Born To Rob? Why Criminals Do It

...By contrast, children of the “unskilled” parents, who were not consistent in their discipline, learned that their actions did not have predictable consequences: “The child...

...Perhaps that really is the point they mean to make, but they also advance a subtler and more practical argument...

...in other cases, tax policy or training programs or the presence or absence of a military draft may have enormous cultural consequences...

...ever since, as Wilson and Herrnstein point out, its procedures have been attacked by other scholars...

...The experience of living and working with these men made a deep impression on him, Pryor says, with the sobriety that has come over him since he nearly burned himself to death while free-basing cocaine...

...Crime and Human Nature is a provocative book, but not because of its hereditarian views...

...Instead, they ‘nattered‘ at the child, occasionally and unpredictably interrupting the nattering with a slap or loss of privileges...

...Alcohol, on the other hand, is a monumentally important direct cause of crime, since people become more aggressive and impulsive under its sway...

...Wilson and Herrnstein, however, introduce one other “consitutional” factor that, for me at least, simply defies belief...

...That dramatic increase in crime, starting in the 1960s, of course, is what most people think of when they hear about a crime problem, and it leads Wilson and Herrnstein to their most provocative conclusions...

...they don’t sweat, breathe quickly, or show any other sign of anxiety about lying...

...efforts to intervene in unhappy families, however, have had better results...

...4) Aggression is related to levels of sex hormones and can be changed by experimental administration of these hormones .” The only photographs in the book come early, in the “constitutional” section...

...In contrast to Herrnstein’s earlier work, Crime and Human Nature underplays any sweeping claims for the precision or significance of IQ scores...

...Come on...

...if he tries hard, he will be more likely to receive his reward...

...Instead, they “natter” at the child, unpredictably interrupting the nattering with a slap or loss of privileges...

...Wilson and Herrnstein blandly assure us that “a skilled bodytyper can take some account of such factors as age, nutrition, and health” in distinguishing body types...

...Some factor other than heredity was obviously at work...

...In a study of child-rearing in a San Francisco ghetto, one researcher found that the “comparatively nurturant childhood pattern...

...Both Herrnstein and Wilson have previously shown themselves able to write lucid prose, but in most of Crime and Human Nature they dutifully plow furrows through acres of facts, leaving the reader to trudge behind...

...For example,] the homicide rate was going up because young persons were becoming more homicidal and not simply because there were more young persons...

...6 The parents of antisocial children are less likely than others to state clear rules, monitor compliance, and punish violations of those rules...

...brawls and street crime grew common...

...For anyone who has not read his way through the daunting mound of academic studies that buttress the book’s argument, it is hard to challenge Crime and Human Nature on detailed points...

...Americans were appalled at the disorder of their growing cities,” Wilson and Herrnstein say...

...In Crime and Human Nature, Wilson and Herrnstein force our attention to those consequences, and for that they deserve credit...

...These efforts were directed at what reformers took to be the causes of crime and disorder-impulsiveness and a lack of conscience...

...According to the studies Wilson and Herrnstein cite, these young mothers tend to love and indulge their children as infants, but grow vexed and impatient as their children move into the more complicated stage of toddlerhood and In finding a source of hope for the underclass and a means of controlling violent crime, government can do some of the work-but the culture has to do the rest...

...five blindfolded male nudes are lined up, and from the contrast of their body types we are supposed to learn that “mesomorphs deficient in ectomorphy” - that is, well-muscled, non-lanky young menare more likely to turn to crime...

...Some cultural questions, such as parents’ “skill” at child-rearing, may not have any appropriate governmental solution...

...What about Teddy Roosevelt or Charles Atlas...

...The chronic violent criminal, they say, is more impulsive in his actions than people at large and lacks what can only be called a “conscience,” which would allow him to empathize with how others may feel about being robbed or raped...

...Most people are familiar with one explanation for the boom in crime rate and for the recent leveling-off...

...beyond...

...They say that when teenaged girls have children, the struggle to provide consistent discipline-difficult under the best circumstances-often proves overwhelming...

...One simple reason is that this topic comes first in a book that is such arduous going that many readers never reach section two...

...in 1790 to 10 gallons in 1829...

...When one receives penalties unconnected to one‘s own behavior, one experiences a kind of stress that [one authority] has called ‘learned helplessness .’ ” It is to this defect in parental “skill,” and not to the rise of single-parent families, that Wilson and Herrnstein attribute some of the disproportionately high rate of crime among the black lower class...

...In political discussions and proposals for political action, people often find it awkward to talk about general cultural trends-in religion or childrearing or the stability of families...

...questions about crime or anything else...

...When a new baby arrived, the older child “was increasingly told, ‘Get out of here-you bother me.’” “Some children reacted against this sudden lessening of affection by becoming sullen or rebellious, behavior that often provoked the mother to send the child out of doors to get him ‘out of her hair.’ ” Wilson and Herrnstein offer no clear explanation for the supposed fall-off in parental skillexcept that it is part of the other trend they describe, the changing social attitude towards discipline and self-control...

...One of the most prominent, which crops up in practically every chapter of the book, is a survey of 500 delinquent and 500 nondelinquent boys conducted in the early 1950s by two researchers named Glueck...

...To turn the question around, Wilson and Herrnstein ask what traits distinguish children who have proven extraordinarily resilient-those who have turned out happy and relatively successful despite extreme poverty, birth defects, absent or unemployed fathers, and other early handicaps...

...The idea that criminals really are different from other people, and not just hapless Jean Valjeans locked up for no graver offense than a desire to feed their young, is the initial proposition of James Q. Wilson’s and Richard Herrnstein’s new book...

...In previous books Wilson has blamed the change on the excesses of our “self-expressive” age...

...That book, published a dozen years ago, offered an unyielding view of the connection between heredity, intelligence, and occupational success...

...Finding a source of hope for the urban underclass, sustaining American competitiveness, bolstering the public schools and other vehicles of democratic contact and opportunity, offsetting the me-first ethic of special interest politics, controlling violent crime-in these and other areas, the government can do some of the work, but the culture has to do the rest...

...Its most unsettling message does not concern what happens to future criminals before they are born but rather what occurs thereafter...

...The one area where liberals and conservatives both believe that the government should try to influence culture directly is the schools, which is why they are such a chronic battleground...

...For example, in the United States, 90 percent of those arrested for violent crimes between 1960 and 1980 were men...

...This is the section that has dominated discussion of the book, and it is easy to understand why...

...They consequently stick very close to an explication of previous studies and then offer a hypothesis that, again, meets the test of common sense...

...Its most unsettling message does not concern what happens to future criminals before they are born but rather what occurs thereafter...

...Taken at face value, the propositions that males are more aggressive than females and that less intelligent people are more likely to resort to violent acts than those who make their living as MDs pass the test of common sense...

...Crime and Human Nature is a dense, academically oriented, and encyclopedic work, which divides the sources of criminality into three broad categories...

...Unemployment and poverty are not correlated with crime in any obvious or systematic way...

...But through the rest of the nineteenth century, even as American society reeled from warfare, industrialization, immigration, the rise of the great autonomous cities, and the emergence of an oppressed industrial class, crime rates continued to decline...

...During the 1820s and 1830s, crime rates shot up in both England and the United States, as the first of many waves of industrialization and urbanization set hordes of uprooted young men loose among the temptations of big-city life Alcohol consumption soared (from an estimated 2.5 gallons per capita in the U.S...

...Although Z.Q...

...tends to give way to a rather severe rejection about the time the infant shows sufficient individuality to try to explore and manipulate his environment by walking and making verbal demands...

...The first is the innate characteristics-or, as the authors put it, the “constitutional factors” -that distinguish violent criminals from people at large...

...Wilson and Herrnstein say that the impact of these efforts cannot be scientifically measured...

...They carefully distance themselves from the phrenologists and physiognomists of yesteryear, who looked for signs of larceny in the topography of the temple or the jut of the jawbut then embrace the neo-lombrosian proposition that criminals have a distinctive “body type...

...comes to understand that he cannot control by his own actions what happens to him...

...enjoyed a prosperity it had never known...

...What is the diet and exercise industry based on, if not on the belief that body type can be changed...

...as they passed their intelligence on to their children, a new hereditary aristocracy was being born...

...Bad boys In this new book, the discussion of inborn “constitutional” factors is more modest and carefully phrased...

...2) The sex differences are found too early in life, at a time when there is no evidence that differential socialization pressures have been brought to bear by adults to ‘shape’ aggression differentially in the two sexes...

...Since most crime is committed by young males, and since the baby boom dumped a glut of young males onto the market starting in the early 1960s, it is only natural that crime would suddenly rise-and then begin to fall, as the supply of teenage males declines...

...Wilson and Herrnstein are not talking about anyone who has ever broken the law, but rather about the handful of repeat offenders who continue to commit crimes until they are caught, killed or injured, or rendered less dangerous by the enfeebling forces of age...

...This explanation is comforting, since the demographic trends are now moving in a law-abiding direction, and Wilson and Herrnstein say that it does account for some of the recent reduction in crime...

...in the Meritocracy...

...3) Similar sex differences are found in man and subhuman primates...

...if he is cruel or destructive, he will be punished...

...turn, on Wilson’s and Herrnstein’s theory that certain people are genetically predisposed to a life of crime, it has provoked most of the controversy surrounding the book...

...The clear implication of these studies is that the average male committed more crimes during the 1960s and 1970s...

...The culture connection With their consideration of constitutional factors out of the way, Wilson and Herrnstein devote the last two-thirds of their book to “developmental” and “social” factors: the way a personality is formed during its upbringing and the signals and incentives society later provides...

...Long hours in front of the TV do not do visible harm to children who are otherwise nonaggressive, but those who are aggressive to begin with become more so after seeing televised violence-and they are more likely than the others to watch a lot of TV...

...It left him with a message to bring to those who’d never had the same cross-cultural exposure...

...The deliberate effort to instill selfcontrolthrough churches, schools, homilies in magazines-fell off in the mid-twentieth century, they say, and at about the same time crime rates began their dramatic rise...

...Narcotics are an important indirect cause of crime, since addicts always need money, but most addicts were criminals before they turned to drugs, Wilson and Herrnstein say...

...That is, something must have changed in American culture, starting in the early 1960s, to make crimes more necessary or palatable...

...Here, the argument boils down to two main assertions: that parents became less “good” at raising children and that society as a whole abandoned its efforts to convey cultural messages about discipline and self-restraint...

...Less than half-in several estimates, much less than half-of the increase can be attributed to the greater proportion of young persons in the population...

...Parental crimebusters The essence of “good” parenthood, as Wilson and Herrnstein see it, is the slow, steady transmission of signals that teach a child the connection between action and consequence...

...But in almost every aspect of politics that now matters to liberals, questions of culture may be as important as government policies...

...Crime and Human Nature is a provocative book, but not because of its hereditarian views...

...Attempts to rehabilitate violent criminals have generally failed...

...Since that contention rests, in turn, on Wilson’s and Herrnstein’s theory that certain people are genetically predisposed to a life of crime, it has provoked most of the controversy surrounding the book...

...Simon & Schuster, $22.95...

...rose by 300 percent...

...These traits, to greatly simplify the book’s argument, are in turn often associated with aggressive behavior early in life, even in infancy-and many more children who behave this way are boys than girls...

...To some extent they may be inherited, to some extent they may be determined by environment, but whatever their genesis, low IQ scores (and the associated difficulty in school and fatalism about the future) seem to be correlated with criminality...

...in the Meritocracy was only indirectly about race, Herrnstein was lambasted for his alleged racism for years afterwards...

...The parents of antisocial children did not make their use of penalties contingent on the child’s behavior...

...James Fallows is Washington editor of The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...This awkwardness is of course most acute for liberals, who do not wish to emulate the selfcongratulatory religiosity of the TV preachers or the prayer-breakfast devotees, and who resent the endless Reaganesque anecdotes proving that poverty is caused by morally lax welfare queens...

...Whatever may be the role of gender and temperament and even body type, the gene pool that gives rise to such “constitutional” factors cannot have changed greatly between 1960 and 1980...

...Part of the reason government efforts did work so well during liberalism’s golden era, from the New Deal through the Great Society, may have been that the cultural underpinning laid by the pious nineteenth century strivers was still in place...

...Among the consistent findings was that these children, along with being first-born, had received intense, consistent, loving, and demanding attention from a mother determined that her child turn out right...

...Certain physical and mental traits, they say, show up far more often among this group than among the population at large...

...but “role models” and expectations go only 60 far...

...Most of the studies on which this conclusion is based are 30 to 40 years old, which makes them more dated than most of the other data Wilson and Herrnstein cite...

...On this point, as in their discussion of other “constitutional” factors, Wilson and Herrnstein grant that social convention may play some part in conditioning boys to behave differently from girls...

...If he is loving, he will be loved...

...To prepare for their roles as men unjustly thrown behind bars, Pryor says, he and Gene WiIder spent time with convicts from an Arizona penitentiary...

...They describe studies of the parents of “problem” children and say that these parents: differed from those of normal children not so much in whether they punished too much or too little, but in that the former did not know how to punish...

...Yet those broad trends often turn out to have a big effect on the problems with which politics must contend, such as crime...

...Chapter by chapter, they move through the most familiar influences on crime-drugs, poverty, broken homes, violent shows on TV...

...I say “seem” and “some” because the chapter on race and crime is the most cautiously written in the book, and the authors are clearly aware that talk about incompetent parents is explosive...

...Maybe “body-typing” is a perfectly respectable discipline with important implications for human behavior, but on the basis of the evidence offered here, it simply sounds wacky...

...James Q. Wilson, Richard Herrnstein...

...Another reason for the emphasis on heredity in the controversy is that, to the general public, Richard Herrnstein is best known as the author of I.Q...

...As America has moved through its business cycles, crime rates have followed a logic of their own: they fell gradually both during the Depression and during the postwar boom, and then soared during the 1960s, when the U.S...

...and while no one is “born” a criminal (as one might be born a hemophiliac or color-blind), some people are born more likely to become criminal than others...

...Wilson and Herrnstein say that the conscience is so atrophied in some chronic criminals that it’s impossible to get a lie-detector reading from them...

...The other main constitutional trait is low intelligence, whose influence is explained in the same limited way: low IQ scores never create a criminal, but many criminals have low IQs...

...WHY CRIMINALS DO IT by James Fallows I routines, Richard Pryor stops in the midst of a stream of dirty jokes and talks pensively about his film, Stir Crazy...

...And the message was, thank God for the penitentiary...

...Recognizing that culture is politically and economically important does not by itself answer specific “what do we do next...

...I have had several “body types” in the past 20 years (including a configuration that, according to Wilson and Herrnstein, is typical of the insane), and I bet I’m not the only one...

...But they warn that it would be a mistake to draw much solace from this trend: There is no doubt that the changing age structure of our society accounted for a significant part of the crime increase, but considerable doubt that age effects explained most of it...

...Wilson and Herrnstein quote from an exhaustive academic review of studies of sex difference, which concluded: “(1) Males are more aggressive than females in all human societies for which evidence is available...

...Of the book’s 20 chapters, only three or four-on the influence of parental discipline and the history of attitudes toward crime-are carefully constructed essays, systematically building an argument and deploying evidence deftly...

...There is no ‘crime gene,’ ” the authors write, “but some traits that are to a degree heritable, such as intelligence and temperament, affect to some extent the likelihood that individuals will engage in criminal activities I’ The most important “genetic” factor is gender: not all men are violent criminals, but almost all violent criminals are men, especially young men...

...Crime and Human Nature...

...The “meritocracy” had begun to work so smoothly, Herrnstein argued, that the smart people were all rising to the top...

...The precise proportions vary from country to country, but around the world, “males are five to 50 times as likely to be arrested as females...

...The responses of these horrified citizens were various-religious revivals, temperance movements, Sunday school instruction, YMCA buildings, the fosterhome movement, the creation of public schools-but all had in common a desire to instill ‘decision of character.’ In myriad ways but with extraordinary singleness of purpose, Americans (and Englishmen) in the mid-nineteenth century invested heavily in programs designed to inculcate selfcontrol and thereby enhance character...

...Yet during those years arrests for serious crime in the U.S...

...More precisely, these parents were less likely than others to state clear rules, monitor compliance with those rules, and punish violations of those rules...

...Beyond government solutions In this condensed form, it may sound as if Wilson and Herrnstein are arguing that the only way to deal with crime is for people to start fearing God and living right...

...In one study of 588 homicides in Philadelphia, [Marvin] Wolfgang found that alcohol had been used by assailant, victim, or both in nearly two-thirds of the cases I’) One-parent families do not necessarily produce criminal children, but children from violent or abusive families are very often disturbed as adults...

...The two stars talked with these unfortunates, heard their stories, got to know them and their families, caught glimpses of their souls...

...Here their most impressive evidence is historic...

...it also offers the reassuring implication that nothing in the social fabric has fundamentally changed...