The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that monitoring and maintaining urban environments in a well-ordered condition may stop further vandalism as well as an escalation into more serious crime.
The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and in the public debate. The theory has been used as a motivation for several reforms in criminal policy.
The broken windows theory has received support from several empirical studies. At the same time it has also been the subject of a large body of criticism.
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The broken windows theory was first introduced by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, in an article titled "Broken Windows" and which appeared in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.[1] The title comes from the following example:
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.
The article received a great deal of attention and was very widely cited. A 1996 criminology and urban sociology book, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities by George L. Kelling and a co-author Catharine Coles, is based on the article but develops the argument in greater detail. It discusses the theory in relation to crime and strategies to contain or eliminate crime from urban neighborhoods.[2]
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book's authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood.
The theory thus makes two major claims: that further petty crime and low-level anti-social behavior will be deterred, and that major crime will, as a result, be prevented. Criticism of the theory has tended to focus only on the latter claim.
The reason why the state of the urban environment may affect crime may be described as due to three factors:
A major factor in determining individual behavior is social norms, internalized rules about the appropriate way to act in a certain situation. Humans constantly monitor other people and their environment in order to determine what the correct norms are for the given situation. They also monitor others to make sure that the others act in an acceptable way. In other words, people do as others do and the group makes sure that the rules are followed. However, when there are no people around, as is often the case in an anonymous, urban environment, the monitoring of or by others does not work. In such an environment, criminals are much more likely to get away with robberies, thefts, and vandalism. When there are few or no other people around, individuals are forced to look for other clues—called signals—as to what the social norms allow them to do and how great is the risk of getting caught violating those norms. An ordered and clean environment sends the signal that this is a place which is monitored and people here conform to the common norms of non-criminal behavior; a disordered environment which is littered, vandalized, and not maintained sends the opposite signal: this is a place where people do as they please and get away with it without being detected. Therefore, as people tend to act the way they think others act, they are more likely to act "disorderly" in the disordered environment.
The book's author, George L. Kelling, was hired as a consultant to the New York City Transit Authority in 1985, and measures to test the broken windows theory were implemented by David Gunn. The presence of graffiti was intensively targeted, and the subway system was cleaned from 1984 until 1990. Kelling has also been hired as a consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department and to the Boston PD.
In 1990, William J. Bratton became head of the New York City Transit Police. Bratton described George L. Kelling as his "intellectual mentor", and implemented zero tolerance of fare-dodging, easier arrestee processing methods and background checks on all those arrested. Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner Howard Safir also adopted the strategy more widely in New York City after Giuliani's election in 1993, under the rubrics of "zero tolerance" and "quality of life".
Thus, Giuliani's "zero-tolerance" roll out was part of an interlocking set of wider reforms, crucial parts of which had been underway since 1985. Giuliani had the police more strictly enforce the law against subway fare evasion, public drinking, urination, and the "squeegee men" who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment. According to the 2001 study of crime trends in New York by George Kelling and William Sousa,[3] rates of both petty and serious crime fell suddenly and significantly, and continued to drop for the following ten years.
Similar success occurred in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the late 1990s with its Safe Streets Program. Operating under the theory that American Westerners use roadways much in the same way that American Easterners use subways, the developers of the program reasoned that lawlessness on the roadways had much the same effect as the problem individuals in New York subways. This program was extensively reviewed by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and published in a case study.[4]
In 2005, Harvard University and Suffolk University researchers worked with local police to identify 34 "crime hot spots" in Lowell, Massachusetts. In half of the spots, authorities cleared trash, fixed streetlights, enforced building codes, discouraged loiterers, made more misdemeanor arrests, and expanded mental health services and aid for the homeless. In the other half, there was no change to routine police service.
The areas that received additional attention experienced a 20% reduction in calls to the police. The study concluded that cleaning up the physical environment is more effective than misdemeanor arrests, and that increasing social services had no effect.[5][6]
In 2007 and 2008 Kees Keizer and colleagues from the University of Groningen conducted a series of controlled experiments to determine if the effect of existing disorder (such as litter or graffiti) increased the incidence of additional crime like stealing, littering or conducting other acts of antisocial behavior. They selected several urban locations which they then arranged in two different ways, at different times. In one condition—the control—the place was maintained orderly. It was kept free from graffiti, broken windows, etc. In the other condition—the experiment—exactly the same environment was arranged in a way where it looked like nobody monitored it and cared about it: windows were broken, graffiti were placed on the walls, among other things. The researchers then secretly monitored the locations to observe if people behaved differently when the environment was disordered. The results confirmed the theory. Their conclusion, published in the journal Science, was that:
Other side effects of better monitoring and cleaned up streets may well be desired by governments or housing agencies, as well as the population of a neighborhood: broken windows can count as an indicator of low real estate value, and may deter investors. Fixing windows is therefore also a step of real estate development, which may lead, desired or not, to gentrification.
In the education realm, the broken windows theory is used to promote order in classrooms and school cultures. The belief is that students are signaled by disorder or rule-breaking and that they, in turn, imitate the disorder. Several school movements—most notably with the charter school movement—encourage strict paternalistic practices to enforce student discipline. Such practices include language codes (governing slang, curse words, or speaking out of turn), classroom etiquette (sitting up straight, tracking the speaker), personal dress (uniforms, little or no jewelry), and behavioral codes (walking in lines, specified bathroom times). Several schools have made remarkable strides in educational gains with this philosophy such as KIPP and American Indian Public Charter School.
According to most criminologists who speak of a broader "backlash",[9] the broken windows theory is not theoretically sound.[10] They claim that the "broken windows theory" closely relates correlation with causality, a reasoning which is prone to fallacy. David Thacher, assistant professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of Michigan, stated in a 2004 paper that:[10]
[S]ocial science has not been kind to the broken windows theory. A number of scholars reanalyzed the initial studies that appeared to support it.... Others pressed forward with new, more sophisticated studies of the relationship between disorder and crime. The most prominent among them concluded that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces.
It has also been argued that rates of major crimes also dropped in many other U.S. cities during the 1990s, both those that had adopted "zero-tolerance" policies and those that had not.[11] In the Winter 2006 edition of the University of Chicago Law Review, Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig looked at the later Department of Housing and Urban Development program that re-housed inner-city project tenants in New York into more orderly neighborhoods.[12] The broken windows theory would suggest that these tenants would commit less crime once moved, due to the more stable conditions on the streets. Harcourt and Ludwig found instead that the tenants continued to commit crime at the same rate.
In a 2007 study called "Reefer Madness" in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, Harcourt and Ludwig found further evidence confirming that mean reversion fully explained the changes in crime rates in the different precincts in New York during the 1990s. Further alternative explanations that have been put forward include the waning of the crack epidemic,[13] unrelated growth in the prison population due to Rockefeller drug laws,[13] and that the number of males aged 16–24 was dropping regardless due to the shape of the US population pyramid.[14]
A low-level intervention of police in neighborhoods has been considered problematic. Accordingly, Gary Stewart writes that "The central drawback of the approaches advanced by Wilson, Kelling, and Kennedy rests in their shared blindness to the potentially harmful impact of broad police discretion on minority communities."[15] This was seen by the authors, who worried that people would be arrested "for the 'crime' of being undesirable". According to Stewart, arguments for low-level police intervention, including the broken windows hypothesis, often act "as cover for racist behavior".[15]
In the best-seller More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2000), economist John Lott, Jr. examined the use of the broken windows approach as well as community- and problem-oriented policing programs in cities over 10,000 in population over two decades. He found that the impacts of these policing policies were not very consistent across different types of crime. He described the pattern as almost "random". For the broken windows approach, Lott found that the approach was actually associated with murder and auto theft rising and rapes and larceny falling. Increased arrest rates, affirmative action policies for hiring police, and right-to-carry laws were much more important in explaining the changes in crime rates. Lott's book, has been subject to criticism and has not undergone peer-review, although other peer-reviewed studies support Lott's conclusions.
In the best-seller Freakonomics, economist Steven D. Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner both confirm and cast doubt on the notion that the broken windows theory was responsible for New York's drop in crime. Levitt noticed that years before the 1990s, abortion was legalized. Women who were least able to raise kids (the poor, drug addicted and unstable) were able to get abortions, so the number of children being born in broken families was decreasing. Most crimes committed in New York are committed by 16- to 24-year old males; when this demographic decreased in number, the crime rate followed. At the same time, Levitt also found that the greater number of police as well an increased incarceration rate had contributed to the decline in crime. Levitt's book is based on published scientific studies that have been subject to peer-review.