Clancys Bar on Third Avenue ) that the Pope and Bishops "ought
to be charismatic types who see their job as turning us on and supporting us in doing our things,"31 Conceivably, the effect of such words on working- and lower-middle-class persons may be to undermine their moral foundations rather than (as the speakers
intend) to renew and strengthen them, The alternative to respect for, external authority is not necessarily respect for internal authority: it t
may be no respect at all,
Other changes in public opinion have also made it easier for working- and lower-working-class people to commit crimes, Perhaps the most important of these changes is the wide acceptance during the 1960S of the view that individuals belonging to groups that have
suffered injustice or are severely disadvantaged (for example
Negroes and the poor) have a kind of quasi right to have their offenses,
against the law extenuated or even to have them regarded as political
acts reflecting a morality "higher" than obedience to law, Even crimes that were formerly regarded as wholly unpolitical and
immoral-
rape, for example were in the 1960S invested with political and moral meaning, and hence with some justification, when committed by one who (whether this meaning was in his mind or not when he committed the crime) belonged to a group that possessed this special license to have its violations of law extenuated or even approved,
Eldridge Cleaver, for example, in his autobiographical Soul on lee explains the apparently numerous rapes that he committed, some of them against black women, on the grounds that racial injustice had created in him a powerful attraction-repulsion to white women,32 It is
plausible to suppose that many of his hundreds of thousands of readers accept the view that a rape that can be interpreted as a gesture of social protest is not wholly without justification and may even be in some way admirable,
In the 1960S the Negro crime rate appears to have increased far more than can be accounted for by changes in the age distribution of the population, Robbery arrests, for example, more than doubled and Negroes account for nearly four-fifths of the difference between the number of arrests at the beginning and at the end of the decade, It is plausible to suggest that the rhetoric of the civil-rights movement and of the Great Society (including the much-publicized emphasis given to
SEVERAL KINDS OF CRIME 195
white racism" by the Kerner Commission) encouraged many blacks to blame the social system for all their problems and to feel that racial injustice, past as well as present, somehow justified not only "denial of responsibility" on their part but also "condemnation of the condemn- . ers" in acts of aggression,33 In other words, the atmosphere of the 1960S may have spread the impression, especially among the young, that, as victims of oppression, Negroes had, if not a license to break the law, at least reduced responsibility for breaking it. Although the
overwhelming majority of their victims continued to be other Negroes, there seems to have been a decided increase in the propor- tion of attacks on whites, The number of law enforcement officers killed by Negroes has increased in recent years, (In 1963- I 967 there were 298 such killings; of the 398 offenders identified, 38 percent
were Negro, In 1968-1972 there were 488 killings; of the 686
offenders identified, 55 percent were Negro,) Impressionistic and
fragmentary evidence suggests that explicitly racial elements may in the last few years have become more important in the motivation of some Negro offenders as, for example, in the case of two youths who, when they held up a Philadelphia trolley in the Spring of 1973,
announced they would rob only white passengers,34 "I am increas-
ingly convinced," writes Marvin Wolfgang, the criminologist , "
that among many black teen-agel's and young adults there is a systematic
diffusion of the Soul on Ice ideology that ripping off whites as a kind of compensatory behavior is acceptable, tolerated and even encour- aged, Raping white women, stealing from white commercial establish- ments, mugging whites in the street and burglarizing white residential quarters are all increasingly viewed by many black juveniles espe- cially as behavior that is Robin Hood in style and another mark of victory for the black community,
"35
Although, as this suggests, policymakers have probably increased
the propensity of certain groups to crime (without
, of course
intending to do so or even being aware of having done so), it does not follow that by pursuing a more enlightened policy they could sig- nificantly reduce it. Certainly in the short run, and probably in the long run as well, the main factors influencing both the propensity of various groups to crime and the size of these groups in short, the citys potential for crime must be taken as given, As a later chapter
196 / THE UNHEAVENLY CITY REVISITED
will contend, it is very doubtful whether in a free country, or indeed in f
any country, either the size or the culture of the lower class can be
changed according to plan, With respect to the other factors that are most significant for crime sex and age the constraints are at least as great. The policymaker must take both the number of boys in the city and the fact that " boys will be boys" as given, Conceivably, he might in effect reduce their numbers by shortening the period of their sociological and psychological (as opposed to biological) adolescence and youth for example, by reducing the school-leaving age and by improving their opportunities to work but even this would not change the situation fundamentally,
What the policymaker can do (in principle, at least) is reduce inducements to crime, These, it will be recalled, are the benefits and costs entering into the individual's calculus in consequence of the situation in which he is placed. Even though his propensity toward crime is great, he will not commit a crime if situational factors make some noncriminal action appear more profitable, Similarly, even if his
propensity is very small, he will commit a crime if the situational benefits of doing so are sufficiently great.
The implication is, of course, that efforts to deter crime should concentrate on increasing the inducements to noncriminal behavior especially those offered to persons who are near the margin between
crime and noncrime that is, who do not need to be moved very far one way or the other. In principle, this may be done either by raising the costs of crime or by raising the benefits of noncrime,
One way of raising the benefits of noncrime is by lowering its relative cost. Thus, for example, it has been suggested that if some public or quasi-public organization were to make usable, second-hand
cars available on a loan basis , or at very low cost, to poor youths,
perhaps also helping them to learn to drive and to get drivers' licenses fewer cars would be stolen,36 Another way would be to introduce the individual to new and preferred action possibilities, Parachute jump- ing, skiing on fast slopes, and "golden gloves" boxing, for example may offer slum boys better opportunities to display "heart" than does stealing cars. The practical difficulty is, however
, that some
. these alternatives may be more costly in life and limb or in money than the actions for which substitutes are needed, Juvenile del in-
SEVERAL KINDS OF CRIME 197
quency is not as destructive as is generally supposed, The number of boys and girls killed or seriously injured in acts of delinquency is probably small compared to the number killed or seriously injured
in football and skiing accidents and it is certainly trivial compared to the number who lose life or limb their own or someone else
seeking thrills on the highway;:J7 the stealing that the young
do is not of enormous economic importance either (about 90 percent of all stolen cars are recovered), Moreover, there are some offenses
for which no socially acceptable substitutes can be found, If a boy must defy authority, he obviously must do so in a way that the authorities do not approve,
Another way of raising the benefits of noncrime is by increasing the relative rate of return from it, In the view of some economists lack of
job opportunities caused the rise in crime in the middle and latter 1960S; therefore "a successful attack on rising crime rates must consider the employment problems facing young people,"38 This
argument, however, can be turned around: the availability of easy money in the " hustles" (or, as some economists are now calling it, the irregular economy ) may have caused withdrawals from the labor force which have been wrongly perceived 'as lack of job opportunities, This view receives some support from Stanley Friedlander, who,
after studying unemployment and crime rates in 30 cities in 1960 and 1966, concludes that "contrary to the literature, the more property crimes in a city, the lower the unemployment rate for nonwhites in both time periods," People engaged in crime or supported by it, he writes, "had means of support that allowed them not to work and not
to be counted in the labor force, The dramatic result is less unemployment (among nonwhites) in cities with high property crime
rates. "39
Impressionistic evidence from the social anthropologist Elliot
Liebow in his book Tallys Corner suggests that some workers move freely back and forth between the " irregular" and "regular" econo-
mies depending upon the opportunities of the day, In a recent year, the crime rate in Washington for the month of August jumped
percent over the preceding month, A veteran police officer explained the increase to David L. Bazelon, Chief Judge, U,S, Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia,
198 THE UNHEAVENLY CITY REVISITED
It's quite simple. . . . You see, August was a very wet month. . . . These people wait on the street corner each morning around 6:00 or 6:30 for a truck to pick them up and take them to a construction site. I f it's raining, that truck doesn t come, and the men are going to be idle that day. If the bad weather keeps up for three days. . , we know we are going to have trouble on our hands - and sure enough, there invariably follows a rash of
purse-snatchings, house-breakings and the like. . . . These people have to eat like the rest of us, you know.
Most stealing is done by persons who want small amounts now, For'
them a job that must be worked at regularly and that pays only at the end of the week is not a real alternative to stealing, Even if the wage rate is high, such a job is of no interest to one who wants only a few dollars - enough, say, to buy a couple of six-packs of beer and a
carton of cigarettes but wants them now this very day, perhaps this very hour. What is needed to reduce stealing, then, is not so much high employment and rising incomes as it is greater opportunity for people who live in the present to get small sums when they want themo r Paying unskilled workers by the day instead of the week would help matters some, So would paying them for days that they are prevented from working by weather, the illness of a family member, or some other good reason, So far as employment levels are concerned, the
need is not so much for more " good" jobs as it is for more casual ones jobs that, although not high paying, are readily available to persons who want to "make a few bucks" when, and only when, the spirit moves them, Boys, especially, need such job opportunities;
perhaps there is no more economical way of reducing juvenile delinquency, and thus crime in general, than by repealing the mini- mum wage and relaxing the child-labor and school-attendance laws,
The main effect of these laws, it is probably safe to say, is to make stealing the boys easiest, if not his only, way of getting the money and
other things he thinks he needs.
If making it easier to earn money is one way of influencing the outcome of the individual's calculus of profit and loss when he con- templates crime, increasing the probability both of his being caught and of his being sever~y punished is another. Obviously, one way of
doing the former with respect to the kinds of crimes that occur in public places is to put more policemen on patrol. From the standpoint
SEVERAL KINDS OF CRIME 199
of the calculating individual, the greater probability of a po- licemans appearing represents a cost; the higher this cost, the
less likely (other things being equal) the individual is to commit a
crime, "Operation 25," an experiment tried all too briefly by the New
York Police Department in 1954, gave indications that rather dramatic results can be obtained by " saturating" an area with patrol-
men.41 For a four-month period the force in a high-crime district of Manhattan was doubled, Muggings fell from 69 to 7, auto thefts from 78 to 24, and assaults from 185 to 132, Murders, however, increased from 6 to 8, (Since it generally takes place in private, murder is not likely to be deterred by the presence on the street of any number of policemen, ) To what extent the drop in crime reflected not deterrence
from crime altogether but rather deterrence from crime
in t/wt
particular precinct (that is, its displacement to a less heavily patrolled one) there is, of course, no way of knowing,
Attaching a stiffer penalty to an offense sometimes, but by
means always, raises the cost of the action significantly, In the first place, the penalties most likely to deter a middle- or working-class person the disgrace that his arrest and conviction will bring upon his family and the prospect of losing his job are not penalties at all to those whose families would not feel disgraced (and to whom it would not matter if they did) and whose chances of getting ajob in the . secondary labor market would not be affected by any number of arrests, So far as those who commit most of the common crimes are
concerned, it is normally only legal penalties fines and imprisonment that enter into the calculus at all, These sometimes make a difference: when the penalty for prostitution was drastically reduced in New York City, the number of prostitutes in the city . increased very quickly, some coming from cities hundreds Of miles
" away in order to take advantage of the lower costs of doing business there.
The
opportunities to deter crime by threateningpenalties-
especially to deter serious crime. by threatening severe penal- ties are sharply limited, In part, this is because the probability of being caught is negligible for minor offenses.43 (Of the serious crimes committed in 1972, only one-fifth were solved by arrests.) But it is also, as James Q. Wilson has pointed out, because severity of pun-
200 THE UNHEAVENLY CITY REVISITED
ishment is subject to rapidly diminishing returns (the difference between a one- and a five-year sentence appearing large and that between a twenty- and a twenty-five year one small) and because the more severe the penalty the less likely it is to be imposed, "To insure . conviction, to avoid an expensive trial, to reduce the chances of
reversal on appeal, and to give expression to their own views of benevolence, prosecutors and judges will try to get a guilty plea, and, all they can offer in return is a lesser sentence, The more severe the
sentence, the greater the bargaining power of the accused, , , ,"1'+
Several recent studies have found that increasing the probability of punishment generally has more deterrent effect than increasing the severity of it,45 Antunes and Hunt, taking as their measure of"
probability the number of persons sent to prison each year in each state for a given crime divided by the number of those crimes reported in those states in the previous year, showed that where a crime was most likely to lead to imprisonment it was least likely to be commit- ted, There was no such association between severity of punishment, as f:
measured by the median length of prison sentence, except in the case of murder, (Capital punishment was left out of account,4(j) In an earlier study, Tittle found that for all offenses except murder the rate
of crime decreased as the probability of punishment increased no
matter what the level of severity, Curiously, the association was
weakest in more highly urbanized areas.47 In still another study,
Ehrlich found that much depends upon the offender s attitude toward risk: one who is averse to risk is deterred more by an increase in the severity of punishment than by an equal increase in the probabil- ~
ity of it whereas with one who prefers risk the opposite is the case, The policy significance of these findings may change, however, as Reynolds has pointed out, if one takes into account the costs of the two methods,49 Increasing the severity of punishment is very much less costly than increasing the probability of it, and the difference in cost for some crimes at least is so great as to make the latter
method appear nothing short of extravagant despite its greater effectiveness. He has worked out the following table which compares the cost of deterring a marginal property crime by each method,
As a practical matter, even for serious crimes (murder being a r partial exception) the probability of being caught is small, that of
Final cost per crime deterred by increasing probability Final cost per crime deterred by increasing sentence
SEVERAL KINDS OF CRIME 201
Burglary Robbery Larceny
$7,050 $5,900 $8,400
$3,175 $3,450 $ 675
being convicted smaller, and that of being severely punished smaller still. If the accompanying diagram, from the 1969 report of the
Violence Commission, were brought up to date, there is no doubt that the small circles would shrink considerably, It is indicative of this that despite the rapidly rising crime rates, the number of persons in prison has declined steadily and in 1970 (the latest year for which figures are available) was 23,720 (10 percent) less than in 1961.
The threat of even very stiff future penalties would not have a deterrent effect upon radically present-oriented individuals. It is likely that even to a normal person a punishment appears smaller the farther off in the future it lies, With the radically present-oriented, this distortion of perspective is much greater: a punishment that is far enough off to appear small to a normal person appears tiny, or is quite invisible, to a present-oriented one, His calculus of benefits and costs is defective, since benefits are in the present where he can see them while costs are in the future where he cannot. Accordingly, even if he knows that the probability of his being caught is high and that the penalty for the crime is severe, he may commit it anyway; no matter how severe, a penalty that lies weeks or months away is not a part of reality for him,
The implication is that in order to deter juveniles and lower-class persons (the present-oriented classes of offenders), penalties must follow very closely upon the commission of crimes, Speeding up court processes so that fines will be imposed or jail sentences begin hours or days, rather than weeks or months, after arrest would probably reduce somewhat the rate of common crimes even if the probability of arrest and conviction remained as low as it now is,
As a practical matter, it is probably impossible to arrange a court procedure that would bring punishment within the time horizon of the
most present-oriented, In order to deter these, the judge and jury