Broken windows thesis

A thesis which links disorderly behaviour to fear of crime, the potential for serious crime, and to urban decay in American cities. It is often cited as an example of communitarian ideas informing public policy. In their view the best way to fight crime is to fight the disorder that precedes it. They used the image of broken windows to explain how neighbourhoods might decay into disorder and crime if no one attends to their maintenance: a broken factory window suggests to passers-by that no one is in Charge or cares; in time a few more windows are broken by rock-throwing youths; passers-by begin to think that no one cares about the whole street; soon, only the young and criminals are prepared to use the street; which then attracts prostitution, drug-dealing, and such like; until, in due course, someone is murdered.

In this way, small disorders lead to larger disorders, and eventually to serious crimes. This analysis implies that if disorderly behaviours in public places including all forms of petty vandalism, begging, vagrancy, and so forth are controlled then a significant drop in serious crime will follow. This means many more officers on foot-patrol and fewer in police cars responding to emergency calls. Law enforcement should be a technique for crime prevention rather than a vehicle for reacting to crime.

These ideas were taken up by the New York Transit Authority, which adopted a policy of zero tolerance towards graffiti on trains, urinating in public, intimidation of commuters, and such like, and dramatically reduced the incidence of serious crime in New York City subways. Similar initiatives have also achieved notable successes in reducing crime-rates and urban decay in many other American cities. See also criminology. From: broken windows thesis in A Dictionary of Sociology ».

Despite this broad policy influence, research on the theory itself has been relatively weak and has produced equivocal findings as will be detailed in this entry. In a nutshell, the broken windows thesis Wilson and Kelling Skip to main content Skip to table of contents.

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Broken Windows Thesis. Authors Authors and affiliations Joshua C. Reference work entry First Online: 27 November How to cite. Synonyms Incivilities thesis ; Order maintenance. This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Natl Rev Online, February Covington J, Taylor RB Fear of crime in urban residential neighborhoods: implication of between- and within-neighborhood sources for current models. Sociol Q 32 2 — Google Scholar.

The presence of graffiti was intensively targeted, and the subway system was cleaned from until In , William J. 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 hired Bratton as his police commissioner who adopted the strategy more widely in New York City after Giuliani's election in , under the rubrics of " quality of life " and " zero tolerance ". Influenced heavily by Kelling and Wilson's article, Giuliani was determined to put the theory into action.

He set out to prove that New York's infamous image of being too big, too unruly, too diverse, too broke to manage, - was, in fact, manageable. Thus, Giuliani's "zero-tolerance" roll out was part of an interlocking set of wider reforms, crucial parts of which had been underway since Bratton had the police more strictly enforce the law against subway fare evasion , public drinking, urination, graffiti artists and the " squeegee men " who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment.

Near the beginning, Bratton received criticism for his work for going after these "petty" crimes. The general statement towards this was "Why care about panhandlers, hookers, or graffiti artists when there are more serious crimes to be dealt with in the city?

If the "petty" criminals are often overlooked and given space to do what they want, then their level of criminality might escalate from petty crimes to more serious offenses. Bratton's work is to attack while the offenders are still green, as it would prevent an escalation of criminal acts in the future.

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. In , 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 study concluded that cleaning up the physical environment is more effective than misdemeanor arrests, and that increasing social services had no effect.

In and 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 supported the theory.

Their conclusion, published in the journal Science , was that:. One example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing. 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. By reducing the amount of broken windows in the community, the inner cities would appear to be attractive to consumers with more capital.

Ridding spaces like downtown New York and Chicago - notably notorious for criminal activity - of danger would draw in investment from consumers, increasing the city's economic status, providing a safe and pleasant image for present and future inhabitants.

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 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.

From to , Stephen B. Plank and colleagues from John Hopkins University conducted a correlational study to determine the degree to which the physical appearance of the school and classroom setting influence student behavior, particularly in respect to the variables concerned in their study: fear, social disorder, and collective efficacy.

From analyses of the survey data, the researchers determined that the variables concerning their study are statistically significant to the physical conditions of the school and classroom setting. Their conclusion, published in the American Journal of Education , was that:. Fixing broken windows and attending to the physical appearance of a school cannot alone guarantee productive teaching and learning, but ignoring them likely greatly increases the chances of a troubling downward spiral.

Many critics state that there are factors, other than physical disorder, that more significantly influence crime rate. They argue that, in order to more effectively reduce crime rate, these factors should be paid more attention to or targeted instead. According to a study conducted by Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush , the premise that the broken windows theory operates on—that social disorder and crime are connected as part of a causal chain—is faulty.

They also argue that the relationship between public disorder and crime rate is weak. Sridhar, however, discusses other trends such as New York City's economic boom in the late s that created a " perfect storm "—that they all contributed to the decrease of crime rate much more significantly than the application of the zero tolerance policy. Sridhar also compares this decrease of crime rate with other major cities that adopted other various policies, and determined that the zero tolerance policy is not as effectual.

Though, a larger concern lingers in terms of whether the broken windows theory is virtually an accepted means of explaining social unrest. A study questioned the legitimacy of the theory concerning the subjectivity of disorder as perceived by persons living in neighborhoods, particularly concentrating on whether citizens view disorder as a separate issue from crime or as identical to it.

The study noted that crime cannot be the result of disorder if the two be identical, agreed that disorder provided evidence of "convergent validity", and concluded that broken windows theory misinterprets the relationship between disorder and crime. Based on common misconceptions by the masses, it is clearly implied that those who commit disorder and crime have a clear tie to groups suffering from financial instability and may be of minority status.

Sampson argues that "The use of racial context to encode disorder does not necessarily mean that people are racially prejudiced in the sense of personal hostility" and notes that residents make a clear implication of who they believe is causing the disruption, which has been termed as implicit bias. According to most criminologists who speak of a broader "backlash", [22] the broken windows theory is not theoretically sound.

David Thacher, assistant professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of Michigan , stated in a paper that: [23]. 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. Harcourt and Ludwig found instead that the tenants continued to commit crime at the same rate. In a 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 s [ citation needed ]. Further alternative explanations that have been put forward include the waning of the crack epidemic , [26] unrelated growth in the prison population due to Rockefeller drug laws , [26] and that the number of males aged 16—24 was dropping regardless due to the shape of the US population pyramid.

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.

According to Stewart, arguments for low-level police intervention, including the broken windows hypothesis, often act "as cover for racist behavior". The application of the broken windows theory in aggressive policing policies, such as William J.

Bratton 's zero-tolerance policy, has been shown to criminalize the poor and homeless. Therefore, those without access to a private space are often criminalized. Critics such as Robert J.