Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing

by Bernard E. Harcourt

This is the first book to challenge the "broken-windows" theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors, 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 misdemeanor laws.

The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty 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 is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? This book explores the reasons why. It also presents a new, more thoughtful vision of criminal justice.

Genres: Law, Nonfiction, Politics, Police, Sociology

304 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2001

About the author

Bernard Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law & Criminology and Chair and Professor of Political Science at The University of Chicago.

Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, criminal law and procedure, and criminology. He is the author of Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). Harcourt is also the coauthor of Criminal Law and the Regulation of Vice (Thompson West 2007), the editor of Guns, Crime, and Punishment in America (New York University Press 2003), and the founder and editor of the journal Carceral Notebooks.

Professor Harcourt earned his bachelor's degree in political theory at Princeton University, his law degree at Harvard Law School, and his PhD in political science at Harvard University. After law school, Professor Harcourt clerked for the Hon. Charles S. Haight Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then worked as an attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, representing death row inmates. Professor Harcourt continues to represent death row inmates pro bono, and has also served on human rights missions in South Africa and Guatemala.

Professor Harcourt has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, New York University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Université Paris X–Nanterre, and Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III, and was previously on the faculty at the University of Arizona.
Education:

AB ,1984, Princeton University; JD, 1989, and PhD, 2000, Harvard University

Reviews

[Thomas Ray]

The author tells us that there's no evidence that "broken windows" policing reduces crime. What it does is demonize and harass poor and nonwhite people. An interview with the author here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/w...

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a mix of empirical study analysis, theory survey, and rhetorical analysis. The author warns the reader that the empirical chapter is necessarily heavy in detail and can be skipped; however I slogged through it. I remembered enough from my one college course to recognize that he was asking good questions of prior studies, though I'd forgotten most of what i once knew about the actual formulas and their results. He used the analysis to separate "broken windows" policing out from other causes of a decrease in crime, thus removing claims that the policing method worked.

In the theoretical section he challenges the categorization of order/disorder using a Foucauldian analysis of subject creation. He questions the assumption that the category "disorder" is fixed and natural, pointing out disorders like white collar crimes and police use of excessive force that are not included among public drunkenness. In his analysis he claims that the manner of policing creates the category "disorder" as it is used then assumed preexistent.

In the rhetorical section he traces the history of the use of a "harm principle" to determinine when government can intervene in individual action. He shows a gradual movement from harm/no harm to analyses of multiple harms. And the "harm principle" doesn't provide a way to weigh among harms. By the conclusion he is arguing that harms done by aggressive policing need to be considered along with harms of the act being constrained for a total anaysis of harm.

Although written in 2001, it still has relevance. I'm interested in following up to see how many of his ideas have been incorporated into later studies and also to see how his thinking has evolved.