James Q. Wilson was born May 27, 1931. Wilson is considered a prominent figure in several disciplines, and his writings include public policy, economics, politics, and criminal justice topics.
Wilson was educated at the University of the Redlands and the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1959. He also holds six honorary degrees, including one from Harvard University.
Wilson has taught at several prestigious universities, starting with his first teaching position at his alma mater, the University of Chicago (1959-1961). He left the University of Chicago in 1961 to accept a teaching position at Harvard University, where he stayed until 1987. He also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1985 to 1997; as of this writing, he is a Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.
Dr. Wilson has held many distinguished offices and positions throughout his career, including serving as the chair of the National Advisory Commission on Drug Abuse (1972-1973). He has served on two separate presidential task forces, including serving as chairman of the White House Task Force on Crime in 1966, and as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1985 to 1991. Additionally, he was a member of the Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime in 1981. Wilson also served as a member of the board of directors of the Police Foundation (1971-1993), and was president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) from 1991 to 1992.
Throughout his career, Wilson has been acknowledged for his contributions and influence; most notably he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 23, 2003. In addition, the APSA awarded Wilson the James Madison Award for distinguished scholarship in 1990, and in 2001 the APSA awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award. Also, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) honored Wilson with the Bruce Smith Award for ”Outstanding Contributions to Criminal Justice.”
Wilson has written on a variety of topics, including policing, human nature, public policy, crime and race, drugs, rehabilitation, and morals. Some of his earlier works focused on policing, especially in urban environments. He was one of the first in the field to pragmatically look at the occupation of policing, and to describe police behavior in a rational and realistic way. His topic Varieties of Police Behavior (1968) took some of the mysticism away from police work as he described different ”styles” of policing that are still cited in the policing literature today (that is, watchman style, the legalistic style, and the service style).
In the 1970s, Wilson focused his research and writings on crime. In Thinking About Crime (1975, revised 1985) Wilson put together a group of his essays that discussed how public policies were in part responsible for rising crime rates in the 1970s. He also criticized other criminology scholars for being too idealistic in their writings and not basing their work on empirical fact. Other general themes from Thinking About Crime include Wilson’s viewpoint that white collar crime does not negatively impact the ”social contract” in the same way as conventional crimes do; therefore, it should not be treated equally. Additionally, Wilson considers crime to be a moral issue. This is a theme that Wilson has continued to write about throughout his career.
In 1982, Wilson published an article in the Atlantic Monthly with George Kelling titled ”Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” In this piece, Wilson combines his interests in crime, policing, communities, and urban issues. ”Broken Windows” is perhaps his most important contribution to the world of policing. The concept of broken windows has become an internationally known doctrine, and remains just as powerful and influential today as it was in the 1980s. In ”Broken Windows” Wilson and Kelling discuss the concept of physical disorder, and how, if let untreated, that disorder can become a signal to criminals that the neighborhood will tolerate crime and other ”nuisance” behaviors. The idea states that a neighborhood that leaves broken windows broken (or graffiti uncovered and so forth) is sending a message that it will also tolerate behaviors such as open-air drug sales and overt prostitution. This type of tolerance can lead to tolerance of more serious crime situations, and a community out of control and crawling with the criminal element. Therefore, Wilson and Kelling suggest that police should address the minor crimes and nuisance behaviors as well as the more serious criminal behaviors. This type of response has had great success in crime-ridden cities across the country, most notably in New York City in the 1990s. The New York City Police Department found that true to Wilson and Kelling’s philosophy, criminals realized there were consequences to their actions, and that the police and community were not going to turn a blind eye to their antisocial behaviors anymore. Wilson and Kelling also discuss the role that citizens’ fear of crime can play in the downfall of a neighborhood.
In the mid-1980s, Wilson cowrote another controversial topic titled Crime and Human Nature: The Definitive Study (1985) with Richard Herrnstein. This volume looked at research conducted in a variety of disciplines in an attempt to answer the question ”Why do people commit crimes?” This work challenges criminologists to look at crime from the level of the individual as opposed to the more commonly viewed societal level.
In the 1990s, Wilson coedited two prominent works, ”Drugs and Crime” (1990) with Michael Tonry, and Crime (1995), an edited anthology on research with Joan Petersilia. The 1990s also saw Wilson focus his writings on morals. In 1991 he published ”On Character,” which was a series of essays that looked at character and responsibility. This theme continued through the 1990s and into the 2000s with topics such as The Moral Sense (1993), Moral Judgment: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System? (1997), and The Marriage Problem (2002), where he discusses the problems associated with the continuing dissolution of the institution of marriage and its effect on social problems, including crime.
