Ludwig is the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and he uses as a heuristic the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s version of the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. According to Kahneman, these are the two cognitive modes that all human beings toggle between. The first is fast, automatic, and intuitive. The second is slow, effortful, and analytical. Ludwig’s innovation is to apply the dichotomy to criminal acts. A System 2 crime might be a carefully planned robbery, in which the assailant stalks and assesses his victims before attacking them. (View Highlight)
This is what criminologists call instrumental violence: acts, Ludwig writes, “committed in order to achieve some tangible or ‘instrumental’ goal (getting someone’s cash or phone or watch or drug turf), where violence is a means to some other, larger end.” A System 1 crime, by contrast, is an act of what Ludwig calls “expressive violence”—aimed not at gaining something tangible but at hurting someone, often in a sudden burst of frustration or anger. (View Highlight)
The central argument of “Unforgiving Places” is that Americans, in their attempts to curb crime, have made a fundamental conceptual error. We’ve assumed that the problem is instrumental violence—and have fashioned our criminal-justice system around that assumption. But the real problem is expressive violence. (View Highlight)
For the better part of a generation, the study of American crime has been in a state of confusion. The first destabilizing event came in the nineteen-nineties, with a sudden and sustained drop in urban crime across the United States, most notably in New York City. At the time, the prevailing view was that gun violence was deeply rooted—a product of entrenched racism, poverty, and despair. But, if that were true, how did New York’s homicide rate fall by more than half in the span of a single decade? Deeply rooted problems aren’t supposed to resolve themselves so swiftly. (View Highlight)
The conventional wisdom adapted. Attention turned to shifts in policing—specifically, the rise of proactive tactics in the nineties. The N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk strategy, aimed at getting guns off the street, was credited with driving the crime decline. But then, in 2013, a federal judge ruled that the police’s stop-and-frisk practices violated constitutional rights. And what happened? Crime continued to fall. New York got safer even though the police stopped doing the things that we thought were making the city safer. It made no sense. (View Highlight)
Then there were those who argued that violent crime was a matter of individual pathology: stunted development, childhood trauma, antisocial tendencies. Look closely at the criminal, we were told. But research—from criminologists like David Weisburd and Lawrence W. Sherman—showed that, in city after city, crime was hyperconcentrated. A handful of blocks accounted for a disproportionate share of violence, and those blocks stayed violent, year after year. In other words, the problem wasn’t people. It was place. (View Highlight)
Last summer, I was given a tour of a low-income neighborhood in Philadelphia by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Its program Transforming Vacant Lots has led a concerted effort to clean up thousands of vacant lots scattered across the city. The approach is simple: clear the weeds, pick up the trash, plant a lawn, put up a post-and-rail fence. The initiative works on over twelve thousand lots, and the results are striking. What once looked like a struggling neighborhood now resembles, at a glance, a middle-class one. (View Highlight)
What’s remarkable, though, isn’t just the aesthetics. It’s that the neighborhoods where these lots have been turned into green spaces have seen a twenty-nine-per-cent drop in gun violence. Twenty-nine per cent! The people haven’t changed. The pathologies haven’t changed. The same police force still patrols the neighborhood. The only new variable is that someone comes by to mow the lawn once or twice a month. As economists like to say: How do you model that? (View Highlight)
This is the puzzle that Ludwig sets out to solve in “Unforgiving Places.” His answer is that these episodes confound us only because we haven’t appreciated how utterly different System 1 criminality is from that of System 2. System 1 thinking is egocentric: it involves, Ludwig writes, interpreting “everything through the lens of ‘What does this have to do with me?’ ” It depends on stark binaries—reducing a range of possibilities to a simple yes or no—and, as he notes, it “focuses more on negative over positive information.” In short, it’s wired for threats. System 1 catastrophizes. It imagines the worst. (View Highlight)
Much of what gets labelled gang violence, he says, is really just conflict between individuals who happen to be in gangs. We misread these events because we insist on naming the affiliations of the combatants (View Highlight)
The “super-predator”—the remorseless psychopath of television dramas—turns out to be rare. The mass shooter, meticulously assembling his arsenal, is a statistical anomaly. The professional hit man is mostly a literary invention (View Highlight)
The Chicago Police Department estimates that arguments lie behind seventy to eighty per cent of homicides. The numbers for Philadelphia and Milwaukee are similar. And that proportion has held remarkably steady over time. Drawing on data from Houston in 1969, the sociologist Donald Black concluded that barely more than a tenth of homicides occurred during predatory crimes like burglary or robbery. The rest, he found, arose from emotionally charged disputes—over infidelity, household finances, drinking, child custody. Not calculated acts of gain, in other words, but eruptions rooted in contested ideas of right and wrong. (View Highlight)
Ludwig’s point is that the criminal-justice system, as we’ve built it, fails to reckon with this reality. We’ve focussed on the signalling function of punishment—on getting the deterrents right, offering the proper mixture of carrots and sticks to influence rational actors. Mass incarceration, which swept the country in the late twentieth century, rested on the assumption that a person spoiling for a fight with another person was weighing costs: that the difference between ten years and twenty-five would matter. But was Jeremy Brown calculating odds when he punched Carlishia Hood? Was her son performing a Bayesian analysis as he ran from the restaurant, gun in hand? (View Highlight)
Why did crime in New York continue to fall after the N.Y.P.D. ended stop-and-frisk? Because what makes police officers effective isn’t how many people they stop or arrest—it’s how many arguments they interrupt or defuse, ideally without resorting to handcuffs or charges. (View Highlight)
Why does crime seem more related to places than to people? Because some places are simply better at de-escalation than other (View Highlight)
And why did Philadelphia’s vacant-lot program work so well? Because, when an empty lot becomes a well-kept lawn, people come outside. They have barbecues and picnics. Kids play. And suddenly, as Jane Jacobs famously put it, the block has “eyes on the street.” (View Highlight)
“Jane Jacobs claimed that informal social control contributed vitally to public safety by interrupting criminal and violent acts in the moment,” Ludwig writes. It’s an idea that doesn’t make much sense if you assume that violence is instrumental. The rational criminal, after all, will just move a block over—set up shop where the odds tilt in his favor. But that’s not how most offenders operate. They’ve lost their temper. For a few volatile minutes, they’re not thinking straight. And, in that state, violence interrupted is violence prevented. (View Highlight)
Ludwig is weary of gun-control arguments. He simply doesn’t believe that the United States is ever going to enact serious restrictions. “Over the last 243 years of U.S. history, the number of major, restrictive federal gun laws has been (depending on how you count) something like five or six.” That’s what economists call the base rate—and Ludwig’s position is that the energy devoted to that lost cause might be better directed elsewhere. (View Highlight)
He wants us, instead, to take System 1 behavior seriously. First, stop talking about criminals as if they occupy some distinct moral category. (View Highlight)
Second, stop locking up so many people for long prison terms. The best way to keep arguments among teen-agers from turning violent is for adults to step in and tell them to cool down—and mass incarceration drains adults from troubled neighborhoods. (View Highlight)
Third, spend more time thinking about what makes one neighborhood safe and another unsafe. Ludwig cites a randomized trial in New York City’s public-housing projects, which found that developments given upgraded outdoor lighting experienced a thirty-five-per-cent reduction in serious crimes compared with those left as is. A well-lit space makes it easier for bystanders to see a confrontation unfold—and makes those involved a little more self-conscious. (View Highlight)
But the biggest opportunity, Ludwig argues, lies in behavioral modification. He writes about a program in Chicago called BAM—Becoming a Man—which teaches teen-agers how to navigate potentially volatile encounters. In a large randomized trial, Ludwig compared students on Chicago’s West Side and South Side who had participated in BAM with those who hadn’t, and found that participation reduced arrests for violent crime by fifty per cent. (View Highlight)
