A Rhythm to the Madness

By James Q. Wilson Susanne Washburn

Is there a link between crime and population growth? And how does social change aggravate the current crime surge? James Q. Wilson, professor of management and public policy at UCLA and author of Thinking About Crime and The Moral Sense, gave his views last week in an interview with TIME assistant editor Susanne Washburn. Excerpts:

Any historian knows that crime waves, in fact, are cyclical. Earlier ones occurred in the 1830s, the late 1860s and the 1920s. The question is, What causes the cycles, and what affects their timing? Crime was abnormally low in the 1940s and 1950s and began to rise around 1963 and peaked in the late 1970s. The increase in crime from 1963 to 1980 was enormous -- and it occurred in a period of general prosperity. Part of the explanation is that the population got younger, because of the baby boom -- and younger men are more likely to commit crime than older ones.

Then in the early 1980s, almost all forms of crime began to decline for a while. The baby boom got old, so the baby boomers were no longer in the crime- prone years. We saw this in declining public-school enrollments. Now, however, if you look at what's happening in elementary schools, enrollments are going up because the children of baby boomers are starting to move through the cycle. My guess -- and the guess of many other criminologists -- is that by the end of this decade we will see an increase in the general crime rate regardless of what the government does.

Obviously, we want to do everything possible to moderate its severity. And public policy ought to be directed toward that end. The public expects it. I think politicians will face up to it. But we simply have to realize we are in an era when our ability to moderate the severity of crimes is substantially reduced from what it once was. We are much more reliant on public policy, which is a crude and not very effective instrument. And we are much less dependent on informal social controls, which, when they work, are the most powerful controls.

The most significant thing in the last half-century has been the dramatic expansion in personal freedom and personal mobility, individual rights, the reorienting of culture around individuals. We obviously value that. But like all human gains, it has been purchased at a price. Most people faced with greater freedom from family, law, village, clan, have used it for good purposes -- artistic expression, economic entrepreneurship, self-expression -- but a small fraction of people have used it for bad purposes. So just as we have had an artistic and economic explosion, we have had a crime explosion. I think the two are indissolubly entwined. When that prosperity puts cars, drugs and guns into the hands of even relatively poor 18-year-olds, young people can do a great deal more damage today than they could in the 1940s or 1950s.