Wilson, James Q. (1975/1983). Thinking about crime. Revised Edition. New York: Basic Books.
This leading book on crime remains worth reading today—essential reading. Unfortunately, the lessons it taught were not learnt, or have been thrown away (as in New York City, and many other American cities today which are abandoning law enforcement). Wilson was one of the co-authors (with George Kelling) of The Broken Windows theory. Former President of the American Political Science Association, his textbook and writings on police, crime, and bureaucracy remain influential. His approach is “evidenced-based,” focused on human nature, common sense, free will and responsibility, and what really works.
With respect to crime, he rejects the supposed need to cure “root causes,” and says that punishment and incarceration (incapacitation) work, reducing opportunities to commit crime works, but rehabilitation and the therapeutic society does not. In simpler language, locking up criminals reduces their ability to commit more crimes. Punishment is both effective and morally good. Reducing / preventing crime helps poor people, the principal victims of crime. Human nature cannot be changed, and must be understood, and rewards and punishments allocated to affect behavior.
Academic and government criminologists today reject punishment, and wish to….eliminate jails and prisons, eliminate bail, decriminalize many offenses, and solve problems through social services and money (i.e. replace police with social and mental health workers). They are Marxists, materialists, and disbelievers in free will and individual responsibility (though they wish to blame police, CEOs, and political enemies). They believe all behavior is caused by economic and social structures and therefore do not advocate individual responsibility and reform but, in the words of T.S. Eliot (Choruses from The Rock, VI) are “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” “From Rousseau and his argument that modern society tends to corrupt naturally good men comes the view that crime is not the result of choice and calculation, but rather the consequence of some defect in social arrangements” (p. 243). Academics do not believe in free will and choice, but society does and must act “as if” free will and responsibility exist (p. 43, 51), regardless of the “scientists.” “All ‘modern” schools of crime….reject this perspective and accept instead the hypothesis of natural causation….”(p. 43).
Prevailing “criminology could not form the basis for much policy advice,… but that did not prevent criminologists from advising” (p. 54). Today’s academics reject punishment, wish to eliminate jails and prisons, and “solve” problems of crime by reorganizing society in unspecified and utopian ways, typically by giving more money to government.
Of course, his “conservative” views on crime and human nature resulted in his being deprecated by the standard textbooks on criminology, but valued by practitioners who work with actual criminals.
“Wicked people exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people” (p. 260). Too much criminology focuses on statistics, aggregates of people, rather than real individuals (p. 119), and deviates from human nature.
Among his significant works, all worth reading, are: City Politics (1963, with Edward Banfield), American Government (2010, 12th ed.), The Moral Sense (1993), and Crime and Human Nature (19895, with Richard Hernstein).
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