SPENGLER What would James Q Wilson tell
Mexico? By Spengler
No
political scientist had more impact on the daily
lives of Americans than James Q Wilson, who
transformed American law enforcement. News of his
death came on March 3. Rather than concentrate on
kingpins, Wilson argued for controlling petty
crime. His classic 1982 article "Broken Windows"
argued that maintaining the perception of public
order was a precondition for law enforcement; in
practice, it implied that controlling petty crime
was just as important as arresting the kingpins.
Last November I had the honor to address
an Amherst College seminar on the same program
with Professor Wilson. He looked well and spoke
with energy; no-one who heard him there would have
guessed that leukemia would fell him within
months. I had meant but did not manage to ask him
a question: what would he
advise Mexico, which has
failed to stop the drug cartels' reign of terror?
Mexico does what Wilson debunked a
generation ago, that is, concentrate on kingpins.
But after nearly 50,000 drug-related deaths in the
last five years, the problem is worse than before.
"The government’s focus on killing or detaining
cartel leaders has led younger, more violent
criminals into the market," the New York Times
wrote March 18 in a story on Mexican lawlessness,
adding, "Many areas now veer toward lawlessness:
in 14 of Mexico's 31 states, the chance of a
crime's leading to trial and sentencing was less
than 1 percent in 2010, according to government
figures analyzed by a Mexican research institute
known as Cidac. And since then, experts say,
attempts at reform have stalled as crime and
impunity have become cozy partners."
Libertarians used to argue that arresting
criminals was futile as long as crime paid,
because there always would be someone willing to
take the job; the only remedy, they added, was to
legalize drugs, bring down the price and eliminate
the economic incentive. The trouble is that the
Mexican gangs do not restrict their predations to
drugs, as the frightful incidence of kidnapping
makes clear. As head of Richard Nixon's commission
on illegal drugs in 1972, Wilson engaged in a
celebrated polemic with the economist Milton
Friedman over drug legalization. Rather than
accept legalization, Wilson proposed to refocus
law enforcement.
It worked, but at
dreadful cost. America has the world's highest
incarceration rate at 743 per 100,000 of
population and holds a quarter of all the prison
inmates in the world. And the prison population
disproportionately includes minorities. A third of
African-Americans between the ages of 20 and 30
have passed through the criminal justice system in
1995, according to the Sentencing Project, a
prisoners' advocacy group. According to the
Sentencing Project, "More than 60% of the people
in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities.
For black males in their twenties, one in every
eight is in prison or jail on any given day".
Controlling crime crushed a generation of
African-Americans. Murder is the leading cause of
death among young African-American men; an
American black has a 5% lifetime probably of
becoming a murder victim (against a 0.7% probably
for a white American). The legal scholar Michelle
Alexander observes that "there are more African
Americans under correctional control - in prison,
jail, or parole - than were enslaved in 1850, a
decade before the Civil War began."
The
bad news is always the good news. There are fewer
crimes because more criminals are in jail. A great
deal is made over the fact that a million of
America's 7.3 million prison inmates were
convicted of non-violent (mainly drug-related)
crimes. It is much easier to convict a dealer for
selling a modest amount of drugs to an undercover
police officer, though, than to catch the dealer
in a violent act. Drug gangs are violent criminal
conspiracies, and most of the prison inmates
convicted of selling drugs promoted such violence.
That was Wilson's genius, although he
never quite took credit for it this way. Contrary
to what the libertarians argued, you can control
the population of prospective criminals - not by
going after the top, where there always is room,
but by waging a war of attrition at the bottom. In
the past I compared the war on drugs to the
American Civil War, which was won by killing off
such a large proportion of military-age Southern
men (nearly 30%) that the Confederate Army lacked
soldiers to put into the ranks. That was the most
heroic thing America ever did.
That is the
United States, where the number of young people
sufficiently poor to risk life and limb in
criminal activity is comparatively small. What
happens in a poor country with a much larger
proportion of unemployment youth? Mexico's
incarceration rate is just 200 per 100,000
population, roughly a quarter of America's. To
attack criminality from the bottom up rather than
the top down would imply a social dislocation of
catastrophic proportions.
In 2010, one of
Mexico's most prominent public intellectuals,
Enrique Krauze, compared today's drug violence to
the 1910 revolution, which killed 8% of the
country's people. He wrote, "Every 100 years,
Mexico seems to have a rendezvous with violence.
We are enduring another violent crisis, albeit one
that differs greatly from those of a century and
two centuries ago.In 2010, Mexico is again
convulsed with violence, though the size and scope
of today's conflict does not even remotely
approach that of 1810 or 1910. This war is
unfolding within and between gangs of criminals,
who commit violent acts that are fueled only by a
competitive lust for money. This is strikingly
different from the revolutions of 1810 or 1910,
which were clashes of ideals."
What 2012
has in common with 1912, though, is the large
number of very poor people without economic
prospects. America's great recession has had a
disproportionate impact on unskilled workers, and
a devastating impact on illegal immigrants. Only
two-fifths of working-age Americans without a
high-school diploma have jobs, and only 45% are
counted in the labor force, while 72% of Americans
with a four-year college degree or better have
jobs. For Mexican migrants, legal or otherwise,
the shutdown of the construction industry has been
devastating. America always represented a safety
valve for Mexico's unemployed. It no longer does,
nor will it for the foreseeable future.
America's recession, to be sure, is not
Mexico's only, or even its worst problem. Mexico's
economy is one of the world's most cartelized,
emblemized by the curious fact that the world's
richest man (the telephone czar Carlos Slim) comes
from a poor country where the cost of a telephone
call is a multiple of the cost in the United
States. The high cost of telephony counts among
the many barriers to entry that keep a third of
the Mexican economy off the books. Economic
reforms would ameliorate the problem, but slowly
and over a long period of time.
It is
questionable whether any Latin American government
can deliberately reduce the criminal element in
its own population. Peru's former President
Alberto Fujimori will remain in prison for decades
after his 2008 conviction stemming from the use of
death squads against the "Shining Path"
guerrillas. And Fujimori had a relatively free
hand during the 1990s because the guerrillas' main
support came from indigenous people in rural
areas, where street justice is hard to document.
Nonetheless, if it is to break the hold of
criminal gangs on many of its cities, Mexico has
no choice but to take a page from James Q Wilson's
book. To undertake the Herculean labor of
suppressing criminality from the bottom will have
terrible consequences, as in Enrique Krauze's
chilling analogy to the 1910 Revolution. The only
thing worse is the alternative. It is not enough
to arrest the drug lords; it is also necessary to
attrite the ranks of their gunmen. How much will
it cost? If you have to ask what it costs, you
can't afford to be a country.
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