Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing - Tapa dura

The main contributions of this volume include its incisive analysis of the uses and abuses of the concepts of incivilities and disorder, its placement of the order-maintenance rhetoric within the broader economic and political discussions of the New Progressives, and its close attention to the legal and societal impacts of the rise to fame of this theoretical perspective. Harcourt's book represents a sincere, thoughtful, and multidisciplinary effort to demythologize the incivilities thesis...The volume is appropriate for graduate students in criminal justice, criminology, political science, and sociology. I have used it in a communities and crime graduate course with good results.--Ralph B. Taylor "American Journal of Sociology "

This book challenges the "broken-windows" theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanours, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanour laws. The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly 30 years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of "law abiders" and "disorderly people" and of "order" and "disorder", which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society. How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice - a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that the author argues is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of citizens - come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics through-out the world? This book explores the reasons why.