It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture. - book reviews

Crime, edited by James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilia (ICS Press, 650 pp., $69.95)

It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture, by Wendy Kaminer (Addison-Wesley, 203 pp., $22)

MAYBE you've started to scout around for some light summer reading. Keep looking. Crime, a hefty collection of essays by the country's most distinguished criminologists, isn't it. But you might want to dive in anyway, if only for the guns, drugs, gangs, cops, genetics, prisons, media violence, family breakdown. And some surprises.

Crime -- the grand simplicity of the title suggests both the scope and the ambition of the project: to sum up the state of the criminologist's art and the implications for public policy as the hot winds of contention buffet Washington and the state capitols. What's known. What's discredited. And what's problematic -- which seems at times to be just about everything.

A never-ending upward spiral of crime? Not so. Crime rates zoomed in the Sixties and Seventies, but they've stayed more or less flat for the past 15 years, with one very frightening exception: homicides by young males, more and more often committed with guns. America as crime capital of the West? Violent crime, yes. But serious property crime is actually lower in the U.S. than in much of the rest of the industrialized world.

Criminologists have learned a good deal since the eminent James Q. Wilson edited a similar but less comprehensive work more than a decade ago, especially about strategies to reduce crime -- which show promise and which don't. This time around, Wilson and co-editor Joan Petersilia are joined by two dozen specialists in twenty fields of inquiry. There's some overlap, but the repetitions are less redundant than complementary -- and sometimes conflicting: Wilson says he was looking for the best scholarship, not harmony. Insofar as discernible political views intrude, which is rarely, there's no consistent outlook. And the prose isn't half bad: there are occasional slides into sociologese, but, far more often, complicated concepts and connections are conveyed with a clarity that is probably a tribute to the editors as well as the authors.

Most criminologists think we rely on prisons too much -- a view amply represented here. Wilson himself isn't so sure. On this point his own views are closer to what the lay public seems to want: more people sent away for longer terms. But incarceration has already risen dramatically since the early Eighties. Why didn't crime go down?

The evidence is ambiguous. Are liberals right about rising injustice? Are conservatives right about cultural decay? If you believe in "root causes" -- from either perspective -- it's conceivable that without the increase in imprisonment crime rates would have gone up sharply instead of holding steady. And one essay notes a provocative sidelight: Most people prosecuted for drug crimes have very high rates of non-drug criminality as well, so putting even minor drug offenders away might have the serendipitous effect of inhibiting crime in general.

As the book makes clear, there is little disagreement among scholars -- of whatever political persuasion -- that genetics and other biological factors play a role in criminality. Just how large a role is endlessly debatable, and there is always the danger of confusing correlation with cause. But there are "predictors," involving both nature and nurture. They do not, of course, "predict" that a given individual is going to become a criminal; they're just statistical risk factors, odds-increasers. Below-normal intelligence is a predictor. So, obviously, is sex: males -- especially young males -- account for most crime.

Poverty and race are predictors, but far less so in themselves than in combination with other factors, such as residence in an unstable neighborhood with a high level of various social pathologies, including widespread illegitimacy. In his essay "The Community," Robert Sampson notes that crime comparisons by race can be deceptive because poor blacks generally live in more chaotic urban settings than do poor whites, and community malaise is a predictor that feeds back to other criminogenic factors in a vicious circle. (Taking that a step further, it might not be such a stretch to argue that social science itself can be criminogenic: The reigning intellectual prejudices of the past thirty years, as translated into policies such as the attempt to coerce "racial balance" in the schools, have only increased racial isolation by driving whites out of the cities and intensifying the concentrations of poverty and pathology left behind.)

Wilson & Co. by no means ignore the racial aspects of crime, but they tiptoe through that minefield with a carefulness that, all things considered, is probably responsible as well as politic. Curiously, there is hardly a mention of capital punishment.

Devotees of that debate, however, can get their fix from Wendy Kaminer's It's All the Rage, a catchy title chosen, I guess, to convey the idea that America has become a very angry land, and that the anger distorts both public attitudes and public policy on crime.