The hard lesson about crime causation is that we the people have failed to do what most of us know is right. We have failed to parent and school our children effectively and to use punishment along the way. We have allowed delinquency, crime, and even violence to increase. The result has been too many children and adults whose offenses could have been prevented who now must be punished severely. We have failed even to provide the prison space for that. Many of us, and especially our children, have been the victims. Violence, especially among youngsters, has become so alarming that the whole country has concluded that something must be done. Although crime rates in general have declined, according to statistics kept by the Census Bureau, violent crime has increased. Juvenile crime, especially violent crime, has gone up even more.
Recent polls, such as one by the New York Times/CBS News, indicate that the public is now as concerned about crime as it is about the economy. Asked what is the single biggest problem facing the nation, 19 percent said "crime or violence," 15 percent said "health care," 14 percent said "the state of the economy." The number who mentioned crime, violence, or guns was up from 2 percent to 20 percent from January 1992.
Our leaders have been similarly affected by the specter of violence. A strategy of punishment-and-prevention has emerged and enchanted them from the attorney general down; it gets repeated in speeches and newspaper columns like a mantra. And it is high time because it is the right response.
But a fundamental truth about policy is this: Prescription rests on diagnosis. Does this mean that the violence afflicting us stems from the absence of punishment and prevention? It does. There has been too little of each--too little punishment, too little prevention. But what that means is complex and controversial.
Criminologists of recent decades have argued (at least implicitly) that violence, like delinquency more generally, is not the result of the absence of punishment. Indeed, they contend that there has been altogether too much punishment. The corrections system, they have said, is too punitive: Prison sentences are generally too long and too many offenders receive them.
Criminologists have resisted the idea that punishment deters. Twenty years ago, James Q. Wilson, formerly of Harvard and now of UCLA, observed that the leading criminology textbooks of that day simply dismissed the idea of deterrence. Only gradually, and only by a handful, have some criminologists come to appreciate what common sense tells most of us: that the threat of punishment is an important consideration in the choice of
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