Crime and Punishment

In two brilliant books, Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, Wilson countered the despairing fatalism of law enforcement in the 1960s and 1970s. He argued that it was not first necessary to solve all of society's other ills—racism, unemployment—before reducing crime. He demonstrated that practicable changes in the behaviors of police and courts could powerfully alter the choices made by potential wrongdoers. If (as he hypothesized) a relatively small number of criminals committed relatively large amounts of crime, then holding those few criminals in prison longer would substantially reduce the overall crime rate. And so it has proven over the past generation of the swiftest record reduction of criminality in American history.