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Thinking About James Q. Wilson: Examining the

Intellectual Contributions of One of the Greatest
Criminal Justice Scholars

Article in Theory in Action · July 2022

DOI: 10.3798/tia.1937-0237.2218

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Theory in Action, Vol. 15, No. 3, July (© 2022)
DOI:10.3798/tia.1937-0237.2218

Thinking About James Q. Wilson:

Examining the Intellectual Contributions of One of the Greatest
Criminal Justice Scholars

Brian Forst1 Interviewed by Robert M. Worley2

[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies

Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org
Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2022 by The
Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

RW: Most criminologists know of James Q. Wilson as a controversial,

conservative figure, and co-author (with George Kelling) of the infamous
"Broken Windows" theory. Are they wrong to think of him that way?

1 Brian Forst is Professor Emeritus of Justice, Law and Criminology at the American

University School of Public Affairs. He joined the AU faculty in 1992, following three
years on the George Washington University faculty. Before that, he was director of
research at the Institute for Law and Social Research (1974-85) and the Police
Foundation (1985-89). He was Visiting Professor in Residence at the University of
California, Irvine, for the fall 2017 term. His research on errors of justice, prosecution,
policing, terrorism, and the deterrent effect of the death penalty is cited extensively. He
has published nine books and over 100 refereed articles, book chapters, encyclopedia
entries, and monographs. His book, Errors of Justice: Nature, Sources and Remedies
(Cambridge University Press), was named Book of the Year for 2006 by the Academy of
Criminal Justice Sciences. The Cambridge University Press released his book, Terrorism,
Crime, and Public Policy, in the fall of 2008. Professor Forst chaired the Justice, Law &
Criminology Department's doctoral program from 2000 to 2010 and supervised eleven
doctoral dissertations from 2000 to 2016. He was awarded the School of Public Affairs
Bernard H. Ross Teaching Excellence Award in 2002 and the School's Outstanding
Scholarship Award in 2008 and 2011. He was a voting member of the D.C. Sentencing
Commission from 2004 through 2010. He played cello with the AU Orchestra in 1998.
2 Robert M. Worley, Ph.D., is Professor and Director of the Criminal Justice Program at

Lamar University. Robert has published extensively on "inappropriate relationships" that

occur between inmates and correctional officers. He has been interviewed by Reuters, the
New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, and the Marshall
Project, as well as other media outlets. Robert is Coeditor (w/ Vidisha B. Worley) of the
Encyclopedia of American Prisons and Jails (ABCClio). His work has appeared in
journals such as Deviant Behavior, Criminal Law Bulletin, American Journal of Criminal
Justice, Security Journal, and Criminal Justice Review, among others. Robert is currently
an Associate Editor of Deviant Behavior and the Book Review Editor of Theory in
Action.

1937-0229 ©2022 Transformative Studies Institute

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BF: No, they’re not wrong. Wilson’s work was indeed controversial –
largely because of his strong conservative ideology. And his Broken
Windows theory was far and away his most widely cited work, infamous
especially among the community of criminologists. His work was
controversial largely because it stood outside of conventional
criminological thought, and far outside of liberal political orthodoxy. He
was a political scientist by training, not a criminologist. Still, most of his
research on policing was foundational. A serious scholar on law
enforcement cannot ignore Wilson’s research on the varieties of police
behavior.

RW: I have always been intrigued by Wilson’s discussion of the night

watchman who would patrol the working-class neighborhoods but
wouldn’t really intervene unless it was absolutely necessary. Wilson was
an amazing scholar of policing.

BF: But he was much more – arguably the most influential criminal
justice scholar of the 20th century. He was a renowned public intellectual
and prolific author of several best-selling books, including the classic
textbook, American Government (now in its 17th edition), and hundreds
of essays, which appealed more to a wide audience of practitioners and
conservatives than to scholars, which only added to the controversy. His
writings on styles of policing in the 1960s and on police bureaucracies in
the 1970s established him as a preeminent scholar on law enforcement.
His 1974 essay, "Crime and the Criminologists," on how criminologists
discuss crime, was not just controversial, but game changing. Although it
can’t be proven, that essay -- which was later expanded into the book,
Thinking About Crime -- may have contributed to the blossoming of
much more academically diverse criminal justice programs in colleges
and universities throughout the United States. His writings on the
biological aspects of crime, on the moral sense, and the development of
character were much more controversial still, receiving acclaim from the
ideological right and even more ridicule from mainstream scholars and
the left. His influence was felt in the several major commissions and
panels on crime and justice on which he served.

RW: I agree.

BF: Less controversially, he was among the first scholars of the criminal
justice system to stimulate field experimentation in criminal justice
research. And he was an enthusiastic mentor and friend to many

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Brian Forst and Robert M. Worley

criminologists. He was president of the American Political Science

Association in 1991-92, and was recognized for his extraordinary
contributions to scholarship and public service in receiving the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. And he wrote, against the grain
of conservative orthodoxy, that research on crime and justice was a
legitimate and effective public good, deserving of substantial federal
funding, with results disseminated to practitioners.

RW: How did you come to know Wilson? What was your impression of
him?

BF: I had read Wilson’s work on policing and admired his lucid writing
and outside-conventional-norms thinking. So, I was a fan when I first
met him in the late 1970s. He joined the research advisory board of a
large federal sentencing research project I was directing, under
supervision of the Department of Justice, with criminologist Charles
Wellford serving as project monitor. It was an amazing board, and Jim’s
insights and advice were extremely helpful. Along with Wilson were
criminologists Don Gottfredson, Norval Morris, and Leslie Wilkins,
legal scholars Alan Dershowitz and Marvin Frankel, and federal judges
Harold Tyler and James Burns (Frankel was also a federal judge). As
chairman of the board of the Police Foundation, Wilson was instrumental
in my becoming research director of the Police Foundation in 1985. His
editorial suggestions on my draft chapters on prosecution in each of his
books on crime and public policy (1983, 1995, 2002, 2011) were always
thoughtful, substantive, and generous. I found his curiosity and boyish
enthusiasm to be highly contagious.

RW: That so cool to be able to have him influence and critique your
academic work.

BF: Jim and I shared more than common interests in crime and justice.
We both grew up in blue-collar Southern California homes, and my first
awareness of him was a spot-on anthropological essay he had written for
Harpers (December 1969) on the culture of high school life in North
Long Beach. I grew up in the same culture just a few miles to the north,
in Inglewood, and while he was on the faculties of UCLA and then
Pepperdine, he lived in the hills above Zuma Beach, where I had been a
lifeguard in the early 1960s. He was the son of an auto repair shop
owner, and I was son of the foreman of a meatpacking plant. So, when I

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drove him to the airport, we had more to talk about than just sentencing
and policing.
When I wrote to congratulate him on receiving the Medal of Freedom
award, he responded that the best part for him was the honor and good
fortune of sitting on the stage next to the revered UCLA basketball
coach, John Wooden.

RW: What did this research project on sentencing reveal?

BF: The Department of Justice commissioned the Institute for Law and
Social Research to conduct a study to establish the need for federal
sentencing guidelines and provide a foundation for their development.
We found substantial variation in sentencing philosophies and practices
among the 264 federal judges studied. At one end, 25% of the judges
considered rehabilitation to be "extremely" important, while at the other
end 19% regarded rehabilitation to be no more than "slightly" important,
and the latter group tended to give much tougher sentences than the
former group. The research made a strong case for sentencing guidelines
both to reduce unwarranted variation in sentences and to more effectively
serve the primary purposes of sentencing: justice and protection of the
community. It also speaks to an issue raised in the recent confirmation
hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson: judicial philosophy really does affect
judicial decision making.

RW: Interesting. What was your impression of Wilson’s approach to

scholarly inquiry?

BF: Well, his experience as a two-time national college debate champion

helped him to frame issues in a direct, often provocative, and usually
compelling way. His doctoral studies at the University of Chicago under
Edward Banfield, teaching at Harvard and UCLA, and associations with
top scholars everywhere exposed him to a wide range of ideas. But I
think that his hands-on approach is what made him such a remarkable
scholar. He was no ordinary political scientist. He was cut more in the
eclectic mold of the German sociologist-historian-jurist-political
economist, Max Weber, whose path-breaking research on bureaucracy
paved the way for Wilson and others. Wilson encouraged researchers at
the Police Foundation to conduct field experiments on policing:
proactive vs reactive patrol strategies in Kansas City, foot patrols and
other forms of community policing in Newark and Houston, and the
police response to domestic violence cases in Minneapolis. He loved

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talking to cops in ride-alongs to better understand policing directly and

experientially. He worked to educate the public on the essentials of the
criminal justice system and policy, as exemplified by his 38-episode
"Crime File" series, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice in the
mid-1980s.

RW: Some social conservative criminologists tend to claim James Q.

Wilson as one of their own. Yet, there seems to be much more to him
than being merely a conservative idealogue. What are your thoughts?

BF: Wilson was on the editorial boards of the conservative journals,

Commentary and The Public Interest, and a frequent contributor to both.
He describes his conversion from having voted for John F. Kennedy,
Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey in the 1960s to conservative
thinking not long afterward in a Wall Street Journal tribute to Irving
Kristol, founder of The Public Interest, after Kristol’s death. He writes
that Kristol’s concern about the unintended consequences of social
policy was especially influential. Thus, Wilson argued in 1985 that the
strong unemployment-crime association does not imply the need for a
jobs program to reduce crime, that employment policy should be
independent of criminal justice policy. (Cook & Wilson, 1985)

RW: Aww, sounds like he may have been pretty conservative.

BF: But he was much more than a conservative idealogue. He was an

extraordinarily scholar, an avid reader, unusually broad thinker,
collaborator, and prolific writer. He’s best known for his research on
policing and the epistemology of crime, but he’s written much more on
crime and justice. The year after his research on unemployment and
crime with Phil Cook, he published a book with criminologists David
Farrington and Lloyd Ohlin proposing a research strategy of
understanding offender behavior through longitudinal analysis.
(Farrington, Ohlin & Wilson, 1986) His City Politics, coauthored with
his mentor, Edward Banfield, was a tour de force, describing urban
politics as a system driven primarily by informal influence rather than
official process – a cultural conflict between those interested in
efficiency and impartiality and those favoring influence and self-interest.
There is much more. To get a more comprehensive view of Wilson’s
work on crime and justice, the interested reader might check out "James
Q. Wilson" in the Oxford Bibliographies on Criminology (2013).

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RW: Interesting.
BF: Yes. Wilson’s long-time Harvard colleague and later Democratic
senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan once took Wilson to the Nixon White
House and said, "Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in
the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention
to what he has to say." (George Will, 2012)
RW: Do you have a sense that his conservatism got the better of his
scholarly objectivity?
BF: For the most part, no. He asked tough questions, especially when
findings went against prevailing conservative thought, but in my
experience he always accepted such findings in his edited volumes. I
heard the same from others, occasionally in print (e.g., Sherman, 2012).
In his later years, his conservative ideology may have trumped his
objectivity, as when he wrote a sharply worded dissent to a National
Academy of Sciences commission on firearms and violence: "In sum, the
evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that Right to
Carry laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect
on other crimes is ambiguous." The other members of the commission
reviewed the same evidence and concluded that Lott’s research was
seriously flawed, and no systematic evidence of such a relationship
existed. (NAS, 2005)
RW: Could you speak a bit more about James Q. Wilson's 1974 essay --
its significance and why it was controversial? Has it aged well?
BF: In that essay, Wilson criticized the way criminologists thought about
crime, arguing that their approach was unscientific, unsupported either
by coherent theory of systematic evidence, and of little or no value to
criminal justice practitioners. Over the decades that followed,
criminology became more rigorous, thanks largely to an abundance of
data, vastly greater computing power, and the use of more sophisticated
empirical tools. So, no, it would be hard to make the same case today
that Wilson made nearly 50 years ago.
RW: You say his book, Thinking About Crime, contributed to more
academically eclectic criminal justice programs. How so? Can you give
us examples?

BF: His "Thinking About Crime" essay, a chapter in his book with the
same title, was about the epistemology of crime, not about crime itself. It

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sharply criticized the sociological orientation of criminology of the time.

Wilson was no fan of sociology, characterizing it as an echo chamber of
leftist dogma, devoid of rigorous scientific information or practical
relevance for the criminal justice system. In the essay, he argued that
economists had been using more theoretically coherent, empirically
supported, and policy-relevant models for dealing with crime, mostly
following theories of rational incentives and deterrence, and community
protection through incapacitation. His characterizations of sociologists
and economists were grossly cartoonish -- much of traditional
criminology is both rigorous and useful, and much of the economics of
crime has been ideologically driven and has not held up to rigorous
scrutiny -- but not totally off base. I think it was no mere coincidence
that in the years that followed criminology and criminal justice programs
throughout the land broadened their faculties to include economists,
psychologists, statisticians, engineers, and scholars of public
administration and industrial organization. Criminology curricula that
had traditionally been nestled exclusively in sociology departments
expanded during the 1980s and ‘90s into schools of criminal justice,
public administration, and public affairs. I say this as a trained
statistician who joined a school of public affairs in 1992 and served 25
years there. This change might have eventually happened on its own, but
there can be little question that Wilson’s essay and book on how to think
about crime accelerated the evolution.
RW: What do you think Wilson’s position would be on our current state
of affairs?
BF: One can only speculate, as Jim can’t speak from the grave. But all of
his writings, even the most doctrinaire, revealed first and foremost his
strong moral sense, love of democracy, respect for good government, and
passion for public policies informed by the best available scientific
evidence. He wrote compellingly of the four pillars of the moral sense:
sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty. Not loyalty. Not fealty to a
person. There can be no question that Wilson today would be aligned
with former Republicans and never-Trumpers. His sense of decency,
integrity, and principled action would have put him in about the same
place as Michael Gerson and Lincoln Project founders Steve Schmidt
and Rick Wilson. I am very sorry that he is not here to speak out for
himself on today’s threats to democracy, both at home and abroad. We
could use his clear and convincing voice in these dark and turbulent
times.

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