Crime and the Conservatives

To understand why we’ve arrived at our present impasse in dealing with crime, we must first reconsider the assumptions that have guided the dominant policies on crime in America through most of the past decade. This
means taking a hard look at the conservative argument about the causes of crime.

At first blush, that may seem a contradiction in terms; during the ’70s, conservatives often ridiculed the very idea of searching for the causes of crime. James Q. Wilson took...