This book challenges the "broken-windows" theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanours, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanour laws. The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly 30 years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of "law abiders" and "disorderly people" and of "order" and "disorder", which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society. How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice - a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that the author argues is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of citizens - come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics through-out the world?
This book explores the reasons why.
- ISBN10 0674038312
- ISBN13 9780674038318
- Publish Date 1 July 2009 (first published 15 August 2001)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Harvard University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 304
- Language English