There has been much talk in Italy on the necessity of adopting a "Zero Tolerance" policy toward crime and illegal immigration, talk fueled by the results of general elections on April 13-14, and by a number of violent crimes, particularly against women.
It is striking to note that this fashion of politicians willing to show they are "tough" on crime arrives in Italy at the very moment when in the US many start to challenge the "broken-windows" theory of crime, which is the basis of the so-called Zero Tolerance criminal policy.
It is enough to go to a mainstream media website to find fresh news like this: "Innocent man free after 26 years in prison." And, of course, there are literally hundreds of cases of innocent people executed, or still in the Death Row.
But facts are never enough to have a theory abandoned, and so it is important to show that the theory that has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws is baseless. Although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years (it started in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1970s) it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of "law abiders" and "disorderly people" and of "order" and "disorder," which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that a particular society adopts.
How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? The problem is that it appears plausible, it offers "something" to show to citizens, and is highly symbolic: politicians can use it to build a "macho image" and this usually is good in competitive elections. Absent a more complex thinking, and serious research, the media and lobbies interested in a repressive policy easily prevail in pushing opportunistic politicians in this direction. The fact that it is a costly and ineffective policy is never seriously debated.
