Broken Windows: The Spread and Control of Crime

Abstract

Early social statisticians in the nineteenth century were astonished to find that the prevalence of crimes from year to year followed a precise mathematical pattern. Specifically, variations from the long-term average fitted onto a bell curve – the same curve that described variations in births and deaths, or in errors in experimental measurements. This means that small deviations from the average happen more often than large ones, and that very large deviations tend to be vanishingly rare. How could it be that these acts of crime, committed with free will, obeyed such regularity? To some, such as the influential Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, this meant that crimes must be somehow compelled by a higher force – not by individual choices, but by “the customs of the people”, and that they must therefore be regarded as an inevitability: a “budget that is paid with frightening regularity”.