Broken Window Essay

Broken Windows Literature Review How can we rid crime from the world? This has been a burning question on the minds of individuals for several years. All actions have consequences, and the power of sentencing these crimes is given to the justice system. In the 1980s, “Broken Windows” was coined by the american criminologist and american academic, George Kelling and James Q. Wilson. The theory is that in order to eliminate large scale crimes, smaller, even harmless crimes must have justice. The ‘broken window’ refers to the experiment conducted to prove their theory, if “a window in a building is left broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken" (Kelling, Wilson, 1982). Rates in crime had substantially dropped

Harcourt, B. 2001). Since the 1980’s, this problem has been a topic rioted against for years and is still present today, Sampson noted that “there's plenty cops can do to deter serious crime but changing conceptions of race probably isn't among them.” (Brook, D. 2006). “This is visible not only in such bloody instances of police wrongdoing as the cases of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo but, more generally, in the city’s eagerness to further the “stereotyping of black criminality” (Anderson B. Harcourt, B. 2001). It is often unclear how police separate “age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms” in determining “the undesirable from the desirable”(Kelling, Wilson, 1982). This often causes civilians, specifically minorities, to feel unsafe when the police make appearances, with broken windows, car and foot patrol became more prevalent and any bias held makes minorities an easy target. This is often deemed unjust, especially with petty crime being inflated, wich makes “the concern about equity more serious” (Kelling, Wilson,