On being right, but unhappy

A n occasion like this one offers a rare opportunity to look back over what you have been trying to say for some time and to reflect on how well it has held up in a way that we do not often get to. I’m grateful, but this is also a perilous enterprise. The potential for a downside is obvious, particularly for those of us who have chosen, for whatever reason, to presume to voice opinions about big issues of social policy. You run the risk of discovering that you were basically wrong from the beginning and of being embarrassed—big time—by how much of your early thinking needs to be thrown out. Another less anticipated danger is the discovery that you were basically right but wish you were not. I think that is where I am today as I look back through arguments I made about the roots of violent crime in America and about what would and would not work and to address it seriously. The good news is that I think my analysis was largely correct. The bad news is that I think my analysis was largely correct. Let me go back 25 years, to the mid 1980s, when I was drafting the manuscript of the book that later became titled Confronting Crime (which was not the original title—I wanted to call it The American Affliction, which I thought was kind of sexy and also substantive, but my editor nixed that choice, for better or for worse). This was in the first flush of the Reagan era. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of conservative policy ideals at that time—not just regarding crime, but with respect to every aspect of social policy. It was said widely that more optimistic or traditionally “liberal” solutions to social ills, including crime, had been tried and had failed. Or worse, they had helped cause (or at least exacerbate) the problems. The absence of credible evidence for that belief did not faze increasing numbers of people across a surprisingly large swath of the political spectrum. So, in addition to the forceful and vocal case being made by newly resurgent conservatives, there was a pervasive sense of doubt, a failure of nerve even among people who thought of themselves as traditional liberals. The resulting vacuum created an opening for the resurfacing of ideas about crime and punishment (as well as much else) that, for some time, had been mostly confined to the fringes of public debate. It was a time that (at least when it came to our ideas about crime)