Debunking Deterrence

IT may seem strange that ideas discarded long ago can resurface today as "a new view"--and get accepted as such by liberal American scholars, the media and the larger population they influence and instruct. But on the question of how to define, prevent and reduce crime, the past reigns triumphant, while liberals look on in silence.

Harvard's own James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, has more influence on American anti-crime policy than perhaps any other scholar. A look at his version of older theories shows what is wrong with America's attempts to deal with crime, and presents a goal to the liberal intelligentsia of the country. That goal is to challenge and offer alternatives to the fuzzy ideas that define conservative anti-crime policies.

Wilson has written voluminously on crime, but his current round of books and articles provide ample material for a brief survey of his thoughts on the matter. For the past two months, his essays on crime have been featured as the cover stories of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. A new book titled Crime and Public Policy was edited by Wilson, and a revised edition of his own work, Thinking About Crime, will soon appear. An excerpt from that book makes up yet another article in the current issue of the journal Public Policy.

In all these publications, Wilson's message is "deterrence." By making punishment swift and certain (not necessarily severe), he argues in the September issue of Atlantic, society can reduce the crime rate more effectively than by starting job-creation programs. This takes us back to the view held for centuries, that crime has less to do with social circumstance than with an individual's inherent tendency towards good or evil.

No one would argue that the threat of arrest and imprisonment has nothing to do with deterring crime. Debate centers on the relative proportion of job-creation and deterrence strategies that should be employed by policymakers. Wilson emphatically leans to the latter.

Wilson favors crime crackdowns over programs designed to alleviate unemployment, poverty and other commonly-presumed sources of crime. He cites study after study showing that various ex-offenders receiving federal aid often return to crime anyway. "The real relationship between crime and unemployment (or poverty) is probably complex, not simple...we might discover that as unemployment rates go up, crime rates go up," Wilson concludes. "One's natural instinct would be to interpret this as meaning that rising unemployment causes rising crime. But rising crime might as easily cause rising unemployment."

Wilson notes that even if crime were caused by poverty, "society cannot feasibly make more than modest changes in the employment prospects of young men. Job-creation takes a long time, when it can be done at all..." Deterrence, then, is the answer. From the cop on the street to the judge on the bench, the law-enforcement establishment must flex its muscles enough to show potential criminals that the costs of crime and the likelihood of punishment are high.

THAT WILSON'S revival of deterrence among policymakers should go largely unanswered by his colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere is disturbing. Indeed, Wilson seems to have earned his reputation as a crime expert chiefly by default. If enough scholars responded to his frequent excursions into policy circles and the general media, discussion about crime might start to make progress instead of heading into the past.

To begin with, Wilson's insistence that poverty and unemployment may not cause crime is ridiculous. The reports he cites as evidence that giving money to poor people doesn't affect their propensity to commit crimes are all confined to short periods of time, usually a couple of years. The point is not that an ex-convict getting work-release aid turns back to crime within a few months; the fact remains that upward mobility over a generation or longer enables individual families and broad demographic groups to distance themselves from the types of crime endemic to lower-class American life.

This should be obvious; we see examples such as the Kennedy family, which went from bootlegging to political eminence in just one generation. More broadly, we find that one of the surest ways to escape getting convicted of a crime is to achieve middle-class standing. Consider the opening paragraph of this New York Times article, quoted in Jeffrey Reiman's The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison:

Jack Greenberg tank $15 from a post office; lust May in Federal Court in Mushuttan he drew six months in jail. Howard Laxell 'misapplied' $150,000 from a bank; in the same month in the same courthouse he drew probation.

Reiman points out that in 1972, nearly half of all jail inmates had pre-arrest incomes of less than $2000, in federal prisons in 1970, almost 60 percent made less than $2000 the year before. And yet a President's Crime Commission has estimated that "91 percent of all Americans have violated laws that could have subjected them to a term of imprisonment at one time in their lives." What about the other crooks?

Poverty causes crime, but not in the way most people assume. The poor are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to long terms than their more affluent fellow criminals. In a single case during the 1960s, according to Reiman, seven executives were found to have rigged electrical equipment prices, in a scheme that cost the public over a billion dollars. They were sentenced to 30 days each. In 1973, by contrast, the average sentence for burglary was five years.

And so it goes. In 1974, embezzlement cost the country three billion dollars, an amount equal to all the money and stolen property on the FBI Index Property Crimes for the same year (these include burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft). But there were only 13,000 arrests for embezzlement that year, compared with 1.7 million arrests for the "crimes of the poor."

Clearly something is wrong. Wilson deliberately ignores the so-called "white collar crimes," claiming in the introduction to Crime and Public Policy that "common predatory street crime is of greater importance to the general public." Having stacked the deck to exclude the rich--whose criminality is statistically several orders of magnitude higher than that of street criminals--Wilson calls for a holy war against criminals, who by his definition must be poor.

Most ironic of all is the fact that, in 1973, embezzlement alone cost society as much as all "crimes of the poor" combined. The same was true of income tax evasion and fraud. Each costs the public more than all burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft put together.

On the issue of violent crime, the wealthy once again commit crimes that put the average street murderer to shame. Last June, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported that the federal government decided about three years ago not to order Ford Motor Co. to recall and fix 10 million faulty trucks it had produced. The vehicles are capable of suddenly backing up by themselves and killing people. Ford didn't recall the cars; it saved $100 million by sending out warning letters and stickers.

As estimated four dozen people have been killed by defective Fords that unexpectedly shifted into reverse. Each bloody, needless death was an act of murder by the executives of Ford and the United States government, although we know that none of the killers will ever serve time.

How many miners have died because a mining company engineer was allowed to cut safety corners to save money? How many factory deaths could have been prevented? The precise numbers tend to come out only when the news media probe a disaster and temporarily revive old arguments about job safety.

Wilson's claim that the "general public" doesn't care quite so much about theft, fraud, embezzlement and corporate murder is interesting on two levels. First, it suggests that some hard thinking about crime is needed; the far greater cost to society in dollars (and possibly in lost lives) is from crimes of the wealthy, yet they routinely escape notice.

Second, the statement shows a deliberate lowering of scholarly standards to the level of a circus master P.T. Barnum's slogan, "give the people what they want." In the name of honesty, however, it might be more appropriate to change the title of his book and article to Thinking About Crime--Except for the Vast Ones Committed by the Mafia, the U.S. Government, Large Corporations and Respectable Middle Class Citizens.

This is the first of a two-part series.