‘If this book had appeared 15 years ago,” James Q. Wilson, editor of Crime and Public Policy (Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, Suite 811, 260 California Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94111, $22.95; paper, $8.95), writes, “its contents would have been very different. Depending on the political inclinations and professional affiliations of its authors, it would have either drawn attention to the possibility of improving human nature and man’s social arrangements or vigorously condemned the changed legal context within which crime-control objectives were being pursued.” Instead, Wilson goes on to say, his contributors do not so much reject previous arguments and assumptions as subject them to far more skeptical and rigorous analysis than commentators on crime have hitherto been in the habit of giving them.
The adjective Wilson uses to describe the present volume is “modest,” which strikes me as judicious. Reading Crime and Public Policy one is impressed by the fact that the chief victims of the period 1965-75 were the intellectuals and academicians who set their mental stamp upon it and who, to paraphrase Chaucer, in wrestling for this world asked a fall. They are still with us, but over the past five years a new breed has been coming into the country that is far less dogmatic and self-righteous than the old; that is actually showing itself capable of learning from experience.
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