Ted Robert Gurr's two-volume work Violence in America
Rule, James
VIOLENCE IN AMERICA, VOLUME 1: THE HISTORY OF CRIME IN AMERICA, edited by Ted Robert GUrr. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications. 1989. 279 pp. $17.95 paperback. VIOLENCE IN AMERICA,...
...But these studies show how much evidence scholarship has provided for such conclusions...
...But they do more than hint at the reason for the high rates of crime by and against black Americans—and that reason is the place they occupy at the bottom of a highly unequal social hierarchy...
...Crime is an elusive subject for study—because it is so emotionally and politically charged, because those who commit it have so little interest in being studied, and above all because the processes by which it is recorded are so variable and poorly understood...
...One virtue of the original Violence in America was to cut through some historical delusions...
...Such policies should not be seen as giveaways but as simple investments in saving lives and creating a livable social environment for everyone in the next century...
...Above all, what sorts of policies, what sorts of politics, offer the best hope of freeing the country of the scourge of crime...
...Americans are not wrong to look to the analysis of crime as a way of understanding something basic about their country—any more than they were a generation ago when they demanded so urgently to know the origins of collective violence...
...Among these, none is more striking than race...
...As editor Ted Gurr notes in his introduction to Volume 1, One of the most disturbing and perplexing features of violent crime in America is the fact that both offenders and victims are disproportionately black...
...In northern 412 • DISSENT Books cities in the second half of the nineteenth century, blacks were two to three times more likely to be murdered, and arrested for murder, than whites...
...Doing research that can answer such questions is a tricky business...
...The resulting vision is not uplifting...
...These books are the editorial grandchildren of a work first published in 1968...
...It is clear that the perceived rise in violent crime over the last generation is no mirage...
...Is there a moral explanation for the surge of criminality that we seem to be experiencing...
...In Chapter 7, a methodical statistical study of Detroit (which Gurr calls "the murder capital of the United States and Europe in 1986"), Loftin, McDowall, and Boudouris dissect the social ingredients of a murderous social world...
...True, the issues occupying public debate today derive from those at the high-water period of public contention...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 413...
...The events of the 1960s had in fact many precedents...
...The gap between white and black homicides reached its greatest extent in some northern cities during the 1970's and 1980's, with blacks as much as fifteen times more likely to be murdered than whites...
...Whether the political will is present to learn and act on such lessons, it would be hazardous to guess...
...But for the moment, violence does not promise, or threaten, to be the arbiter of these contests...
...But the contributions assembled by Gun often transcend these obstacles...
...371 pp...
...The first edition of this work drew wide attention, doubtless motivated by desire for answers to the questions of the day: How could all this rebellion break out in such a peaceful, "consensual" society...
...These studies offer no conclusive explanation as to why crime rates have risen so sharply in recent decades...
...VIOLENCE IN AMERICA, VOLUME 2: PROTEST, REBELLION, REFORM, edited by Ted Robert Gun...
...If these two thoughtful volumes had no more important virtue, they would earn their keep by the reflections they spur on the changes in America over the twenty-one years since the original publication...
...If so, then the extended periods of chronic high unemployment in America, and its concentration among blacks, should lead to misery and mayhem well into the future...
...A second edition appeared in 1979...
...Their analyses show only moderate effects of short-term unemployment on crime rates...
...Partisans today are more likely to turn to courts or legislatures...
...But enduring poverty shows marked conducive effects on murder rates: "The full influence of the economy on homicide was . . . apparent only over a period of several years...
...Those were the days of the Great American Cultural Revolution...
...Yet collective political violence, for reasons not difficult to plumb, has lost much of its hold in the public conscience...
...After what appears to have been a long secular decline, murder rates rose sharply from the 1960s to the 1980s, both in the United States and other industrial democracies...
...They then appeared as a report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, formed in the wake of a political militancy that had shaken the entire country...
...More alarming still, several chapters in Volume 1 link crime, and especially murder, to some of the most deep-going forms of inequality in American life...
...To what extent are these trends related to persistent social inequalities...
...To this reviewer, the lesson to be drawn from this work could hardly be more obvious: We need a crash program to bring socially devastated noncommunities that produce such high crime rates into the mainstream of American life...
...But, he concludes, the fact that indicators of so many family pathologies now stand at historical highs does not bode well for levels of crime in the early twenty-first century...
...It is a conclusion much like those of William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged, and none the more reassuring...
...Americans seem now to be obsessed with questions about crime that run parallel to those that agonized us about violence twenty years ago: Is America really as criminal as it seems...
...The fact that Britain and Sweden show parallel trends (though at lower absolute levels) makes it hard to resist the conclusion that some fundamental social change is at work...
...The contributions—from historians and social scientists, including Charles Tilly, Louis Hartz, the late Morris Janowitz, and others—demonstrated how deep the strain of violence in American history goes...
...19.95 paperback...
...What do such violent episodes tell us about the country...
...These insights are no less true today than they were then...
...Such is the conclusion of Wesley Skogan, who argues in Chapter 11 that even enduring poverty has not produced crime where community institutions such as church, family, and school remained strong...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
