put in place almost ten years earlier, and all that we had learned so far was that federal aid to education was not improving school achievement, Project Head Start did not seem to be working, communityaction programs were not reducing crime, jobtraining programs were not reducing hard-core unemployment, and drug-treatment programs were having, at best, an uncertain effect on heroin addiction...

...It probably has to do with the complex, poorly understood interaction among individual temperaments, familial processes, criminal opportunities, law-enforcement practices, and national culture—which all vary, to some degree, from one society to another...

...There are some hypotheses worth considering, and a few scraps of evidence, but not much else...

...He simply avoids my central point—that our courts are not notably lenient with most serious convicted offenders—and instead shifts the terrain altogether, suggesting that I believe that "sanctions have no effect on crime...

...But what we know is not especially encouraging...

...I can assure Mr...

...The record of efforts to get still "tougher" on such crimes, especially through mandatory sentences, is not compelling...

...The inference I drew from this was also true: the search for ways to cure the root causes, given the knowledge we had at the time, reflected 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...

...When I published the first edition of Thinking About Crime in 1973, I wanted, among other things, to persuade readers that both the liberal and the conservative positions of the time were in error...

...had he in fact read my book, he would have known that...

...I argued that as an explanation for American crime rates this simply didn't stand up to the evidence...

...What liberals—and those to their left—did believe was that certain aspects of the socioeconomic environment had a profound effect on the crime rate—extremes of economic and racial inequality, blocked opportunities to achieve the economic and social rewards others could expect, intermittent or inadequate employment...

...but I'm afraid it's his, not mine...

...and fourth, that cultural explanations for the growth of crime in America are false and, worse, misleading, for they justify inaction (presumably inaction with respect to economic and other material matters...

...I will not repeat the review here...

...I believed that both position were wrong...

...Otherwise, he will once again make liberalism (if, in fact, he is a liberal) what it was in the mid-1960s—a victim of crime in the streets...

...I did not believe there was any evidence to support such a view...

...For the objection that the programs weren't adequate to the problems was basically correct...

...He makes essentially four arguments...

...In short, a given robbery is four times as likely to result in incarceration in England, and nearly six times as likely to result in incarceration in Japan, as in California...

...Are we really to believe that such things as an effective employment policy—to take just the most obvious example— or a narrower spread of economic inequality don't even rate a place on the list of possible factors that might help explain those differences...

...I'd hoped that Wilson's response might help stimulate a healthy debate on the issues I raised...

...Currie's book because I want to know, given his impatience (and sleight of hand) with any arguments based on cultural or criminal justice, how he proposes to explain and cope with criminality...

...All of the data we have, in fact, support the contention that we are more punitive with offenders who have been caught and convicted than most 226 other developed countries...

...CURRIE DISMISSES my view that cultural factors play a large role in determining the major increases and decreases in crime in American history...

...Something similar happens in his objection to my treatment of his argument about the links between crime and American culture...

...However, he's certainly no "pragmatist," as he claims, but an ardent and influential advocate of a view of crime that rests on certain important political assumptions— particularly the common conservative insistence on the limits of "government...

...I don't know anyone who believed that, and I know a great many liberal criminologists...

...If conservatives wish to defend that strategy with any credibility in the future, they'll have to do a much better job than Wilson has here...

...That's true, but it's also not the issue...

...Wilson in turn takes me to task on these issues, but in ways that convince me, if I needed convincing, that my original criticisms were on target...

...My beef with Wilson's specific argument wasn't that it was "cultural," but that it was wrong...

...And since no one has ever shown that it's "leniency" that keeps us from catching criminals at the rate the Japanese do, we need to look elsewhere both to understand why our crime rates are so high and to develop realistic ways of doing something about them...

...In the meantime, justice alone, to say nothing of a desire to reduce crime, requires that the guilty be punished...

...They knew, too, that this default was especially critical because of the massive migration of jobless people to the cities following the mechanization of agriculture and the consequent elimination of rural livelihoods...

...Since I have not yet seen Mr...

...Currie has raised...

...It was in this context that I began my book with the sentence Mr...

...Wilson argues that all that sustained the liberal (and left) position in the face of the "failure" of some Great Society programs was "hope or ideology or both...

...Will the gains observed in certain groups of youngsters be found in other kinds as well...

...Of course, he cannot prove that, any more than I (or Monkonnen, or Lane, or Gun, or Bayley, or Vogel) can prove that other cultural factors may also be at work...

...But that isn't what we got...

...moreover, even if altering the social context of crime would reduce criminality, it would take decades—perhaps generations—of effort for such efforts to have a significant effect...

...They also knew that the United States was unique among the advanced industrial societies in having developed no effective or comprehensive postwar employment policy...

...3. Wilson argues that the root causes of crime lie in "intimate settings"—notably early childhood experiences—that are inherently "difficult to reach, much less to change," through social policy...

...I tend to agree that, especially when it comes to serious violent crime, much of what goes wrong goes wrong at an early age...

...And if not, why dismiss plausible, but inherently unprovable, cultural arguments with a sneer...

...Once again, since he makes no effort to challenge—or even acknowledge—the specifics of my argument, I see no reason to modify that judgment...

...indeed, I was one, and I certainly never believed it...

...I was not opposed to the hope, and said as much ("reducing poverty and breaking up the ghettoes are desirable policies in their own right, whatever their effects on crime...

...Since I've already done that, let me just note a few of the more obvious and distressing ways in which his remarks misrepresent or oversimplify the evidence...

...One reason may be that he thinks a cultural argument is inherently conservative...

...Instead, he argues that since the chances of being caught and convicted are higher in Japan (according to the Wolpin study), the overall chances of incarceration are higher there...

...I was less happy upon actually reading it...

...One must be impressed with the vast accumulation of evidence pointing to the im223 portance of these very early experiences—experiences occurring long before the child can have much contact with the labor market—in producing the high-rate offender...

...I used Wolpin's data to show that, even before our massive "get-tough" efforts of the 1970s and 1980s, the United States incarcerated more of those robbers we had managed to catch and convict than did the British or the Japanese...

...Hence Wilson's earlier statement was simply wrong—wrong even for the period before the "get-tough" 1970s, even more so now...

...Wolpin is one of the very few scholars who have compared crime rates across nations in the context of a well-defined theory of criminal behavior...

...The argument of many conservatives (exemplified by the campaign rhetoric of Richard Nixon) was that the proper approach to crime was to take the "handcuffs" off the police (by repealing courtordered exclusionary rules), restore the death penalty, increase the severity of penalties for crimes, and appoint a "get-tough" attorney general...

...We are beginning to learn how schools that achieve an orderly environment for learning differ from those that can barely cope with riotous misconduct...

...I argued that by international standards we are not a particularly tolerant society...

...Currie's inference—that greater punitiveness is associated with higher crime rates—is wrong...

...I review these studies at length in the revised edition of Thinking About Crime (Basic Books, 1983...

...Crime and Human Nature amply supports the view, earlier suggested in Thinking About Crime, that the root causes of crime among the career criminals tend to be found in intimate settings that policy-makers will find difficult to reach, much less to change...

...I do not know...

...First, he largely skirts the specific criticisms I made of the conservative view in the original article—notably its emphasis on judicial leniency as a central cause of America's high crime rate and the similar, but broader, assault on the laxity or "permissiveness" of American culture and institutions generally...

...Moreover, it is a choice whose results have been meager and disappointing in the very terms Wilson claims to care most about: the risks of victimization by crime...

...For there was considerable evidence even by the late 1960s (much of it summarized in such compendia as the report of the Task Force on Violent Crimes of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence)— and there is much more today...

...The evidence from biology, child development, the sociology of the family, and research on schooling shows quite clearly how early childhood experiences, interacting with individual predispositions, affect the extent to which people take into account the distant consequences of their actions and the feelings and interests of others...

...I grant you that was a rather testy way of phrasing the matter (I said as much at the time), but bear in mind what Mr...

...How would he know...

...Efforts to reduce crime by giving jobs and job-training to ex-convicts and delinquent highschool dropouts have not yet been very successful, but it is conceivable that by focusing attention on younger children who have not yet found crime rewarding, more can be achieved...

...Wilson says that no evidence supports this view, but I'm afraid that tells us more about his own lack of familiarity with the criminological literature of the time than it does about the actual state of the evidence...

...but other governments did...

...I'm certain Mr...

...We do indeed put more convicted robbers behind bars than other countries...

...Difficult, but not impossible...

...Efforts to rehabilitate criminals had been under way for decades, and the clear lesson from the research was that we had not yet learned of any programs that made much of a difference...

...There were clues that new forms of police deployment, such as reintegrating the police into the community and developing specialized squads that would target high-rate offenders, might make a difference, but the evidence was still fragmentary...

...I look forward to Mr...

...This combined conditional probability is easily calculated from the data in Professor Wolpin's article...

...The problem in America was not that government could not, but that it would not, take on the task...

...Wilson's comments on Japan in his response simply add to that conviction...

...Later, he backs up a bit and admits that "the weakening of long-standing norms of racial inequality" probably had "an important influence...

...Moreover, Richard J. Herrnstein and I have discussed at length the development of criminality among young persons in Crime and Human Nature (Simon & Schuster, 1985...

...But their often slipshod and cavalier rejection of more constructive alternatives actually condemns hundreds of thousands of Americans to brutalization and fear every year...

...Of course, prison is not the proper sentence for every offender...

...He has been advancing this argument for many years, and I confess I still don't know what to make of it...

...WILSON, HOWEVER, SEEMS unable to acknowledge this...

...Second, his long, more general critique of the liberal and left position on crime— past and present—misrepresents the views of his opponents, overstates the evidence against those views, and exaggerates the evidence in support of his own...

...It certainly isn't unreasonable," I wrote, "to believe that perceptions of `cost' have some weight in determining individuals' behavior...

...I certainly do not label that theory the "stock theme of insidious moral rage" used to explain "nearly everything the contemporary liberal finds wrong with American society...

...Take employment policy...

...On the other hand, there was not then, nor is there now, a shred of evidence to support Wilson's sweeping claim that "altering the social context of crime" would take decades or "generations" to have an effect, if it would have any at all...

...Currie takes me to task for embracing, without evidence, a theory of human nature that assumes that people choose a course of action based on its likely consequences, consequences evaluated in terms of learned rules of conduct that moderate their natural desire for self-gratification...

...But Wilson consistently caricatures that position and exaggerates the evidence against it...

...Imagine what a reader's reaction would be if I asserted that Anglos are less criminal than Hispanics because crime rates are always higher wherever Hispanics are especially numerous...

...The question is what we make of this for purposes of intelligent social policy—or for understanding the causes of crime...

...The studies of deterrence that were available in the mid-1970s, almost without exception, supported such a theory...

...Or suppose I were to state that unemployment rates had no effect on crime because England, Italy, and 224 the United States all had comparable unemployment rates but very different crime rates...

...Nonetheless, his findings lead him to precisely the opposite conclusion than the one Mr...

...England, 0.161...