Fixing Broken Windows. - book review

Public Interest, Wntr, 1997 by William A. Galston

In short, we must look at the impact of undesirable acts on the community, not just on the immediate victims. In the aggregate, disorderly behavior can be even more damaging to communities than are the serious crimes registered in official indices. The underlying theme of broken-windows policing is that fighting crime cannot be detached from - indeed, depends upon - restoring community.

Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters agree with Kelling and Coles that effective crime fighting rests on a cultural foundation. Their focus is on the "moral poverty" stemming from family disintegration, particularly from the lack of adult love and guidance. (They are notably silent on the role that "economic poverty" may play in exacerbating these pathologies.) They advocate public policies that would at least stop undermining families, as well as community and religious initiatives that would assist families and (when necessary) alleviate deeply troubled families of the responsibilities that they can no longer discharge.

Still, the bulk of Body Count is devoted not to reversing cultural trends but to more conventional strategies of crime fighting. The authors debunk the oft-heard allegation that U.S. prisons are filled with non-violent first-timers; in fact, over 90 percent are either violent offenders or recidivists. They show that even violent offenders spend relatively little time in prison before release and that large numbers of criminals committed the crime for which they are incarcerated while on probation or parole. They make a plausible case that the failure to restrain known criminals is at the heart of current crime statistics and that the social benefits of a strategy even more focused on incarceration than is our current approach would substantially exceed the social costs. (This strategy entails not just keeping repeat criminals behind bars longer but also keeping community-based offenders under stricter supervision.)

Not surprisingly, the authors of Body Count focus on juvenile crime. In one of the most innovative sections of the book, they trace the connection between youth crime and the easy access to alcohol in urban areas. They recommend a strategy for reducing its availability - zoning restrictions, the control of advertising targeted to young people, and the maintenance of high legal drinking ages. (Their analysis suggests that consumption of alcoholic beverages is affected by price as well as physical availability; it is therefore not clear why they refrain from endorsing a substantial increase in taxes on such beverages as a complement to their regulatory approach.)

The authors also decry the recent increase in drug use by young people, which they trace to reduced anti-drug information, counterproductive messages from the media, drug-legalization romanticism, community tolerance of open-air drug markets, and the ambivalence of baby-boom parents on the subject. They present evidence suggesting that some elements of the current administration's anti-drug strategy - in particular, creating drug courts and focusing treatment resources on hard-core addicts - are neither effective nor efficient. They propose a revised strategy that emphasizes comprehensive education for young people, an all-out assault on open-air drug markets, the renewed use of sanctions and interdiction against foreign sources of supply, and the systematic destruction of major drug-trafficking organizations operating within the United States. While most of these proposals seem plausible, it must be noted that the evidence in favor of their efficacy is less than fully compelling. In any event, they are likely to add fuel to an already raging debate over the future of U.S. drug-fighting efforts.