James Q. Wilson
James Quinn Wilson (May 27, 1931 – March 2, 2012) was an American academic, political scientist, and an authority on public administration. Most of his career was spent as a professor at UCLA and Harvard University. He coauthored a leading university textbook, American Government, as well as many scholarly books and articles, and op-ed essays. He gained national attention for a 1982 article introducing the broken windows theory.
Wilson served on many national committees and boards, and was elected president of the American Political Science Association. In 2003, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President George W. Bush.
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Career
James Wilson completed his B.A. at the University of Redlands in 1952, where he was the national collegiate debate champion in 1951 and 1952. He completed an M.A. (1957) and a Ph.D. (1959) in political science at the University of Chicago. From 1961 to 1987, he was the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University.
His 1975 book Thinking About Crime put forward a novel theory of incapacitation as the most effective explanation for the reduction in crime rates observed where longer prison sentences were the norm. Criminals might not be deterred by the threat of longer sentences, but repeat offenders would be prevented from further offending, simply because they would be in jail rather than out on the street.[1]
The broken windows theory was first introduced by social scientists Wilson and George L. Kelling, in an article titled "Broken Windows" and which appeared in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.[2]
From 1987 until 1997, he was the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at the UCLA Anderson School of Management at UCLA. From 1998 to 2009, he was the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy.[3][4]
Wilson's university text American Government (now coauthored with John J. DiIulio, Jr.) is widely sold. The Amazon Best Sellers Rank of his text was 386,812 on April 19, 2012.
Business positions
Wilson was a former chairman of the White House Task Force on Crime (1966), of the National Advisory Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention (1972–73) and a member of the Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime (1981), the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985–90), and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was a former president of the American Political Science Association. He served on the board of directors for the New England Electric System (now National Grid USA), Protection One, RAND, and State Farm Mutual Insurance.
He was the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute. Wilson was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the International Council of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.
Political views
Although as a young professor he "voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the last's presidential campaign", [5] Wilson was later recognized as a leading conservative scholar, as indicated by his advisory position to the American Enterprise Institute.
Wilson was a staunch advocate for perseverance in the US War on Drugs, saying,
Even now, when the dangers of drug use are well understood, many educated people still discuss the drug problem in almost every way except the right way. They talk about the "costs" of drug use and the "socioeconomic factors" that shape that use. They rarely speak plainly—drug use is wrong because it's immoral and it is immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul.[6]
Awards
- Honorary doctorate from Harvard University
- Lifetime Achievement Award, American Political Science Association, 2001
- Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2003
Death
On March 2, 2012, Wilson died in Boston, Massachusetts from complications due to leukemia.[7]
Books
- American Politics, Then and Now (2010)
- American Government, 12th ed. (2010, with John J. DiIulio, Jr.)
- Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (2008, ed. with Peter Schuck)
- The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Damages Families (2002)
- Moral Judgment (1997)
- The Moral Sense (1993)
- On Character: Essays by James Q. Wilson (1991)
- Bureaucracy (1989) – "his masterwork"[8]
- Crime and Human Nature (1985, with Richard Herrnstein)
- Watching Fishes: Life and Behavior on Coral Reefs (1985, with Roberta Wilson)
- The Politics of Regulation (1980)
- The Investigators (1978)
- Thinking About Crime (1975)
- Political Organizations (1973)
- Varieties of Police Behavior (1968)
- The Amateur Democrat (1966)
- City Politics (1963, with Edward C. Banfield)
- Negro Politics (1960)
Films
References
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- ↑ http://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/academics/faculty/default.htm?faculty=james_wilson
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- ↑ Quoted in W. J. Bennett, Body Count (New York: 1996), pp. 140–41
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External links
- Biography at Boston College
- Wilson's page at Pepperdine's website
- James Q. Wilson Archives online articles
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- James Q. Wilson Collection at the RAND Library
- No easy answers, an interview with Wilson in Reason
- Center for Inquiry's Textbook Accuracy Report [PDF]
- Wilson's rebuttal to textbook criticisms at the Wayback Machine
- American academics
- American criminologists
- American essayists
- American non-fiction crime writers
- American political scientists
- American textbook writers
- American male writers
- Boston College faculty
- University of California, Los Angeles faculty
- University of Chicago alumni
- Harvard University faculty
- Miller Center Affiliates
- Writers from Denver, Colorado
- Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
- The American Spectator people
- University of Redlands alumni
- Public administration scholars
- 1931 births
- 2012 deaths
- Male essayists
