Isn't education a cheaper anti-dote to (violent) crime?
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Scientist at Work: On Crime as Science (a Neighbor at a Time)
January 6, 2004
By DAN HURLEY
BOSTON - Dr. Felton Earls was on the street, looking for
something at ground level that would help explain his
theories about the roots of crime. He found it across from
a South Side housing project, in a community garden of
frost-wilted kale and tomatoes.
"That couldn't be more perfect," said Dr. Earls, a
61-year-old professor of human behavior and development at
the Harvard School of Public Health. Gazing at a homemade
sign for the garden at the corner of East Brookline Street
and Harrison Avenue, he pointed out four little words:
"Please respect our efforts."
"We've been besieged to better explain our findings," he
said. For over 10 years, Dr. Earls has run one of the
largest, longest and most expensive studies in the history
of criminology. "We always say, It's all about taking
action, making an effort."
Dr. Earls and his colleagues argue that the most important
influence on a neighborhood's crime rate is neighbors'
willingness to act, when needed, for one another's benefit,
and particularly for the benefit of one another's children.
And they present compelling evidence to back up their
argument.
Will a group of local teenagers hanging out on the corner
be allowed to intimidate passers-by, or will they be
dispersed and their parents called? Will a vacant lot
become a breeding ground for rats and drug dealers, or will
it be transformed into a community garden?
Such decisions, Dr. Earls has shown, exert a power over a
neighborhood's crime rate strong enough to overcome the far
better known influences of race, income, family and
individual temperament.
"It is far and away the most important research insight in
the last decade," said Jeremy Travis, director of the
National Institute of Justice from 1994 to 2000. "I think
it will shape policy for the next generation."
Francis T. Cullen, immediate past president of the American
Society of Criminology, said of Dr. Earls's research, "It
is perhaps the most important research undertaking ever
embarked upon in the study of the development of criminal
behavior."
The National Institute of Justice has so far spent over $18
million on Dr. Earls's study - more than it has ever
financed for any other project. The MacArthur Foundation
has spent another $23.6 million on the study, likewise the
most it has spent, and money from other government agencies
has brought the cost of the project to over $51 million so
far.
Dr. Earls came to his current work by a circuitous route
that included one great leap. Born to working-class parents
in New Orleans, he graduated from Howard University's
College of Medicine and pursued a postdoctoral fellowship
in neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin.
It was there that he met Dr. Mary Carlson, a
neurophysiologist. They have been married for 31 years and
are now collaborating on a project in Tanzania to promote
the well-being of children who have lost their parents to
AIDS.
When they met, they were both aiming for a white-jacket
career in the laboratory. In fact, back in April 1968, Dr.
Earls spent 36 hours straight, alone for much of the time,
in a soundproof room, mapping the responses of a cat's
brain to various high- or low-frequency sounds.
When he emerged from his laboratory on the evening of April
5, the Wisconsin campus was in an uproar. Only then did he
learn that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed the day
before. Having participated in rallies led by Dr. King, Dr.
Earls says he reacted instantly.
"I realized that I couldn't have a career in
neurophysiology. I couldn't remain in a laboratory," he
said. "King's death made me see that I had to work for
society. My laboratory had to be the community, and I had
to work with children because they represent our best
hope."
Six months later, he left Wisconsin and went to East Harlem
to train as a pediatrician, then to Massachusetts General
Hospital to train as a child psychiatrist, and finally to
the London School of Hygiene for a degree in public health.
His research is, in essence, about the health of
communities, not just about crime. "I am concerned about
crime," he said, "but my background is in public health. We
look at kids growing up in neighborhoods across a much
wider range than just crime: drug use, school performance,
birth weights, asthma, sexual behavior."
His study, based in Chicago, has challenged an immensely
popular competing theory about the roots of crime. "Broken
windows," as it is known, holds that physical and social
disorder in a neighborhood lead to increased crime, that if
one broken window or aggressive squeegee man is allowed to
remain in a neighborhood, bigger acts of disorderly
behavior will follow.
This theory has been one of the most important in
criminology. It was first proposed in an article published
20 years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, written by Dr. James
Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The theory provided the
intellectual foundation for a crackdown on "quality of
life" crimes in New York City under Mayor Rudolph W.
Giuliani.
Today, "broken windows" policing is endorsed by police
chiefs across the country, its proponents sought out for
lectures and consulting around the world. But from the
beginning, Dr. Wilson concedes, the theory lacked
substantive scientific evidence that it worked.
"I still to this day do not know if improving order will or
will not reduce crime," Dr. Wilson, now a professor
emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles,
recently said in a telephone interview. "People have not
understood that this was a speculation."
Testing "broken windows" was not the point of the Project
on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the study
planned and conducted by Dr. Earls and colleagues to
unravel the social, familial, educational and personal
threads that weave together into lives of crime and
violence.
Nonetheless the data gathered for it, with a precision
rarely seen in social science, directly contradicted Dr.
Wilson's notions. From June to October 1995, trained
observers drove a sport utility vehicle at 5 miles per hour
down every street in 196 carefully selected Chicago
neighborhoods.
As they drove, a pair of video recorders, one on each side
of the S.U.V., recorded social activities and physical
features: litter, graffiti, drug deals, public drinking,
everything within the camera's view. When the researchers
were done, 11,408 blocks had been observed and videotaped.
Then the police records on homicide, robbery and burglary
were pulled for each of these 196 neighborhoods, along with
in-person surveys of 8,782 residents.
In a landmark 1997 paper that he wrote with colleagues in
the journal Science, and in a subsequent study in The
American Journal of Sociology, Dr. Earls reported that most
major crimes were linked not to "broken windows" but to two
other neighborhood variables: concentrated poverty and what
he calls, with an unfortunate instinct for the dry and
off-putting language of social science, collective
efficacy.
"If you got a crew to clean up the mess," Dr. Earls said,
"it would last for two weeks and go back to where it was.
The point of intervention is not to clean up the
neighborhood, but to work on its collective efficacy. If
you organized a community meeting in a local church or
school, it's a chance for people to meet and solve
problems.
"If one of the ideas that comes out of the meeting is for
them to clean up the graffiti in the neighborhood, the
benefit will be much longer lasting, and will probably
impact the development of kids in that area. But it would
be based on this community action - not on a work crew
coming in from the outside."
Boston's experience in the 1990's, he believes,
demonstrates his point. "Right now there are about 35
homicides per year in Boston, down from 151 in 1991," he
said. "It plummeted between 1996 and 1998. Many people
attributed it to the Ten-Point Coalition, a group of black
ministers who took to the streets to engage kids and work
with other adults to develop after-school programs.
"At the same time, they were also asking the kids to help
them target the ringleaders who were going down to Maryland
to buy weapons. And they were coordinating their activities
with policemen. So through these ministers, there was an
activation of large groups of adults and kids."
Driving back from the community garden in the South End of
Boston, Dr. Earls emphasized that the analysis of the
findings of the Chicago study had only begun. The entire
neighborhood study was repeated between 2000 and 2002, and
a second study tracking the behavioral and medical
development of some 7,000 children in those same
neighborhoods from birth to age 25, was finished in
December 2001.
Dr. Robert J. Sampson of Harvard, Dr. Steven Raudenbush of
the University of Michigan, Dr. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of
Columbia and Dr. Earls are now working together on papers
that they expect to see published this year.
"If we are to show that where you grow up is more important
than your temperament or your I.Q. or your family, or even
equally important, that is a major contribution to
science," Dr. Earls said. "We're saying that community is
important at a moment in science when many of the most
dramatic findings are in genetics. If genetics plays a
role, it's got to be a minor role, because the community
effects are very robust."
As important as the study's findings, Dr. Earls said, are
the measurement tools developed to uncover them. "Newton's
discovery of gravity was important because he was able to
measure it and quantify it," he says. "What we are
discovering around collective efficacy was not terribly
obvious before we started to measure it with some
precision."
As for policy implications, Dr. Earls said that rather than
focusing on arresting squeegee men and graffiti scrawlers,
local governments should support the development of
cooperative efforts in low-income neighborhoods by
encouraging neighbors to meet and work together. Indeed,
cities that sow community gardens, he said, may reap a
harvest of not only kale and tomatoes, but safer
neighborhoods and healthier children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/science/06PROF.html?ex=1074441165&ei=1&en=dadfcc8dcfa7ff28
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