There’s an old joke that in the 1970s and 1980s, James Q. Wilson waged a one-man battle against a thousand sociologists, criminologists, and other academics. The punchline: “A thousand to one against Wilson—that’s almost a fair fight.” The quip captures both Wilson’s towering intellect—recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, author of dozens of books, and arguably the most important conservative social scientist of the late twentieth century—and the impact of one major strand of his work, launched in high-profile magazine articles and expressed most powerfully in 1975’s Thinking About Crime.
In that book, Wilson challenged the establishment consensus that crime, then exploding, was determined by “root causes” of poverty, deprivation, and racism. Social scientists broadly agreed that only by addressing such causes could policymakers change the basic condition of man and free him from the need to offend. Thinking About Crime argued the opposite: people cannot be remade, but they can be deterred. With the right balance of incentives, Wilson maintained, they will refrain from offending regardless of their underlying tendencies. This view proved highly influential and remains common among right-of-center criminologists today.
Yet it would be a mistake to read Thinking About Crime as uninterested in why crime happens. Fifty years later, the book’s greatest value lies not in its extensive reviews of often out-of-date research (though the broad strokes of Wilson’s argument remain accurate, later studies have altered the picture somewhat) but in its theory of crime causation.
Like many crime researchers, Wilson saw a society’s crime level as shaped chiefly by the degree of restraint exercised by the community in which offenders operate. More than the police or courts, a community’s informal systems of social control—the norms and rules defining not only criminal behavior but also “orderliness”—play the central role. The idea of a community keeping the peace has roots in an older legal tradition that Wilson at times sought to evoke. Recovering it sheds light on today’s crime debates and sets the stage for a renewed appreciation of Wilson’s continued relevance.
Predatory crime does not merely victimize individuals; it impedes and, in the extreme case, prevents the formation and maintenance of community.” So begins Wilson’s argument in Chapter 2 of Thinking About Crime, “Crime and Community.” The claim seems innocuous: crime hurts not just individuals but communities. But it has substantial implications.
When Wilson was writing, theories of crime tended to focus on what motivated individuals to engage in “deviant” behavior. Inevitably, criminologists concluded that society had somehow transgressed against the deviant. “Strain” theory, for example, held that deviance arose when people acted out in response to their inability—imposed by social circumstances—to achieve socially desirable goals through legitimate means. “Labeling” theory, meanwhile, argued that criminals offend because society “labels” them as such, turning temporary malfeasance into a lifelong condition. Such views were not marginal; when Wilson first became interested in crime, they were the dominant schools of thought in sociological criminology.
This way of thinking led naturally to a focus on changing the individual’s circumstances to relieve the strain or remove the label. Jobs programs, transfers, anti-prejudice campaigns, and the rest of 1960s social policy were assumed to be the correct remedies. As Wilson noted, however, little empirical evidence supported this approach. And the emphasis on “root causes” ignored a key fact: their very rootedness made them the hardest for policy to change.
Liberal criminologists also erred in seeking the source of crime in the individual’s condition rather than his community. Other contemporaries of Wilson, however, framed the problem differently. “Social control” theorists, drawing on traditions reaching back to Thomas Hobbes, saw crime not as something caused but as something prevented. Everyone has an innate tendency to offend, but our social bonds, or systems of “social control,” constrain us by imposing norms. The causal story of crime, therefore, should focus more on the institutional context in which the individual lives than on the individual himself.
Though the social control theorists usually distinguished themselves from him, Wilson’s perspective was closely related. His interest grew out of surveys that he and others had conducted, which found that the top concern of city dwellers—black and white alike—was not wealth or racism but disorder. Disorder is distinct from crime: “many of the forms of impropriety” noted in the surveys included “rowdy teenagers” or “lurid advertisements.” “What these concerns have in common,” Wilson wrote, “and thus what constitutes the ‘urban problem’ for a large percentage (perhaps a majority) of urban citizens, is a sense of the failure of community.”
What is community? For Wilson, it was not the warm fuzzy sentiment that the word sometimes evokes. Rather, community meant a shared set of norms of “right and seemly conduct” and the ongoing process by which those norms are reinforced. Disorderly behavior—rowdy teenagers, lurid advertisements—undermined those shared norms and disrupted that process. The breakdown of this process, more than any strain or label, was, Wilson believed, a major driver of rising crime.
Without understanding this idea, it’s impossible fully to grasp Wilson’s most important criminological contribution: Broken Windows theory. The concept would not be fully articulated until 1982, when Wilson and former Manhattan Institute senior fellow George Kelling published their famous article on it in The Atlantic (Chapter 5 in the 1983 edition of Thinking About Crime). But the argument follows logically from Wilson’s belief in the importance of social control.
The essay opens with a paradox from an evaluation that Kelling and others conducted of police foot patrols in Newark. The study found that shifting officers to foot patrol had no effect on crime rates. Yet it made residents of the affected areas feel safer—and even convinced them that crime was falling, though it wasn’t. Why?
The answer, Kelling and Wilson maintained, goes to the heart of what police officers actually do. They recount the story of one officer whom Kelling shadowed, the pseudonymous “Kelly,” who patrolled “a busy but dilapidated area in the heart of Newark.” His job, it turned out, was not primarily to solve crimes. Rather, “as he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules.” He enforced norms against public intoxication, loitering, and petty harassment—small infractions that never appear in the major crime statistics.
Officer Kelly’s behavior clashed with the then-dominant “crime-fighting” model of policing. In that view, he was wasting his time on minor nuisances instead of clearing major offenses. Conventional opinion even held that his focus on “bums” and drunks was not just misguided but bigoted.
Against this model, Kelling and Wilson argued that Kelly was practicing what they called “order-maintenance” policing: not solving crimes but keeping the peace. This, they suggested, was what made residents of foot-patrolled neighborhoods feel safer and believe that crime was falling. The police weren’t lowering the murder rate simply by walking the beat; they were addressing the “forms of impropriety” that, in Wilson’s framework, erode community.
Crucially, it is the community, not the police, that does the most to control crime. “The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself,” Kelling and Wilson wrote. “The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control.” From this insight came Broken Windows theory. “ ‘Untended’ behavior,” they observe, “leads to the breakdown of community controls,” setting off a downward spiral in which eroding norms give rise to more serious crime.
This process, Wilson and Kelling believed, explained the urban decay of the 1970s and 1980s far better than the “root causes” theories that Wilson had criticized. More important, it suggested an actionable remedy: police should target communities on the brink of collapse—not so much to fight crime as to reinforce social control.
Was Wilson correct? Is it community, with its informal social controls, that prevents crime? And does reducing disorder strengthen this process?
Such a complex theory resists simple validation. Still, many signs suggest that the Wilson-Kelling account is sound. Take a recent systematic review of 56 studies of disorder-related policing in the journal Criminology. It found that strategies targeting disorder significantly reduce crime, especially when they involve focused, “problem-solving” interventions at crime hot spots. “Aggressive order maintenance” alone doesn’t work, the authors note; police must make the community itself less hospitable to crime.
Or consider the many nonpolice interventions that repair the built environment. Cleaning and greening vacant lots, repairing abandoned houses, and enforcing housing codes all reduce crime. The underlying mechanism is hard to discern, but each of these interventions resembles a kind of Broken Windows policing: improve the quality of the built environment to restore social control and thereby reduce crime. More generally, an established relationship exists between crime, disorder, and “collective efficacy,” the shared belief that a neighborhood can govern itself. (Oddly, this relationship is often cited against Broken Windows theory, perhaps because critics misunderstand it.)
Despite evidence that order-maintenance policing works, many remain resistant to it. In practice, strategies like those used by the NYPD are often dismissed as racist, dysfunctional, and oppressive. Why?
As Wilson and Kelling noted, the answer lies in the very foundations of how we conceive criminal law. The shift away from social order—from seeing the community as a locus of crime control—occurred within the law’s own categories. The criminal law now concerns itself almost entirely with the actions of individuals, not groups. “We have become accustomed to thinking of the law in essentially individualistic terms,” Wilson and Kelling wrote. “The law defines my rights, punishes his behavior and is applied by that officer because of this harm.”
Yet the community—and the enforcement of its norms—does have a place in the criminal law. Concerns for civil “peace” reach back to the Roman foundations of Western law. In the English common law, criminal prosecutions once rested not only on a wrong against an individual victim but also on a breach of the “King’s peace,” a general orderliness emanating from the sovereign and implicated in all public wrongdoing. This idea endures in the sovereign’s role in criminal proceedings (“the people versus” the defendant, in American prosecutions) and in offenses such as “disturbing the peace” or “disorderly conduct.”
Such nebulous offenses make sense only if the community, as Wilson defined it, has coherent interests worth defending. These interests sit uneasily alongside the methodological individualism that came to dominate legal thinking in the latter half of the twentieth century. This shift helps explain why the Supreme Court has steadily chipped away at loitering laws (beginning with 1972’s Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville) for being unconstitutionally “vague.” It also underlies the Court’s continual narrowing of its “fighting words” and incitement jurisprudence—speech, in other words, that tends to disturb the peace.
More broadly, entire categories of public disorderliness are now treated as things that Americans must tolerate. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit held that bans on public camping could constitute cruel and unusual punishment; the Supreme Court later overruled the decision. Public drug use was essentially legal in two states for five years. Who is harmed, proponents ask, by such “victimless” crimes? In the Wilsonian view, the answer is clear: the community itself and the normative process by which it remains functional and safe.
If we are to make the best and sanest use of our laws and liberties,” Wilson begins the final chapter of Thinking About Crime, “we must first adopt a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned, and Utopian things forgotten.” It is classic Wilson: a counsel of prudence against radicalism and a dismissal of unrealistic reforms in favor of sobriety.
Taking Wilson seriously means recognizing that such sobriety rests on his broader vision of crime and its causes. Crime occurs not from deprivation but from the absence of forces that restrain it—forces subtle and easily disrupted, as they have been by the legal and cultural war that the nation has waged against them for decades. We need to end that war and restore order to its rightful place in law and culture, or we will pay a steep price.
