Sensing the public's angst, politicians of all stripes have proposed solutions. Their crime-fighting proposals have come in two forms. One is served up by incentivists and the other by stucturalists. The incentivists claim that more severe punishments reduce crime rates. The structuralists object to these solutions. They argue that getting tough on crime doesn't work. For the structuralists, the solution to crime lies in criminal rehabilitation and also in the amelioration of the root cause of crime: the breakdown in moral standards and civility in America.
Who's right? The evidence, which is summarized by James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in Crime and Human Nature, overwhelmingly favors the incentivists. Contrary to assertions made by the structuralists, getting tough on crime works and it works rapidly, according to data presented in the book.
The data also suggest that stucturalists err in claiming that criminal rehabilitation works. In actuality, it has a poor track record. The one strong leg structuralists have to stand on is based on their desire to reset the nation's moral compass. This is important. But even if we wear the rosiest of glasses, we cannot be too sanguine about the possibility of changing America's moral standards, at least in the short run.
To reduce crime now, we must change the incentives faced by potential criminals.
As Gary Becker, the University of Chicago's Nobel-laureate economist, has shown, crimes are not irrational acts. Instead, they are voluntarily committed by people who compare the expected benefits of crime with the expected costs. As Meyer Lansky, the infamous Mafia boss, claimed, "I am a businessman." He calculated the
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