But the case that the incarceration boom led to the crime decline is far from watertight.
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For one thing, the prison bulge began in the 1980s, but violence did not decline until a decade later. For another, Canada did not go on an imprisonment binge, but its violence rate went down too. These facts don’t disprove the theory that imprisonment mattered, but they force it to make additional assumptions, such as that the effect of imprisonment builds up over time, reaches a critical mass, and spills over national borders.
Mass incarceration, even if it does lower violence, introduces problems of its own. Once the most violent individuals have been locked up, imprisoning more of them rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, because each additional prisoner become less and less dangerous, and pulling them off the streets makes a smaller and smaller dent in the violence rate.
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Also, since people tend to get less violent as they get older, keeping men in prison beyond a certain point does little to reduce crime. For all these reasons, there is an optimum rate of incarceration. It’s unlikely that the American criminal justice system will find it, because electoral politics keep ratcheting the incarceration rate upward, particularly in jurisdictions in which judges are elected rather than appointed. Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent’s television ads as “soft on crime” and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men.
A second way in which Leviathan became more effective in the 1990s was a ballooning of the police.
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In a stroke of political genius, President Bill Clinton undercut his conservative opponents in 1994 by supporting legislation that promised to add 100,000 officers to the nation’s police forces. Additional cops not only nab more criminals but are more noticeable by their presence, deterring people from committing crimes in the first place. And many of the police earned back their old nickname
flatfoots
by walking a beat and keeping an eye on the neighborhood rather than sitting in cars and awaiting a radio call before speeding to a crime scene. In some cities, like Boston, the police were accompanied by parole officers who knew the worst troublemakers individually and had the power to have them rearrested for the slightest infraction.
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In New York, police headquarters tracked neighborhood crime reports obsessively and held captains’ feet to the fire if the crime rate in their precinct started to drift upward.
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The visibility of the police was multiplied by a mandate to go after nuisance crimes like graffiti, littering, aggressive panhandling, drinking liquor or urinating in public, and extorting cash from drivers at stoplights after a cursory wipe of their windshield with a filthy squeegee. The rationale, originally articulated by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in their famous Broken Windows theory, was that an orderly environment serves as a reminder that police and residents are dedicated to keeping the peace, whereas a vandalized and unruly one is a signal that no one is in charge.
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Did these bigger and smarter police forces actually drive down crime? Research on this question is the usual social science rat’s nest of confounded variables, but the big picture suggests that the answer is “yes, in part,” even if we can’t pinpoint which of the innovations did the trick. Not only do several analyses suggest that
something
in the new policing reduced crime, but the jurisdiction that spent the most effort in perfecting its police, New York City, showed the greatest reduction of all. Once the epitome of urban rot, New York is now one of America’s safest cities, having enjoyed a slide in the crime rate that was twice the national average and that continued in the 2000s after the decline in the rest of the country had run out of steam.
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As the criminologist Franklin Zimring put it in
The Great American Crime Decline
, “If the combination of more cops, more aggressive policing, and management reforms did account for as much as a 35% crime decrease (half the [U.S.] total), it would be by far the biggest crime prevention achievement in the recorded history of metropolitan policing.”
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What about Broken Windows policing in particular? Most academics hate the Broken Windows theory because it seems to vindicate the view of social conservatives (including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani) that violence rates are driven by law and order rather than by “root causes” such as poverty and racism. And it has been almost impossible to prove that Broken Windows works with the usual correlational methods because the cities that implemented the policy also hired a lot of police at the same time.
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But an ingenious set of studies, recently reported in
Science
, has supported the theory using the gold standard of science: an experimental manipulation and a matched control group.
Three Dutch researchers picked an alley in Groningen where Netherlanders park their bicycles and attached an advertising flyer to the handlebars of each one. The commuters had to detach the flyer before they could ride their bikes, but the researchers had removed all the wastebaskets, so they either had to carry the flyer home or toss it on the ground. Above the bicycles was a prominent sign prohibiting graffiti and a wall that the experimenters had either covered in graffiti (the experimental condition) or left clean (the control condition). When the commuters were in the presence of the illegal graffiti, twice as many of them threw the flyer on the ground—exactly what the Broken Windows theory predicted. In other studies, people littered more when they saw unreturned shopping carts strewn about, and when they heard illegal firecrackers being set off in the distance. It wasn’t just harmless infractions like littering that were affected. In another experiment, passersby were tempted by an addressed envelope protruding from a mailbox with a five-euro bill visible inside it. When the mailbox was covered in graffiti or surrounded by litter, a quarter of the passersby stole it; when the mailbox was clean, half that many did. The researchers argued that an orderly environment fosters a sense of responsibility not so much by deterrence (since Groningen police rarely penalize litterers) as by the signaling of a social norm: This is the kind of place where people obey the rules.
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Ultimately, we must look to a change in norms to understand the 1990s crime bust, just as it was a change in norms that helped explain the boom three decades earlier. Though policing reforms almost certainly contributed to the headlong decline in American violence, particularly in New York, remember that Canada and Western Europe saw declines as well (albeit not by the same amount), and they did not bulk up their prisons or police to nearly the same degree. Even some of the hardest-headed crime statisticians have thrown up their hands and concluded that much of the explanation must lie in difficult-to-quantify cultural and psychological changes.
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The Great Crime Decline of the 1990s was part of a change in sensibilities that can fairly be called a recivilizing process. To start with, some of the goofier ideas of the 1960s had lost their appeal. The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun. A greater awareness of rape and sexual abuse made the ethos “If it feels good, do it” seem repugnant rather than liberating. And the sheer depravity of inner-city violence—toddlers struck by bullets in drive-by shootings, church funerals of teenagers invaded by knife-wielding gangs—could no longer be explained away as an understandable response to racism or poverty.
The result was a wave of civilizing offensives. As we will see in chapter 7, one positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist “Take Back the Night” protests) made these environments safer for everyone.
One of the most impressive civilizing offensives of the 1990s came from African American communities, who set themselves the task of recivilizing their young men. As with the pacifying of the American West a century before, much of the moral energy came from women and the church.
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In Boston a team of clergymen led by Ray Hammond, Eugene Rivers, and Jeffrey Brown worked in partnership with the police and social service agencies to clamp down on gang violence.
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They leveraged their knowledge of local communities to identify the most dangerous gang members and put them on notice that the police and community were watching them, sometimes in meetings with their gangs, sometimes in meetings with their mothers and grandmothers. Community leaders also disrupted cycles of revenge by converging on any gang member who had recently been aggrieved and leaning on him to forswear vengeance. The interventions were effective not just because of the threat of an arrest but because the external pressure provided the men with an “out” that allowed them to back off without losing face, much as two brawling men may accede to being pulled apart by weaker interceders. These efforts contributed to the “Boston Miracle” of the 1990s in which the homicide rate dropped fivefold; it has remained low, with some fluctuations, ever since.
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The police and courts, for their part, have been redirecting their use of criminal punishment from brute deterrence and incapacitation to the second stage of a civilizing process, enhancing the perceived legitimacy of government force. When a criminal justice system works properly, it’s not because rational actors know that Big Brother is watching them 24/7 and will swoop down and impose a cost that will cancel any ill-gotten gain. No democracy has the resources or the will to turn society into that kind of Skinner box. Only a
sample
of criminal behavior can ever be detected and punished, and the sampling should be fair enough that citizens perceive the entire regime to be legitimate. A key legitimator is the perception that the system is set up in such a way that a person, and more importantly the person’s adversaries, face a constant chance of being punished if they break the law, so that they all may internalize inhibitions against predation, preemptive attack, and vigilante retribution. But in many American jurisdictions, the punishments had been so capricious as to appear like misfortunes coming out of the blue rather than predictable consequences of proscribed behavior. Offenders skipped probation hearings or failed drug tests with impunity, and they saw their peers get away with it as well, but then one day, in what they experienced as a stroke of bad luck, they were suddenly sent away for years.
But now judges, working with police and community leaders, are broadening their crime-fighting strategy from draconian yet unpredictable punishments for big crimes to small yet reliable punishments for smaller ones—a guarantee, for example, that missing a probation hearing will net the offender a few days in jail.
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The shift exploits two features of our psychology (which will be explored in the chapter on our better angels). One is that people—especially the people who are likely to get in trouble with the law—steeply discount the future, and respond more to certain and immediate punishments than to hypothetical and delayed ones.
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The other is that people conceive of their relationships with other people and institutions in moral terms, categorizing them either as contests of raw dominance or as contracts governed by reciprocity and fairness.
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Steven Alm, a judge who devised a “probation with enforcement” program, summed up the reason for the program’s success: “When the system isn’t consistent and predictable, when people are punished randomly, they think, My probation officer doesn’t like me, or, Someone’s prejudiced against me, rather than seeing that everyone who breaks a rule is treated equally, in precisely the same way.”
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The newer offensive to tamp down violence also aims to enhance the habits of empathy and self-control that are the internal enforcers of the Civilizing Process. The Boston effort was named the TenPoint Coalition after a manifesto with ten stated goals, such as to “Promote and campaign for a cultural shift to help reduce youth violence within the Black community, both physically and verbally, by initiating conversations, introspection and reflection on the thoughts and actions that hold us back as a people, individually and collectively.” One of the programs with which it has joined forces, Operation Ceasefire, was explicitly designed by David Kennedy to implement Immanuel Kant’s credo that “morality predicated on external pressures alone is never sufficient.”
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The journalist John Seabrook describes one of its empathy-building events:
At the one I attended, there was a palpable, almost evangelical desire to make the experience transformative for the gangbangers. An older ex–gang member named Arthur Phelps, whom everyone called Pops, wheeled a thirty-seven-year-old woman in a wheelchair to the center of the room. Her name was Margaret Long, and she was paralyzed from the chest down. “Seventeen years ago, I shot this woman,” Phelps said, weeping. “And I live with that every day of my life.” Then Long cried out, “And I go to the bathroom in a bag,” and she snatched out the colostomy bag from inside the pocket of her wheelchair and held it up while the young men stared in horror. When the final speaker, a street worker named Aaron Pullins III, yelled, “Your house is on fire! Your building is burning! You’ve got to save yourselves! Stand up!,” three-quarters of the group jumped to their feet, as if they had been jerked up like puppets on strings.
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