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You are here: Home / Open Threads / James Q. Wilson RIP

James Q. Wilson RIP

by DougJ|  March 4, 201211:17 am| 48 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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I’ve been dreading the inevitable Bobo/Chunky Bobo/Charles Lane eulogies of social scientist James Q. Wilson (an avowed conservative), who died last week. Wilson is the father of the “broken window” of law enforcement, which has been very influential in the development of community policing and the like.

By all accounts, Wilson was — and wanted to be thought of as — a researcher who happened to have right-wing political beliefs, not a right-wing researcher. So to my mind, Douthat’s eulogy today was a bit offensive. To summarize, Douthat paints Wilson and Breitbart as two sides of the conservative coin, Wilson the contemplative Burkean side and Breitbart the brash populist side. He then goes on to claim that Wilson’s theories are single-handedly responsible for the nationwide drop in crime in American cities.

I don’t expect Lane and Bobo to make the comparison with Breitbart, but we will hear a lot about how Wilson’s tough-minded Hayekian modesty showed the wooly-headed liberals the right way to fight crime, about how Giuliani made New York safe all by himself by adopting Wilson’s strategies (even though DC experienced similar drops under Marion Barry), and so on.

I’m not quite sure why this annoys me so much — I think Wilson’s ideas were very good, even if their effect is wildly exaggerated — but it does.

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48Comments

  1. 1.

    dr. bloor

    March 4, 2012 at 11:23 am

    I’m not quite sure why this annoys me so much

    Probably because it’s chapter #1,205,392 in “Sloppy Thinking by Ross Douchehat: The New York Times Really Doesn’t Give a Shit” and it’s not even a particularly entertaining one at that.

  2. 2.

    Doc Sportello

    March 4, 2012 at 11:28 am

    A minor point.

    Though Giuliani is more identified with broken windows and the decline in crime, Dinkins got the ball rolling by hiring more cops, and crime went down in the last three years of his term.

  3. 3.

    kerFuFFler

    March 4, 2012 at 11:31 am

    I’ve been reading that lead abatement and abortion have contributed to the drop in crime rates. Lead abatement helped kids avoid the medical problems that make them fail in school, and the availability of abortion reduced the number of unwanted children many of whom might have been neglected, abused or otherwise turned to a life of crime.

  4. 4.

    gwangung

    March 4, 2012 at 11:32 am

    God, that’s stupid of Douthat.

  5. 5.

    aimai

    March 4, 2012 at 11:34 am

    Oh, good old “Lock ’em and Shock ’em” J. Q. Wilson. He was a professor at Harvard, IIRC, when I was an undergrad lo these many years ago. At that time he stood for an extremely punitive form of social engineering and social repression of the underclass. The broken windows theory of policing, such as it was, was actually the milder rather obvious end of what he was then renowned for.

    aimai

  6. 6.

    Hawes

    March 4, 2012 at 11:46 am

    Remember: If you’re simple minded, then it helps to see simple solutions to complex problems. Crime’s dropping? Broken Windows! Terrorism? Kill Muslims! Economic difficulties? Tax cuts!

    While the last week has demonstrated that the conservative mind is certainly one tracked, that track is not always sex.

    But it’s always one tracked.

  7. 7.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    March 4, 2012 at 11:51 am

    I’m not quite sure why this annoys me so much—I think Wilson’s ideas were very good, even if their effect is wildly exaggerated—but it does.

    Here’s the reason it’s annoying: the drop in crime (and teen pregnancy) is correlated with the removal of lead from the environment: ban on leaded gasoline, ban on lead paint, and lead paint remediation.

    All brought about by the Evil Liberal EPA and fought by Authoritarian Conservatives every step of the way.

  8. 8.

    Steve in DC

    March 4, 2012 at 11:52 am

    There hasn’t been a Burkean conservative since Burke, oh well.

  9. 9.

    BC

    March 4, 2012 at 11:52 am

    While the last week has demonstrated that the conservative mind is certainly one tracked, that track is not always sex. But it’s always one tracked.

    This. What annoys you is that it takes complicated issues and provides simplistic solutions. If you dig into what was happening in NY under Dinks and G911, you would find multiple changes that would influence lower crime rates. The idea that complex issues have simple solutions is the annoyance.

  10. 10.

    Lee Hartmann

    March 4, 2012 at 11:55 am

    But it’s Doubt that. Of course it has to be simple for him to “understand” it.

  11. 11.

    butler

    March 4, 2012 at 11:56 am

    A minor point.
    .

    No, this is not a minor point. Its a major point, and it should be repeated often.

    “Broken Windows” theory is NOT what brought crime all the way down. Big things, like economic growth and high tech jobs and using tax money to employ a hell of a lot more cops had a lot more to do with the long term decline.

    “Broken windows” is a cute little pseudo-theory which people can quote without thinking too hard or referencing any evidence or actually addressing the real choices which have to be made to create long term change.

  12. 12.

    SFAW

    March 4, 2012 at 11:56 am

    Re: Giuliani’s crime drop: and to think, that bastard Bill Bratton tried to steal some of the credit from St. Rudy.

    aimai –

    Harvard? No wonder you’re such an elitist. Or is that “elite”?

  13. 13.

    Tara the Antisocial Social Worker

    March 4, 2012 at 11:57 am

    Can we apply the broken window theory to bank regulations, campaign finance, and the like? Do a mortgage without a clear chain of title to the property, go to jail. Foreclose on a buyer without every document in place, go to jail. Any hint of coordination between PAC and candidate, go to jail.

  14. 14.

    Drouse

    March 4, 2012 at 11:58 am

    I guess in theory community policing is worth trying. I lived for a long time in a city where the chief of police was a big fan. All it did was engender a whole lot of bad feelings in poorer areas. It got really heavy handed and killed a lot of the desire for cooperation that’s needed for the method to work. After a while the police got carried away and nothing kills the desire to help like being constantly harassed over every little thing.

  15. 15.

    cmorenc

    March 4, 2012 at 11:58 am

    @DougJarvis Green-Ellis:

    I’m not quite sure why this annoys me so much—I think Wilson’s ideas were very good, even if their effect is wildly exaggerated—but it does.

    A significant part of it has to do with Chunky Bobo invidiously bringing Breitbart into the discussion at all about whether Wilson was onto something. It’s as if you were writing something about the soundness of Krugman’s analysis of the economic effect of repealing the Bush tax cuts for a general audience including conservatives, but threw in Michael Moore’s name into the middle of the argument somewhere. Of course, for all his excesses, Michael Moore has infinitely greater integrity than did Breitbart, but you get the point.

  16. 16.

    cermet

    March 4, 2012 at 12:00 pm

    @Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Yet strangely, it was under raygun’s admin that the EPA took charge and mandated Pb’s removal from gasoline. St. raygun appeared to support Gov regulations of industry AND environmental activism. So much for todays thug’s.

  17. 17.

    EconWatcher

    March 4, 2012 at 12:01 pm

    As much as i don’t like it, i suspect that our mass incarceration policies have something to do with the drop in crime rate (not denying other factors, such as lead). Mass incarceration is how we deal with social problems in this country; it’s our alternative to social democracy. It’s repulsive, but not without benefits to the classes of people unlikely to end up in jail.

  18. 18.

    MosesZD

    March 4, 2012 at 12:07 pm

    The actual truth is that crime has been dropping like crazy for a long time. And none of the competing law enforcement theories can explain why, seeing as they all get the same results.

    Personally, I think this guy has the best theory in the matter:

    LUKE BURBANK, host:

    Well, keeping on the topic of lead and lead poisoning, could the decline of leaded gasoline actually be responsible for the big urban crime drop that we’ve seen since the 1990s?

    There have been a lot of theories as to why crime has gone down like it has. Politicians like Rudy Giuliani say it was their innovative policies that did it in places like New York. The guys behind that book “Freakonomics” say that the legalization of abortion actually may have played a role. There’s a new claim out, though, that traces things back to the gas pump.

    Rick Nevin is an economist. He says the decrease in the use of leaded gasoline which started phasing out in the mid-1970s has led to the fewer rapes, fewer robberies and murders. And this is not just in the U.S., but in a bunch of countries around the world.

    Full interview. It’s more complicated than just the blurb:

    http://www.npr.org/templates/s…..d=16034271

    But I think it’s reasonable because he has both correlation and causation factors in his work. Correlation is not enough. Otherwise ice cream consumption would cause crime… But lead does impact, significantly, brain development.

  19. 19.

    Davis X. Machina

    March 4, 2012 at 12:13 pm

    Mark Kleiman, one of the best of the growing number of good poli-sci/social science bloggers out there mentioned that Wilson gave him a good review, the best in fact, and used for the jacket blurb — of the blogger’s book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, though it basically contradicted the “broken windows” theory of community policing. And that Wilson had signed an amicus brief arguing against life-without-parole sentencing laws for juveniles, laws that had been passed using Wilson’s work as a justification, or a pretext.

    So it would appear the man wasn’t a complete hack.

  20. 20.

    Villago Delenda Est

    March 4, 2012 at 12:18 pm

    Wilson’s concept of “a researcher who happens to have right-wing political beliefs” is totally at odds with Heritage/AEI/Cato, where right-wing dogma is searching for justification through “research”. Descartes before the horse, right there.

  21. 21.

    BruceForOhio

    March 4, 2012 at 12:20 pm

    Can we apply the broken window theory to bank regulations, campaign finance, and the like?

    YES YES YES PLEASE, OH PRETTY PLEASE??

    O/T – new comment fun, interesting layout, gotta figure out how to link back to the comment upon which I am commenting…

  22. 22.

    gnomedad

    March 4, 2012 at 12:24 pm

    Rick Nevin is an economist. He says the decrease in the use of leaded gasoline which started phasing out in the mid-1970s has led to the fewer rapes, fewer robberies and murders. And this is not just in the U.S., but in a bunch of countries around the world.

    I’ve sometimes wondered when the loons would start agitating to bring back leaded gasoline. Hmm, maybe someday when I’m bored I’ll troll a tea party rally with a “bring back leaded gas” sign.

  23. 23.

    SFAW

    March 4, 2012 at 12:26 pm

    Michael Moore has infinitely greater integrity than did Breitbart

    Hell, Tricky Dick had infinitely greater integrity than Breitbart. I mean, .00000001 is infinitely greater than zero, from a multiplicative standpoint. Or so sayeth my nerd alter-ego.

  24. 24.

    Watusie

    March 4, 2012 at 12:27 pm

    Violent crime is dropping all over America, in places which signed up to the broken windows theory, and in places that didn’t.

    Reason? I like the theory that points to lead paint abatement and unleaded gas. A hypothesis that Wilson himself endorsed.
    http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/the-crime-of-lead-exposure/

    Babies exposed to lead grow up to be young adults with impaired impulse control and are therefore more likely to commit crime.

  25. 25.

    geg6

    March 4, 2012 at 12:27 pm

    @Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:

    Yeah, that is what I understand the latest research to be saying. Not that I hate the idea of cleaning up neglected neighborhoods, but I really don’t think there is a lot of data to back up the idea that it has anything to do with lowering crime rates.

    You know what lowers crime rates? When people have good health, good nutrition, schools that work, safe homes, and jobs. Arresting homeless people or the guy who Windexes your windshield in the hope of making a buch, not so much.

  26. 26.

    Joey Maloney

    March 4, 2012 at 12:27 pm

    @Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:

    Here’s the reason it’s annoying: the drop in crime (and teen pregnancy) is correlated with the removal of lead from the environment: ban on leaded gasoline, ban on lead paint, and lead paint remediation.

    How much of it is just plain old demographics? The most crime-prone group is males between 15 and 45, and that cohort has been steadily shrinking.

  27. 27.

    Zifnab25

    March 4, 2012 at 12:29 pm

    I’m not quite sure why this annoys me so much—I think Wilson’s ideas were very good, even if their effect is wildly exaggerated—but it does.

    Wilson was practical, rational, and scientific. He made proposals, he tested them, and lo and behold he got a few hypotheses right. Douthat makes wild conjectures that are often proven wrong, and Brietbart fabricates evidence from whole cloth. And they want to be held in the same esteem as a gentleman from academia with right-of-center political philosophy.

    It’s like watching the KKK show up at a country club and start chanting “One of us! One of us!” because both constituencies want to lower taxes. :-p Trying to steal virtue by vague ideological association is going to leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth.

  28. 28.

    aimai

    March 4, 2012 at 12:33 pm

    @EconWatcher:
    This argument has actually been tied to the declining birthrate/abortion argument. The argument goes that most crimes are committed by young, vigorious, and not wholly rational young men–people with poor impulse control–and most crimes that are actually punished by locking people up are committed by poor young men with poor impulse control since they get caught and get sentenced (having no good representation) more than upper class kids with the same problems. Locking up a huge proportion of your young males eventually turns them into old males who at least don’t have vigor to commit crimes, even if they still have poor impulse control. So, a huge spike in the incarceration of young males results, forty years on, in a spike in the released old-male population no longer prone to committing so many violent crimes. Plus it decreases the father-generation for young and up and coming teen criminals.

    Of course the destruction it wreaks on families and communities besides the mere issue of criminality and theft can’t be imagined or computed in these statistics.

    aimai

  29. 29.

    toujoursdan

    March 4, 2012 at 12:50 pm

    @Watusie:

    There’s that, and the very obvious reason that the population is aging and that older people are less likely to commit crime (esp. violent crime) than younger people. As the proportion of the population in the teen-35 year old demographic shrinks, the crime rate goes down.

    Gentrification probably has also played a role. The “inner city” has given way as more middle class and even wealthy class people looking for cheaper housing in a choice location next to all the amenities. The people who used to live in these areas are priced out of the market, dispatched to the outer suburbs and rural areas where the population density is lower. The opportunities for violent encounters and crimes of opportunity (purse snatching, pick pocketing) are fewer. Poverty itself doesn’t lead to crime but the family breakdown, poor employment opportunities and social disorders do. But they are somewhat mitigated by lower population densities.

  30. 30.

    MikeJake

    March 4, 2012 at 12:58 pm

    There’s just no way anyone can quantify the precise effect that any one variable has had on the drop in violent crime, whether it’s “broken window” policies, three strikes laws, more prisons, more abortion, etc. That goes for you too, Freakonomics guys.

  31. 31.

    aimai

    March 4, 2012 at 1:09 pm

    I’d be curious to see someone put together the “broken windows” argument with the new research showing that it is upper class people who tend to be most careless of social convention and most likely to steal from other people when unobserved. I think there is something quite interesting about the focus on zero tolerance, three strikes, quick punitive action when we know for a fact that the exact same crimes are committed by upper class youths but don’t come to light or are covered over. I mean, just take the image of the “broken window” and the quick action that is required to keep a poor neighborhood from spiraling down from graffitti to rape? There’s a shit ton of vandalism in upper class neighborhoods but the owners send out the illegal immigrant workers to fix shit and the entire matter is usually covered up because “boys will be boys.” The neighborhood does just fine (more or less) without locking all the kids up. That’s because juvenile vandalism doesn’t lead to a life of drug dealing and rape unless there’s literally no other remunerative economic activity in the area and no educational oppportunities to keep the juveniles occupied when they aren’t breaking windows, partying in empty houses, or graffitting.

    aimai

  32. 32.

    PeakVT

    March 4, 2012 at 1:09 pm

    @cermet: Get yourself some facts, son.

  33. 33.

    aimai

    March 4, 2012 at 1:10 pm

    @MikeJake:
    I hate the freakonomics guys. The entire fucking shtick boils down to: Its cheaper that this happens this way.

    aimai

  34. 34.

    PeakVT

    March 4, 2012 at 1:21 pm

    @EconWatcher: Attributing some of the drop in crime to high incarceration rates might make sense in the abstract, but if anyone has done a strong study linking the two, they’ve done a poor job of making it public.

  35. 35.

    MikeJake

    March 4, 2012 at 1:25 pm

    @aimai:

    In the Freakonomics movie, they actually tried to break down the effects of the most commonly cited variables by percentage. No surprise, they deemed Stephen Levitt’s pet theory, legalization of abortion, as the most significant factor, and assigned a percentage to it. It was the kind of pseudo-precision that I’ve come to expect from economists.

  36. 36.

    Linda

    March 4, 2012 at 1:59 pm

    I’m not quite sure why this annoys me so much—I think Wilson’s ideas were very good, even if their effect is wildly exaggerated—but it does.

    Let me help you with that. You are pissed because right-wingers are hijacking ideas into their pantheon under the slenderest of pretexts. Like “patriotism,” “God,” and other ideas that they feel they have gained the right to trademark, and then contaminate with their own distinct flavorings that would be unrecognizable to others who believe in them.

  37. 37.

    Marcellus Shale, Public Dick

    March 4, 2012 at 2:18 pm

    @Watusie:

    how about the decline in percentage of households that own guns, its as good as any place to start.

  38. 38.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    March 4, 2012 at 2:29 pm

    @cermet:

    St. raygun appeared to support Gov regulations of industry AND environmental activism.

    Reagan: Just another dang water-fluoridatin’ commie-lovin’ tree-huggin’ liberal bastard.

  39. 39.

    David Koch

    March 4, 2012 at 3:21 pm

    I just broke some windows in his honor.

    I thought the wingers were against “regulations”?

    I should be able to break all the windows I want on my property. They’re my windows. I paid for them.

    Fucking fascist-socilizt-broken-window-nanny-state!

  40. 40.

    AA+ Bonds

    March 4, 2012 at 5:38 pm

    Fuck James Wilson. He wrote my poli sci textbook in high school and followed it up with the “theory” of Gen-Y “superpredators”. The bane of my young existence, him and John Dilulio.

    Those guys and Breitbart ARE two sides of the same coin – filthy fucking fascist liars. Wilson just provided the Breitbartism of the academy.

    http://exiledonline.com/mark-ames-1-andrew-breitbart-0-exiled-editor-does-dirty-chicken-dance-on-breitbart%E2%80%99s-grave/

  41. 41.

    Suffern ACE

    March 4, 2012 at 6:55 pm

    @AA+ Bonds: Ah, yes. Superpredators. But hey, when Dilulio actually went and studied the situation and did RESEARCH, he found that his hypothesis was false. So we need to give credit where credit is due.

  42. 42.

    Suffern ACE

    March 4, 2012 at 7:06 pm

    @Suffern ACE: Oh, heck. Since AA+ Bonds got me in the history mode. Look at the examples of extreme right wing media outlets involved with shoveling the Superpredator idea. In many ways, the Ivy League conservatives are more dangerous than the Breitburts of the world since no one would ever question their work.

  43. 43.

    Jimbo316

    March 4, 2012 at 8:20 pm

    The period that Wilson was writing about – the 1960s – was the height of the Baby Boom generation in their youth. In every country in the world, large numbers of young males in the population are associated with elevated crime rates. This is not to say that Wilson’s “broken window” prescription was mistaken; it is to say that just being a right-winger doesn’t mean that the world gets better. In fact, the opposite since right wing economic policies have invariably reduced freedom for the majority, exacerbated poverty, increased social conflict and economic concentration in just about every country, including our own, of course.

  44. 44.

    liberal

    March 4, 2012 at 8:38 pm

    I don’t see how the “young men” idea can be correct. I would assume the first thought of any criminologist would be to normalize crime rats by the population size of men of those ages.

  45. 45.

    Another Halocene Human

    March 5, 2012 at 6:45 pm

    Re: broken windows, have you seen the website of the guy who says it’s all lead poisoning? He makes a pretty persuasive case. Especially because (as documented in Freakonomics) we’re in a secular youth crime drop and nobody has convincingly explained why (not even Freakonomics–the lead poisoning guy has some good data showing why he’s right and they’re wrong, btw).

    Also, too, why is “Burkean” a praiseworthy attribute? Isn’t he just the original British euroskeptic? Why should Americans care? We don’t have kings and I, for one, have no use for royalist parties. In fact, I started mouthing off on my visit a few years ago to the Tower of London when we were ushered through a video of the Queen’s coronation. (My Indian-national friends shushed me and hustled me out of there. Other highlight of the room–besides jewels stolen from Ireland and India, that is–was a solid gold punch bowl used for coronation parties. I mean, really.)

    Dunno why so many Americans clamor for a king.

  46. 46.

    Another Halocene Human

    March 5, 2012 at 6:46 pm

    @liberal: Wasn’t this, in fact, SOP at one time?

    Don’t you recall the fears that the 1990’s violence was only the tip of the iceberg and that 1970’s rates were coming because of the demographic wave?

    But then it never happened?

    I think I’m leaning towards the Pb in the gasoline theory, here.

  47. 47.

    Another Halocene Human

    March 5, 2012 at 6:52 pm

    @aimai:

    I think there is something quite interesting about the focus on zero tolerance, three strikes, quick punitive action when we know for a fact that the exact same crimes are committed by upper class youths but don’t come to light or are covered over.

    When the frat rats started destroying our property, we caught them (more or less) sober and in the light of day and demanded damages for the things they did at 2am. Once it hit their pocketbook, the vandalism stopped quick.

    Law and order works too. Turns out campus police don’t have much patience for ‘boys will be boys’ antics like fist fights.

    It’s actually pretty funny in the end because some of these winners have never been told “no” in their life.

  48. 48.

    Another Halocene Human

    March 5, 2012 at 6:59 pm

    @aimai: Locking up a huge proportion of your young males eventually turns them into old males who at least don’t have vigor to commit crimes, even if they still have poor impulse control.

    This actually isn’t true… Teenagers have less impulse control because the part of the brain that assesses future consequences hasn’t fully formed yet. The truth is that most older released prisoners don’t reoffend, except for property crimes. (=burglary, cons, etc) And that’s why it’s so important to give prisoners an education and a trade that they can engage in once they leave prison, rather than forcing them into a life of crime (either petty drug dealing or property crimes) once they get out.

    There is always some percentage who will reoffend. One would hope that criminology and parole boards and so on would be depoliticized so that they could use the best current evidence to predict who’s at a high risk for recidivism when weighing who to parole and who to keep on the inside. Sadly, there’s some history of pseudoscience in the field which has damaged the reputation of science in general in the criminal field. I’d like to see a renaissance of evidence-based everything in criminal justice–from police work, to prosecution, to parole decisions.

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