James Q. Wilson Remembered

James Q. Wilson, one of the nation’s most influential social scientists, passed away yesterday at the age of 80. Although he was possibly best known for this “broken windows” theory of crime, he also wrote many books throughout his life, including two influential ones about political beaurocracy, entitled “Political Organizations” and “Beaurocracy.”

Wilson’s “broken windows” theory was based off of a famous experiment done, where two cars were left abandoned on a city street, one in perfect condition, and the other sporting a broken window. the result was that the car with the broken window was vandalized further, stripped of eveything inside it, whereas the car in perfect condition was left that way.

From this experiement, James W. Wilson and George L. Keiling wrote a paper that was published in 1982, suggesting that we can stop serious crime by first stopping petty crimes, such as vandalism. This theory came after both the experiment with two cars, as well as observing the correlation between police ignoring petty crimes (i.e. vandalism and petty theft) and focusing on more serious offenses, such as murder and robbery (grand theft). Their theory changed the way that cities treat small crimes, and also had a direct effect on lowering crime in our country.

Mark Kleiman in the Daily Standard wrote that, “Jim wanted to get things right, even when that meant acknowledging that he had earlier been wrong: a tendency not common among academics, or among participants in policy debates.” Wilson passed away on Saturday, after a long battle with Leukemia.