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Incivility and Crime
| Article
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20437 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
6,060 Words |
| Author
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James Q. Wilson
James Q. Wilson is Collins Professor of Management and Public
Policy at UCLA. His publications include Thinking about Crime
(1983), Essays on Character (1991) and Bureaucracy; What
Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (1991) |
Of late, modernization has been accompanied by criminality. Though there are some noteworthy exceptions (Japan being the most prominent), the economic advancement of a nation has been purchased at the price, among other things, of higher levels of property crime and, to a lesser extent of violent crime. Yet the evidence is also quite clear that those individuals who are most likely to commit crimes are not the most obvious beneficiaries of modernization; the criminals today, like those of yesteryear, tend to be the poor and the unschooled. How can we explain the failure of economic progress to produce higher levels of lawabidingness, especially since that progress has reduced the (relative) size of the population most likely to break the law?
This question is all the more puzzling when we realize that it is only economic progress in its contemporary form that seems to be associated with increased criminality. In the early nineteenth century, crime and disorder were quite common in the large cities of Europe and the United States but then became less so during the second half of that century, even though the size and density of these cities was increasing dramatically. Ted Robert Gurr found that in London, Stock Holm, and Sydney, the number of murders, assaults, and thefts that came to the attention of the police declined "irregularly, but consistently, for a half a century or more". Public safety continued to improve in these cities well into the twentieth century. In Boston, Philadelphia, Rochester, Muncie, and New York City, crime rates rose in the early nineteenth century and then began to decline beginning around the middle of that century. Philadelphia is the best-studied city in this regard. There, Roger Lane counted 3.3 murder indictments per hundred thousand persons in the middle of the nineteenth century but only 2.1 by century's end, a decline of 36 percent.
The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of industrialization and urbanization and, in the United States, one in which millions of immigrants entered the nation. Despite rapid economic growth and convulsive social changes, crime rates appear to have declined, or at worse, to have traced an irregular pattern around a relatively stable trend line.
The contemporary period has also been one of economic growth and urbanization, and unlike a century ago these changes have been accompanied by higher rates of crime. In the United States between 1960 and 1978 the robbery rate more than tripled, the auto theft rate more than doubled, and the burglary rate nearly tripled. Beginning around 1955, the rate of serious ("indictable") offenses in England
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