Free Republic

There are undoubtedly many people who are alive today because of James Q. Wilson, who died last week. He was not a doctor or medical scientist, nor was he a fireman or coast guardsman who rescued people from immediate dangers. James Q. Wilson was a scholar who studied crime. He saved lives because his penetrating analyses of crime and the effect of the criminal law debunked the theories of other intellectuals, which had led judges and legislators to ease up on criminals — leading in turn to skyrocketing rates of crime, including murder. Prior to 1960, murder rates in the...

There are undoubtedly many people who are alive today because of James Q. Wilson, who died last week. He was not a doctor or medical scientist, nor was he a fireman or coast guardsman who rescued people from immediate dangers. James Q. Wilson was a scholar who studied crime. He saved lives because his penetrating analyses of crime, and the effect of the criminal law, debunked the theories of other intellectuals, which had led judges and legislators to ease up on criminals — leading in turn to skyrocketing rates of crime, including murder. Prior to 1960, murder rates in...

Jobs have fled, lawbreaking hasn’t risen—and criminologists are scratching their heads.During the seventies and eighties, scarcely any newspaper story about rising crime failed to mention that it was strongly linked to unemployment and poverty. The argument was straightforward: if less legitimate work was available, more illegal work would take place. Certain scholars agreed. Economist Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, a Nobel laureate, developed a powerful theory that crime was rational—that a person will commit crime if the expected utility exceeds that of using his time and other resources in pursuit of alternative activities, such as leisure or legitimate...

Academic debates occasionally get pretty ugly, and that is just the way it is. Sometimes they get very ugly. There is one case that has bothered me for several years. James Q. Wilson is now 80 years old, and for decades he has been the most prominent criminologist in the country, responsible for a number of important ideas, such as the Broken Windows theory, which argues that urban disorder and vandalism produce additional crime. Undoubtedly, Wilson has made a number of enemies, as he has taken positions that upset some on the left. One such issue was Wilson’s involvement with...

Notwithstanding his status as America's greatest thinker on crime, punishment and social order, James Q. Wilson's toleration for minor deviancies, his own and other's, is notable. [...] Mr. Wilson is most famous for the phrase "broken windows," but he is quick to point out that it didn't originate with him. Philip Zimbardo of Stanford conducted an experiment in which he found that a car parked on a sedate street in a middle-class New York neighborhood would sit unvandalized for days—that is, until Mr. Zimbardo himself came back with a hammer and broke the first window. [...] "The biggest change in...

Children differ, as any parent of two or more knows. Some babies sleep through the night, others are always awake; some are calm, others are fussy; some walk at an early age, others after a long wait. Scientists have proved that genes are responsible for these early differences. But people assume that as children get older and spend more time under their parents’ influence, the effect of genes declines. They are wrong. For a century or more, we have understood that intelligence is largely inherited, though even today some mistakenly rail against the idea and say that nurture, not nature,...

An American government textbook author defends his work against allegations of conservative bias. Of course some textbooks are politically biased. It is not hard to understand why. Opinion surveys and studies of campaign contributions show that the great majority of academic social scientists are liberals, so no one should be astonished to learn that some liberals write left-leaning textbooks and that some of them assign them to their classes. No doubt there are right-wing textbooks as well, though I suspect that, given the shortage of conservative historians and political scientists, there are fewer of them. But in my experience, most...

American Exceptionalism By James Q. Wilson In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville discussed American exceptionalism in Democracy in America, and he is still correct. There was then and there continues now to be in this country a remarkable commitment to liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, and laissez-faire values. He gave three explanations for this state of affairs: We came to occupy a vast, largely empty, and isolated continent; we have benefited from a legal system that involves federalism and an independent judiciary; and we have embraced certain "habits of the heart" that were profoundly shaped by our religious tradition. Of these, Tocqueville rightly...

When a federal judge in Pennsylvania struck down the efforts of a local school board to teach "intelligent design," he rightly criticized the wholly unscientific nature of that enterprise. Some people will disagree with his view, arguing that evolution is a "theory" and intelligent design is a "theory," so students should look at both theories. But this view confuses the meaning of the word "theory." In science, a theory states a relationship between two or more things (scientists like to call them "variables") that can be tested by factual observations. We have a "theory of gravity" that predicts the speed...

In 2001, New York Times... liberal columnist Anthony Lewis was asked: "Have you changed your views on socialism?" Lewis' answer: "I'm still for it. But it doesn't work." ...Never underestimate "the power of bad ideas." No matter how successful some of the policies... since the early '90s have been, they'll always have critics on the left who treat accountability, self-reliance and high standards as the enemies of the downtrodden.... Welfare reform: One of the biggest successes of the Giuliani administration was its program of welfare reform, launched long before the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996. When Giuliani came into...

The Delusion of Darwinian Natural Law Marc D. GuerraIn a short, inconspicuous paragraph in the conclusion to the first edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin speculates that "in the distant future … psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." One hundred and forty years later, Darwin's eerie prediction about the revolutionary effect of his work on human beings' self-understanding seems all too prophetic. After a century of dissemination, the once-novel theory of evolution is widely accepted as established scientific fact. Given the quasi-religious hold...

We are Family When I was a teenager, it never would have occurred to me to blame the police, if I committed a crime or otherwise got in trouble, much less sue them. That´s probably because my mother never taught me to blame the police, and beat the hell out of me when I got in trouble; because I personally knew hero cops; and because no community of solidarity awaited me, if I sought to blame my troubles on the police. A substantial proportion of the adults in most urban black neighborhoods today – in some areas, the vast...

Toogood Reports [Wednesday, April 16, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/ Weeks before Saddam Hussein was toppled — in person and symbolically, in the form of statues — the New York Times started its campaign for the postwar defeat of the American military. Columnists Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman, and the Times' editorial writers, insisted that virtually immediately after victory, America would have to turn over control to the democratic will of the Iraqi people, and get out of the country. Our rivals and enemies (take your pick) in France, Germany, and Russia, have informed us that the U.S. enjoys neither...