Body Count: Moral Poverty … and How to Win America's War against Crime and Drugs. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 11, 1996 by Christie Davies

IT is an appropriate time for Americans to be writing books about violence. As William Bennett, John DiIulio, and John Walters make clear, the United States is now the most violent of the civilized nations, with ten million violent crimes every year; this represents a five-fold increase since the 1950s. Between 1990 and 1994 there were nearly 120,000 murders, twice the death toll of the Vietnam War. Although there has been a modest fall in the incidence of violent crime in recent years, teenage violence, including murder, has continued to increase dramatically. As soon as the proportion of teenagers in America rises again, in the echo of a past baby boom, so too will the incidence of criminal violence; indeed the future will be even worse, for with every decade teenage criminals become meaner, nastier, and more violent than their predecessors.

The reason for this surge of violence has nothing to do with the alleged causes cited by the liberal Left, such as poverty, social injustice, or racism, but is the result of an increasing "moral poverty," an apt phrase coined by Bennett and his colleagues. By this they mean the failure -- particularly in homes with a single parent or where one or both of the parents are themselves deviants or even criminals -- to provide children appropriate moral training. The trends are clear: rising illegitimacy results in increased violence.

During the last thirty to forty years economic prosperity has grown and there has been a five-fold rise in social spending, but illegitimacy, crimes of violence, and property crimes have all vastly increased. Bennett et al. rightly identify moral factors as being at the core of this social regression. My own earlier research on other countries not only confirms their finding but strongly supports their concluding hypothesis that the "religious dimension of moral poverty . . . is the most important dimension of all."

Where I am forced to disagree with Bennett (a former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy) and his co-authors is in the equal emphasis given to crime and drugs in the very title of their book, which speaks of "America's War against Crime and Drugs." The link between these two evils is not as simple as it seems. In particular the authors unreasonably attack NR for calling for drug legalization.

Nowhere do they properly confront the point made by Nathaniel Pallone and James Hennessy that 26 per cent of property crimes and 27 per cent of robberies are carried out to get money to buy drugs. Should the price of drugs rise thanks to successful law enforcement, this will presumably lead to even more crime. I do not dispute the inverse of this, as shown by Bennett et al.: that a fall in the black-market price of cocaine, heroin, or marijuana leads to a corresponding rise in the number of drug-related emergency-room cases. Were tobacco to be banned tomorrow there would be a marked improvement in the nation's health, much as there was during Prohibition (of alcohol) in the 1920s, but there would also be a huge upsurge in organized crime and hence violence as bootleg cigarettes and chewing tobacco poured in from the Balkans, Egypt, and Zimbabwe. True, heroin and cocaine can rot the moral fiber not just of individuals but also of communities, but then as Bennett and his co-authors themselves show, this is equally true of alcohol consumption. The answer is neither prohibition nor a wide-open market but a high degree of control that stops short of an unwinnable "war against drugs" and uses morality and derision, taxation and licensed prescribing as its key forms of pressure, not criminal law.

George Kelling and Catherine Coles's plan for reducing crime in America by restoring order in the community, an order symbolized by the speedy fixing of broken windows, is timely and persuasive. On the basis of case histories of successful crime-reduction policies in New York City (especially in the subways) and Seattle, and of valiant but flawed attempts in Buffalo and San Francisco, the authors are able to show that the key to reducing crime is the restoration of order. During the last thirty to forty years, streets and other public spaces, and bus, train, and subway stations, have become places of disorder thronged by homeless vagrants, aggressive panhandlers, the heedless mentally afflicted, and the drunken and drug-stupefied who sprawl on the sidewalks. They inspire not merely distaste but real fear among tourists, commuters, and shoppers. Worse still, they are the sea in which the real villains --pickpockets, the muggers, and the armed drug dealers -- swim.

What Mr. Kelling and Miss Coles have shown is that when the police ignore the "petty" problems of disorder and concentrate on major crime, they fail; the perpetrators of serious crimes continue to elude them. By contrast, if the police impose order by arresting fare-beaters and aggressive beggars, moving on loungers and idlers, forcefully directing the inebriated and the mad to appropriate refuges, and stamping out disorderly conduct, then serious crime falls. Such has been the experience of several cities.