James Q. Wilson, 1931–2012

No one in James Q. Wilson’s family had ever gone to college, and he didn’t plan to either. The summer after high school, he was learning how to fix carburetors at his father’s car repair shop when his English teacher came by and said he’d arranged for Wilson to be admitted to a local college. That was the first tenuous step in the academic career of one of America’s most influential social scientists, whose “broken windows” theory inspired a new approach to law enforcement and ushered in a remarkable reduction in urban crime.

Born in Denver, Wilson grew up in a lower-middle-class part of Long Beach, Calif., said NationalReview.com. After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Redlands and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, Wilson wrote a series of books tackling subjects “far removed from his own experience,” including Negro Politics and The Amateur Democrat, a study of affluent reformers in Manhattan.

As a political science professor at Harvard in the 1960s, Wilson developed a deeper interest in crime and how to combat it. He came to the subject as “an avowed conservative” advocating strict punishment, said The New York Times, but was “less an ideologue than a scientist.” In 1982, he and criminologist George Kelling made the case in The Atlantic Monthly that police had to act swiftly and firmly to head off “the domino effect of disorder,” said The Boston Globe. “One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing,” they wrote. Their article famously inspired William J. Bratton, who served in turn as police commissioner of Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, to adopt the new approach, increasing foot patrols and cracking down on seemingly minor delinquents like graffiti artists and subway freeloaders. Crime in all three cities fell dramatically, and the “broken window” strategy took hold across the country.

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Wilson’s larger message was that cultural and moral values are what determine “how long a society can stay free, grateful, and prospering,” said USNews.com. His ideas continue to exert an oversize influence on American life.