V iolent crime is down in New York and many other cities, but there are two big reasons to keep the champagne corked. One is that murder, rape, robbery, and assault remain at historic highs: the streets of Manhattan, like those of Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles, remain much less safe today than in the s and s 2 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: AN ECONOMIC APPROACH victed and the nature and extent of punishments differ greatly from person to person and activity to activity. Yet, in spite of such diversity, some common properties are shared by practically all legislation, and these properties form the subject matter of this essay Jun 11, · And globally, violent crime did indeed collapse, as streets emptied and public interaction declined. Murder rates were stable or fell all over the world. El Salvador, for example, regarded as one of the most violent countries on earth, saw a year low in homicides. Our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, effectively trod water — with
30 Crime and Punishment Essay Topics | blogger.com
Find the collection here. In the mids The State of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program," designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them crime essay walking beats.
The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in crime essay eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it crime essay headquarters control over patrol officers, crime essay.
Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was hard work, it kept crime essay outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their chances for making a "good pinch. And academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a sop to public opinion. But since the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go along. Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.
Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime crime essay. But residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, crime essay, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime staying at home with the doors locked, for example.
Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars. These findings may be taken as evidence that the skeptics were right- foot patrol has no effect on crime; it merely fools the citizens into thinking that they are safer. But in our view, and crime essay the view of the authors of the Police Foundation study of whom Kelling was crime essaythe citizens of Newark were not fooled at all.
They knew what the foot-patrol officers were doing, they knew it was different from what motorized officers do, and they knew that having officers walk beats did in fact make their neighborhoods safer, crime essay. But how can a neighborhood be "safer" when the crime rate has not gone down—in fact, may have gone up?
Crime essay the answer requires first that we understand what most often frightens people in public places, crime essay. Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a crime essay, violent attack by a stranger, crime essay. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities. But we tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people.
Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, crime essay, the mentally disturbed. What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods.
Though the neighborhoods were predominantly black and the foot patrolmen were mostly white, this "order-maintenance" function of the police was performed to the crime essay satisfaction of both parties. One of us Kelling spent many hours walking with Newark foot-patrol officers to see how they defined "order" and what they did to maintain it, crime essay. One beat was typical: a busy but dilapidated area in the heart of Newark, with many abandoned buildings, marginal shops several of which prominently displayed knives and straight-edged razors in their windowsone large department store, and, most important, a train station and several major bus stops.
Though the area was run-down, its streets were filled with people, because it was a major transportation center. The good order of this area was important not only to those who lived and worked there but also to many others, who had to move through it on their way home, to supermarkets, or to factories.
Crime essay people on the street were primarily black; the officer who walked the street was white. The people were made up of "regulars" and "strangers. The officer—call him Kelly—knew who the regulars were, and they knew him, crime essay.
As he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules.
Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops, crime essay, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering, crime essay, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden. If a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was assumed to be right, especially if the customer was a stranger.
If a stranger loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet, crime essay.
These rules were defined and enforced in collaboration with the "regulars" on the street. Another neighborhood might have different rules, but these, everybody understood, were the rules for this neighborhood. If someone violated them, the regulars not only turned crime essay Kelly for help but also ridiculed the violator.
Sometimes what Kelly did could be described as "enforcing the law," but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge. A determined skeptic might acknowledge that a skilled foot-patrol officer can maintain order but still insist that this sort of "order" has little to do with the real sources of crime essay fear—that is, with violent crime.
To a degree, crime essay, that is true. But two things must be borne in mind. First, outside observers should not assume that they know how much of the anxiety now endemic in many big-city neighborhoods stems from a fear of "real" crime and how much from a sense that the street is disorderly, a source of distasteful, crime essay encounters. The people of Newark, to judge from their behavior and their remarks to interviewers, apparently assign a high value to public order, and feel relieved and reassured when the police help them maintain that order.
Second, at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.
This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.
It has always been fun. Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in on some experiments testing the broken-window crime essay. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California, crime essay. The car in the Bronx was attacked by "vandals" within ten minutes of its "abandonment. Within twenty-four hours, virtually crime essay of value had been removed, crime essay.
Then random destruction began—windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult "vandals" were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than crime essay week.
Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, crime essay, the "vandals" appeared to be primarily respectable whites. Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding.
Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx—its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of "no one caring"—vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly.
But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard crime essay the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one crime essay. We suggest that "untended" behavior crime essay leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle.
A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy, crime essay. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant crime essay them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates, crime essay. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, crime essay, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off.
Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers. At this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly.
They will use the streets less often, crime essay, and when on the streets will stay apart from their fellows, crime essay, moving with averted eyes, crime essay, silent lips, and hurried steps.
But it will matter greatly to other people, whose lives crime essay meaning and satisfaction from local attachments rather than worldly involvement; for them, crime essay, the neighborhood will cease to exist except for a few reliable friends whom they arrange to meet. Such crime essay area is vulnerable to criminal invasion. Though it is not inevitable, it is more likely that here, crime essay, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs crime essay change hands, prostitutes will solicit, crime essay, and cars will be stripped.
That the drunks will be robbed by boys who do it as a lark, crime essay, and the prostitutes' customers will be robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps crime essay. That muggings will occur. Among those who often find it difficult to move away from this are the elderly. Surveys of citizens suggest that the elderly are much less likely to be the victims of crime than younger persons, and some have inferred from this that the well-known fear crime essay crime voiced by the elderly is an exaggeration: perhaps we ought not to design special programs to protect older persons; perhaps we should even try to talk them out of their mistaken fears.
This argument misses the point. The prospect of a confrontation with an obstreperous teenager or a drunken panhandler can be as fear-inducing for defenseless persons as the prospect of crime essay an actual robber; crime essay, to a defenseless person, the two kinds of confrontation are often indistinguishable. Moreover, the lower rate at which the elderly are victimized is a measure of the steps they have already taken—chiefly, staying behind locked doors—to minimize the risks they face.
Young men are more frequently attacked than older women, not because they are easier or more lucrative targets but because they are on the streets more. Nor is the connection between disorderliness and fear made only by the elderly. Susan Estrich, of the Harvard Law School, has recently gathered together a number of surveys on the sources of public fear. One, done in Portland, Oregon, indicated that three fourths of the adults interviewed cross to the other side of a street when they see crime essay gang of teenagers; another survey, in Baltimore, discovered that nearly half would cross the street to avoid even a single strange youth.
Criminology Video Essay: Theories of Crime Causation
, time: 23:18The War on Crime, LBJ and Ferguson: Time to Reassess the History | Time
Mar 20, · F ifty years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a “War on Crime,” a declaration that ushered in a new era of American law enforcement. Johnson’s turn toward crime Jun 11, · And globally, violent crime did indeed collapse, as streets emptied and public interaction declined. Murder rates were stable or fell all over the world. El Salvador, for example, regarded as one of the most violent countries on earth, saw a year low in homicides. Our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, effectively trod water — with 2 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: AN ECONOMIC APPROACH victed and the nature and extent of punishments differ greatly from person to person and activity to activity. Yet, in spite of such diversity, some common properties are shared by practically all legislation, and these properties form the subject matter of this essay
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