Thinking About Crime

"In 1974 if you asked Americans what their number one concern was, it wasn’t energy, though that was a time of gas lines. It was not unemployment, though there was a terrible recession. It was not inflation, though inflation was accelerating. It wasn’t the war in Vietnam; it wasn’t Watergate. The number one concern was crime. Yes. Up until 1973 the way the government kept crime statistics was by the FBI calling local police departments and asking, ‘How many crimes have you had recently?’ Some police departments would report as best they could, but others didn’t do a good job. Others knew that their mayor wouldn’t want big numbers reported, and as the crime wave grew throughout the 1960s, crime statistics became less accurate. So in 1973-74 the Department of Justice introduced a new measure, a statistical survey of households to find out if you or a member of your household had been the victim of a serious crime in the past year. What they discovered in the first year of the survey was that one out of every three American households had been the victim of a serious crime. It was a huge, huge deal. And, as you say, in those days it was liberal thought that was riddled with taboos: things that couldn’t be said, thoughts that couldn’t be pronounced, all these gatekeepers to shut down open discussion of important social problems. One of the fundamental rules of liberal discourse was that you mustn’t do anything that blames the victim. And the victim of crime is, of course, the criminal – so we won’t blame the criminal for what he did. What Wilson did in this book was to bring unsentimental social science to bear on the problem of crime: to analyse it as a social science problem, why it happened. He had a series of insights – the book is not one grand theory, it’s many multiple insights. One of the things he argued is that the supply of crime is not infinite, that is, the crimes are done by relatively small numbers of people. If you can get those people off the streets – incapacitation is the technical term – you can make a big difference and that’s, in fact, exactly what happened. What he also did was he provided a corrective to those conservatives (conservative thinking can be emotional too) who thought the answer was that if you electrocute enough murderers you can reduce the crime rate. You don’t have to do that. If the punishments are certain and you remove enough people from the streets, you have a big impact. The whole debate over the death penalty has become much less passionate as the crime problem has receded. It’s a conservative book because of its mood. Its mood is unsentimental. It does not believe there is greater virtue at the bottom of society, it doesn’t accept conventional excuses, it doesn’t make racism the centre of the American story. Also, because it’s willing to contemplate the effective use of state punitive power to solve a social problem. Actually, he argues against the idea that criminals are economically rational. This was the previous teaching – that criminals were very sensitive to costs and benefits of their crime. Wilson says, ‘No they’re not, they’re not good calculators.’ That’s why incapacitation is so important. Because if they were good calculators it would just take making the sentence a few months longer: ‘Gee, that means 22 months in jail for stealing that car! The car’s worth $12,000 and then 22 months in jail, that makes $18,000 in foregone income, no I won’t do it.’ He’s arguing against that. His argument is that this guy is a bad calculator, but this one guy is going to commit a lot of crimes. You take him off the street and that one jail sentence can eliminate many, many crimes. When the term neoconservative was originally introduced into American speech back in the 1970s, the distinction was often drawn on the right between the neoconservatives and the older conservatives. The older conservatives were primarily literary intellectuals – Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver. They were themselves great writers ­– certainly Kirk was. They were people whose first interest was the analysis of literature; they were imaginative writers. What the neoconservatives brought to politics was the application of social science to social problems. What made them conservative was, as Mrs Thatcher said, that the facts of life are conservative. They are social scientists, they use social-science methods, they are interested in the governance of society and public policy."