The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

I’m pleased that Christopher Jencks thinks my book has the “enormous virtue” of focusing attention on the societal determinants of crime [NYR, February 12]. But I’m a little bewildered by the substance of his review; at times, I get the odd feeling that the book Jencks reviewed isn’t quite the one I wrote.

Jencks says I argue that crime is “a product of economic inequality.” Well, that’s partly true, but it greatly oversimplifies what I really said. The central argument in Confronting Crime is that our unusually high crime rates can be traced—in part—to a pattern of development distinguished by the “relatively unbuffered play of market forces.” One result was an unusually wide spread of income inequality, but there were many others: greater economic insecurity, less provision for the casualties of technological and economic change, greater disruption of families and communities, and a culture that—even more than in other developed capitalist societies—underemphasized communal and cooperative values and overemphasized individual acquisition. Other factors, I said, were also important, especially our uniquely tragic racial history.

Now, I’m not sure what Jencks thinks about this larger argument, since he doesn’t really engage it. Instead, he too often reduces the debate to a battle between straw men; a narrow focus on the effects of income distribution on the one hand and an equally narrow focus on cultural factors on the other. Some examples:

Early on, Jencks chides liberals—presumably including me—for thinking that inequality is simply a matter of money, and not understanding that reducing it would require us to “reorganize work as well as redistribute income.” Sure it would; but I said so myself, at some length. Jencks acknowledges that I’d “doubtless” agree about the importance of work—but doesn’t tell his readers that inadequate work is central to the book’s diagnosis and a decent employment policy central to its strategy.

Later, Jencks uses the example of India, a poor country with a relatively low crime rate, to argue that income inequality alone can’t explain international differences in crime rates, and that cultural factors must be involved too. Fine; but again, I’m not sure who Jencks is arguing with. I spent some time explaining why some poor countries managed to maintain low crime rates, and India was my main example. I argued—following the work of Clayton Hartjen at Rutgers—that India’s poor were often integrated into a supportive communal life, involving useful work for the young, strong ties of family, religion, and subcaste, and a cultural ethos encouraging a sense of membership in a larger, cohesive community. I suggested that the disruption of these bonds by a process of market-driven development was partly responsible for the high crime rates in many Third World countries. Jencks may or may not agree with this view, but it’s hardly one that rests on the effects of income differences alone.

Jencks similarly takes me to task for suggesting that rising unemployment—and hence rising crime—among black youth in the Sixties resulted from “economic conditions” alone. But I didn’t say that. Early in the book, I said I thought that the weakening of cultural supports for racial subordination played a part in the rising rates of inner-city crime in the Sixties. But so, I thought, did a lot of other things: the relative shrinking of opportunities for low-skilled blue-collar work, just when agriculture, traditionally a crucial employer of black youth, was employing fewer and fewer of them; the corrosive long-term effects of this on black family life and community cohesion; the impact of crowding increasing numbers of marginal poor cheek to jowl with increasingly affluent strata in the cities; the growth of the hard-drug trade; and more. (There is also the sheer size of the youth cohort reaching adolescence in the late Sixties, which I noted briefly but should have said more about.) A mix, in short, of economic, cultural, social, and demographic factors. But Jencks apparently wants to argue that the roots of this volatile situation were cultural rather than economic; indeed, he pins most of the blame on the civil rights movement, for leading black kids to want jobs they weren’t qualified to get. But does Jencks really believe that it was the baleful influence of the civil rights movement alone, and nothing else about the structural situation of black youth, that led to their rising crime rates? And if, as I suspect, he doesn’t really believe that, what’s the point of exaggerating?

A final example. Jencks believes that the argument for a close connection between inequality and crime is “discredited” because, though income inequality has recently increased in the United States, crime has gone down. This argument isn’t exactly wrong, but, again, it’s misleadingly simplistic. Inequality has indeed risen, but to say, without further elaboration, that crime has gone down obscures the complexity of what’s been going on. Crime dipped, sometimes strongly, in the early Eighties. But the homicide rate—which both Jencks and I think is our most reliable indicator—has been rising again since the end of 1984, and in 1986 rose sharply, even terrifyingly, in some cities; equaling or nearly equaling the peaks they suffered in the late Seventies.

Moreover, this has taken place in the face of the doubling of the national prison population and its near-tripling in many states since the early Seventies. Now, I’d be the last to exaggerate the effectiveness of imprisonment in reducing crime; but I know few criminologists who’d argue that this incarceration “binge” has had no effect on the crime rate. Hence I think it’s more appropriate to ask what has kept the rates so high even though we’ve locked up hundreds of thousands of serious offenders: and the growing deprivation and marginalization at the bottom of the social ladder (and its complex relationship to the illicit drug trade) is a prime suspect.

Even more importantly, Jencks’s argument, once again, depends on an overly narrow view of the dynamics of inequality. We wouldn’t really expect crime in shoot upward dramatically whenever the index of income distribution moved upward a few points. A deeper view of the effects of inequality looks to the long-term more than the short—to the impact of growing deprivation (and declining social services) on family functioning, health care, and nutrition, long-range prospects for decent work, levels of child abuse and neglect, and much more. The most troubling consequences are unlikely to appear overnight; but I think we’d be naive not to expect them to haunt us down the road.

Jencks concludes with a singularly bleak view of the state of our knowledge about what we might do to reduce crime—telling us, indeed, that criminologists don’t have “any reliable advice” on how to bring down the crime rate. But if Jencks is really going to accuse the entire criminological profession of having nothing useful to say about reducing crime, I think he’s under some obligation to engage the arguments they’ve in fact made more seriously than he has done, and show why he thinks they’re wrong.

In Confronting Crime, I suggested a range of strategies I thought could help bring down the crime rate. They included, among others, a tougher response to men who beat their wives, intensive probation for less dangerous criminals, better rehabilitation programs for young offenders, more resources for family support programs, family planning services, assistance to teen-aged parents, and quality preschool education; and, above all, comprehensive, intensive job training and the direct creation of permanent, useful jobs. I didn’t suggest that these were the only strategies we should consider, or that they would be easy, or that they could reduce crime overnight even if we mustered the political power to tackle them seriously. I did think they showed promise. Now Jencks may really believe that none of them would make a difference; we don’t know, since he doesn’t mention any of them. If he does believe that, he ought to be willing to defend that rather extreme position more directly.

Elliott Currie

Berkeley, California

To the Editors:

My first purpose in this letter is to express appreciation for Christopher Jencks’s fairminded and thoughtful review of Crime and Human Nature. But, as long as I’m writing, it may not be out of place to comment further.

First, Jencks observes that our book has chapters on “genes, gender, age, IQ, personality, schools, television, drugs, even race,” then criticizes it for having none on “the effects of either social class or poverty.” But Chapter 12, on “labor markets,” which his review fails to mention, presents what evidence there is on crime in relation to economic need, to objective inequality between the rich and poor as well as the envy of the poor for the rich, to the temptations of being poor among the affluent, and to unemployment. These economic variables per se (as distinguished from the individual characteristics associated with them) account for little of the crime in America. In the chapter’s first sentence, we point out that economic variables would probably be more important if the extremes of wealth and poverty or the sheer needs of the poor were greater than they are here.

Second, Jencks dismisses studies showing identical twins to be more correlated than fraternal twins for criminal behavior. This is the crucial datum for the twin method of quantitative genetics, inasmuch as it suggests that genes, which identical twins share more of than fraternal, make a contribution to the trait in question. Jencks dismisses the evidence from twins because he believes that identical twins are likely “to have more influence on one another than fraternal twins.” That’s a plausible hypothesis, but, as our book said, the evidence, gathered by David Rowe of the University of Oklahoma and others, fails to support it as far as criminal behavior is concerned. Since the book came out, additional evidence has all but refuted it. The main reason identical twins are more similar in criminality than fraternal is, it seems even surer now than when the book was written, their greater genetic overlap. Jencks further says that the large Danish adoption study, one of the major studies implicating genes, implies only a 2 percent genetic contribution to the variance in criminality. However Jencks derived this estimate, it is at odds by a factor of about twenty or more with any general conclusion that is supported by the totality of available data.

Third, Jencks interprets the much larger crime rate in American cities and suburbs, as compared to the countryside, as evidence of a major nongenetic influence on crime. The reasoning tacitly presupposes, most improbably, that the genetic makeup of rural and city-suburban populations are the same. The racial composition of cities and countryside, for example, differs, and there are probably other genetic differences. Robert Gordon of Johns Hopkins University has concluded that the lifetime prevalence of crime for individuals is independent of community size above communities of 10,000, after correcting for the differing crime rates of blacks and whites. Jencks’s lapse of reasoning here is a prime example of a common weakness in sociological theory, which is to infer a purely sociological explanation for data after having tacitly assumed it.