Broken Windows Thesis

The development of any society inevitably creates deviance. As customs, morals, and economies emerge, so too do standards of conduct. The delineation of a “right” way of conducting oneself simultaneously gives rise to a “wrong” way. The wrong way may exist as social deviance that invites informal penalties such as shame and ostracism, or it might be formally proscribed by law-making authorities who classify the act as a crime.

The criminalization of deviance is nowhere a more murky or tenuous endeavor than in the realm of behaviors that fail to conform to mainstream standards and yet do not have direct, identifiable victims. This is the class of behavior called “social disorder.” Social disorder has a long and troubled legislative history, starting with the early criminalization of homelessness and drug addiction, which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately declared to be constitutionally impermissible. It has proved difficult enough to translate even seemingly straightforward precepts like “Thou shalt not kill” into law, given the numerous exceptions that must be made for war, self-defense, the death penalty, and corporate negligence, and even more daunting a task to codify the far vaguer principle “Thou shalt not be disorderly” into law.

The most axial attempt at the criminalization of disorder in recent history was James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling's broken windows thesis. Wilson and Kelling contended that disorder if left unchecked causes serious crime. The publication of their 1982 article was a turning point in the way society views disorder and its solutions. Key to the thesis's popular success was its legitimation of the eradication of social disorder: If disorderly individuals ultimately invite crime into an area, then disorder is a grave threat to society and, therefore, a legitimate target of elimination efforts. Without this rationale to justify itself, the broken windows thesis would have been no more than a decrying of the moral and physical decay of certain neighborhoods and city areas. With this rationale included, though, Wilson and Kelling were able to advance the argument that disorder is not merely obnoxious—it is dangerous.

The present entry provides an overview of the broken windows thesis. Emphasis is placed on the important distinction between the criminalization of social disorder (panhandling, loitering, public intoxication, etc.) and that of physical disorder (vandalism, graffiti, etc.). In some respects, the broken windows thesis is a recasting of old laws against statuses such as vagrancy and drug addiction; that is, by criminalizing the behaviors commonly seen among homeless persons, the addicted, troubled youth, and the mentally ill, broken windows also, [Page 78]by extension, criminalizes these states of being. The policing of social disorder, then, represents the contemporary social construction of a class not just of deviance but, rather, of deviants—that is, the target for legitimate government interference and coercive control.