Steven Pinker’s most recent tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, attempts to document and explain the dramatic decrease in war, murder, and state-sanctioned violence since the dawn of civilization. He examines several distinct phenomena spanning over millennia, ranging from the advent of the state, to the near extinction of interstate war in the post-Cold War era. I want to zoom in on just one rather small part of Pinker’s work that has large implications for public policy regarding law enforcement, incarceration, and sentencing. The section of Better Angels I’ll be looking at comes from chapter 3, “The Civilizing Process,” specifically subsections “Violence in America,” “Decivilization in the 1960s” and “Recivilization in the 1990s.”
I have to admit that Pinker’s treatment of crime in America made me more sympathetic to the police state. Not the kind where people are locked up for political dissent, but rather where policemen are visible presences on the streets, laws are rigorously enforced, and crimes reliably punished. Prior to coming face-to-face with the data on violent crime in America, my left-leaning disposition told me crime was caused by “root causes” like poverty, unemployment, and economic stagnation. I associated violence with underlying social ills, and accordingly did not put much stock in “tough on crime” policies that increased police presence and incarceration without addressing economic welfare. If we cure the social ills, I thought, their chief symptom—crime—will dissipate.
But, as Pinker points out, there’s a problem: violent crime is not correlated with economic conditions. All told, from 1957 to 1980 the homicide rate in America more than doubled. In the 1960s alone, as unemployment hovered around four percent, violent crime in the United States increased by a whopping 135 percent. Today, we are living the inverse of that phenomenon: Since the start of the Great Recession, violent crime in the U.S. has decreased by a sizeable 14 percent. The examples don’t end there: Great Britain in the 1990s saw a decrease in unemployment and an increase in violent crime; during the same period, Canada experienced both an uptick in unemployment and a decrease in violence. Even income inequality, which is generally a good indicator of comparative crime rates across different societies, does little to explain the ebb and flow of violence in the United States. In 1968, amid a dramatic explosion in violent crime, the country reached its greatest level of income equality on record; since 1990, on the other hand, income inequality has skyrocketed as violent crime has tanked.
To what, then, can we attribute the United States’ explosion of violence in the ’60s, if not economic ills? In one of Better Angels’ more anecdotal passages, Pinker describes how popular culture came to devalue conformity and obedience and romanticize impulsiveness and anti-authoritarianism. He quotes song lyrics from the Rolling Stones and references scenes from Easy Rider. In a particularly interesting aside, he calls attention to the phenomenon of proletarianization, whereby the values of the middle- and working-class came to define what was socially desirable, as opposed to the behavior of the elite, which had previously set the standard for proper comportment. Since the elite had been generally less violent than the great masses for hundreds of years (“boor,” after all, used to just mean farmer), Pinker offers this trend as a piece to the explanatory puzzle.
As fascinating as this narrative of cultural evolution is, the pop-culture explanatory thesis seems insufficient to explain the ’60s increase in violent crime. After all, Easy Rider and the Stones appealed mainly to middle-class white suburban teenagers who were not the demographic most effected by the ’60s uptick in violence, which mostly affected urban residents, especially African Americans.
That being said, Pinker augments his cultural narrative with more rigorous and ultimately more compelling explanations. The 1960s and ‘70s coincided with what he calls the “self-handicapping of the criminal justice Leviathan.” In other words, the American state ceased to rigorously prosecute and punish crime. During this period, the probability of being arrested if you committed a crime decreased by half, from 0.32 in 1 to 0.18. And if, in 1979, you were a member of the unlucky 18 percent, your chances of facing imprisonment were 80 percent lower than they would have been in 1960. Insofar as people respond to incentives, this was not a good trend. Further, Pinker notes that police ceased to make arrests for petty crimes like vandalism and graffiti. In light of the mounting evidence supporting the “broken windows theory”—the idea that small crimes in a neighborhood pave the way for greater offenses—this vandalism argument appears to hold its water.
In the 1990s, the county reversed almost all of these trends. Minimum sentencing laws, strict enforcement of anti-graffiti policies on urban transportation, and a huge increase in the nation’s police force likely contributed to the fall of violent crime. Now, however, we bear the unpleasant result of this surge of enforcement: we have more people behind bars than any nation in the world—by a lot. As someone who finds this repulsive, especially when one considers that African Americans are overrepresented by about 300 percent in the prison population, I don’t like the idea that massive incarceration could have had positive effects. Yet as Pinker points out, when you throw a lot of people behind bars, you’ll almost certainly catch those who are guilty—even if you also jail the innocent.
As far as I can tell, the key to reducing violence further in American communities is robust policing and consistent sentencing. For the law to function, crime must have a reliably negative outcome for the perpetrator. Yet, the deficit of trust between law enforcement and the people most harmed by crime in this country is a perpetual roadblock to progress in further reducing violent crime. One possible solution is the hiring of police officers from the neighborhoods they patrol. Another is rigorous training to prevent racially charged frisking incidents (like this one) from ever occurring. As for our excessive incarceration (and it is obviously excessive), we could reduce the prison rolls dramatically by driving the drug trade aboveground with legalization.
We are fortunate as a nation to be living in an era when crime is relatively infrequent as compared with recent decades. However, there is much room for improvement: we are still a nation of murderers compared with Western Europe. If the social science behind Better Angels is any indication, a smart, robust police presence in American communities could further reduce violence in our lives.