Malcolm Gladwell acknowledges the problems with "Broken Windows", but he wants to know what else could have caused the dramatic drop in crime in the 90s. Another famous author, Steven Levitt, answered that question in his book, Freakonomics. Chapter 4 of that book ranks all the proposed reasons for the crimes drop, and identifies an important reason that was overlooked. Unfortunately, that reason was so controversial that Levitt's challenge to Broken Windows is rarely discussed.
For our meeting we will go over Levitt's analysis. There is no good video on YouTube; so I will use excerpts from the audiobook during the meeting. For those that want to read about the analysis, but don't have the book, there is a PDF online.
----------------------------------- Updated 9/22/16 --------------------------------------
Here is the link to the short video shown at the beginning of the meeting:
----------------------------------- Updated 9/22/16 --------------------------------------
Here is the link to the short video shown at the beginning of the meeting:
The level of violence occurring in America’s poor, urban, and largely minority neighborhoods is something relatively new. That is, if we look closely I think we would find that most of these neighborhoods were vibrant and reasonably safe places to live in at one time. So what has changed? Human genetics has remained fundamentally unchanged for tens of thousands of years, so the human beings who live there now are genetically no different from the human beings who lived there seventy years ago, nor are they fundamentally different from those who live in other places that do not experience a similar level of violence. Culture has changed, but cultural changes don’t happen in a vacuum. So what is different? Obviously, increasing police presence, locking people up, reducing illegal drugs, and preventing unwanted births will reduce crime, but such actions do nothing to address the underlying causes and indeed involve no effort to even understand what those might be. If we can identify changes that have occurred in today’s more violent communities since the 1950s we might gain some insight as to underlying causes of that violence, without which it seems impossible to do anything other than continue to apply some rather expensive band-aids, and some people would argue, some rather inhumane remedies.
ReplyDeleteEven though the over-all crime rate is dropping nationwide, there are some areas that crime is now on the rise. Baltimore seems to be one of them. The Freakonomics analysis covers the crime drop of the 90s. There may be other local factors in areas where there are currently a rise in crime. Community distrust of the police is the factor most often stated.
DeleteI am taking a criminology course at HCC and it is fascinating. Something everyone should know more about. My instructor is a former defense attorney and she is excellent!
ReplyDelete