CONCLUSION
The study of violence and disorder, like the study of religion, has two basic plot lines, decline and persistence. Analysts of violence tend, as Bill Buford put it, to see violence either as a deviation from the past or as continuous with it. That is, commentators stress that the violence of their own times is somehow worse or different from that of preceding generations or they argue that it is fundamentally the same thing, the unvarying sordid product of poverty or oppression or crowd psychology or whatever human characteristics they take to be causally relevant and to transcend time and place.1
I have endeavored to combine these two points of view. There is something both fundamentally old and fundamentally new about late-twentieth-century American violence. What is continuous—in fact, as old as the species—is that a disproportionate share of violent and disorderly acts involve young men. The tendency is in their bodies, in their chemistry, in their genes. In the words of the psychologist Thomas Bouchard Jr., "The genes sing a prehistoric song that should today sometimes be resisted but which it would be foolish to ignore."2 This idea is not yet generally accepted by historians, who are suspicious of its political implications and content to labor within the familiar paradigms of cultural or economic determinism. But it does have strong support from biological and social scientific research. Anyone who wants to understand the history of violence and disorder in American society—in any society—should watch the young men closely, for it is with them that evolution has centered the problem.
Yet gender and age are only two aspects of violence and disorder. Cultural norms and social arrangements are equally critical. Young men who are sensitive about honor and race, intoxicated, irreligious, gathered in armed and undisciplined groups, and without family ties are more prone to mayhem than other young men. This also is historically continuous. The social dynamics of a group of touchy, drunken bachelors in a backwoods tavern in seventeenth-century Virginia would not have been much different from those of a group of touchy, drunken bachelors in a bar in twentieth-century Harlem, and the color of the blood on the floor was surely the same.
But when we ask why these two groups of bibulous men were unsupervised and single, we discover an important difference. The historical change, the something new, involves the reasons for the weakness or failure of the family as an instrument of moderation and control.
Familial social control in America (or, more precisely, in remote parts of America) was for a long time frustrated by demographic and social forces. The economically driven migration of peripatetic bachelor laborers, both into the society as a whole and more particularly into masculine domains like gold fields and range country and bonanza farms, distorted local marriage markets. The distortion was aggravated by women's preference for and migration to cities, by racist and nativist assumptions that ruled out potential spouses from different ethnic groups, and by the work-spree cycle, the privately profitable but socially disastrous siphoning off of itinerant bachelor laborers' wages, which might otherwise have gone into savings and family formation.
The migratory problem, as it happened, was self-resolving. Over time the demand for itinerant male labor declined and the gender ratios evened out, both nationally and regionally. Imbalanced marriage markets ceased to be a major problem except in distant places like Alaska. The favorable demography and prosperous, mature industrial economy of the 1940s and 1950s made it possible for record numbers of Americans in all social classes and ethnic groups to marry, many of them at an early age. The marriage and baby booms generated their share of problems, from crowded schools to suburban sprawl, but they also had a domesticating effect. Rates of crime and violent death fell.
Then came the 1960s, a decade that looks more and more like the hinge of modern American history. The baby boomers entered their teens and twenties; rates of drug and alcohol consumption began to go up, as did divorce, illegitimacy, sex and violence in the media, and the propensity to avoid or delay marriage and to live alone. For reasons of racism, segregation, and structural economic change, as well as the persistence of a subculture of poverty, these changes were most apparent in the inner city. It was the ghetto residents who suffered most from the upsurge of youthful male violence and disorder, especially after the crack trade upgraded weapons and destroyed families and whole neighborhoods.
It is as if what had been a transient demographic anomaly in nonagricultural frontier regions, the temporary breakdown in the familial mechanisms for controlling young men, has become a permanent feature of ghetto life despite (or, as some have suggested, because of) the low gender ratio. Indeed, it is possible to think of the urban ghettos as artificial and unusually violent frontier societies—vice-ridden combat zones in which groups of armed, unparented, and reputation-conscious young bachelors, high on alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs, menace one another and the local citizenry, undeterred if not altogether untouched by an entropic justice system.
Calling ghettos in the decaying hearts of big cities "frontiers" may seem an odd metaphor, but it is not an anachronistic one. It has often occurred to contemporaries. Sanyika Shakur, a former Eight-Tray Gangster Crip who took to studying history in prison, decided that the incursions of his set into enemy territory were like those of American settlers into Indian lands. Scouts would be sent in, the "natives" probed for weaknesses, raiding parties would "mount up," a military presence would be established, then "in come the citizens—in this case, gang members." When Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros toured Chicago's Ida B. Wells public housing project in 1993 (accompanied by a security patrol) he decided that what he saw was "almost like a western frontier." Local residents began calling North Kenwood, another Chicago war zone, "the Wild West." The founders of the Jamaican drug gangs took their generic name, "posses," from western films. One young New York City drug dealer who went to Buffalo in search of sweeter profits and softer markets even evoked the frontier analogy in Turnerian fashion. "There's more opportunity in Buffalo," he explained. "You know back in the days when you went West to claim gold? Buffalo's like that."3
The language of gangs resembles that of the masculine frontier. It is vivid, profane, and unconsciously self-denigrating. Just as men in western mining camps and bunkhouses dubbed themselves "boys," black gang members call themselves "homeboys" and "niggers." Nicknames like G-Roc and Tiny Vamp replace formal names, which are often unknown to other gang members, as they were unknown to other miners in the gold fields.4 In both cases the conventional virtues and connections implied by polite social discourse—Mister, given name, surname—are jettisoned in favor of noms de guerre and defiant, juvenile language that reflect the disposability and puerility of its speakers.
Outsiders have understood the situation in much the same way. The nonagricultural frontier was, in deed and reputation, the most tumultuous region of the expanding nation; the inner city has earned the same distinction in the twentieth century. The parallel even turned up in the language of the Vietnam War. When Navy pilots flew off to bomb Hanoi, they said they were going to "Dodge City." Air Force pilots, more up-to-date in their choice of metaphors, said they were going "downtown." The two images, a century apart in their origins, connoted exactly the same thing: the zone of maximum danger.
A good analogy, like a good argument, should not be pushed too hard. There are also important differences between violence and disorder in the nonagricultural West and in the late-twentieth-century ghetto. Far more ghetto youth are illegitimate, hence undersocialized, and unemployed, hence unproductive in the legitimate economy, than was the case along the frontier. If the dominant pattern of frontier vice was work and spree, that of ghetto vice is hustle and spree, adding another dimension of crime and degradation to the violence surrounding the vice industry. Young frontiersmen, whatever their marital prospects may have been, did not want for work. The dollars they spent on liquor and whores were usually come by honestly, not by robbery or shoplifting or drug dealing. Street gangs of the sort common today in the inner city were practically nonexistent.
The historical sources (as opposed to western novels and movies) also indicate that there was less sociopathic violence on the frontier. The reasons for the killing—nobody calls me that, goddam skulking savages, coolies take our wages—may seem lamentable to modern eyes, but at least they were reasons. Settlers were not much worried that a kid with a gun and no regard for human life would mow them down while gunning for someone else. People were not, in fact, much worried about kids at all.5
They are now. One of the most disturbing and politically explosive aspects of inner-city violence, terrifying to black and white communities alike, has been the rapid increase of felonious crime and gunplay among unsupervised inner-city youths, not excluding children. Miami police chief Donald Warshaw has encountered ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds "running around with guns and drugs, and when we track down their parents, we find they are on drugs, too. It's out of control."6
And it keeps getting worse. Michael Bell, a resident of Jacksonville, Florida, who began selling drugs at thirteen, managed to accumulate a record of sixteen arrests on narcotics, gun, theft, and battery charges before finally being convicted of two murders at the age of twenty-four. He used an AK-47 and ambushed his victims. He was the prime suspect in at least four other killings. "He doesn't seem to have a conscience at all," said the homicide detective who doggedly pursued him. "This guy has absolutely no remorse about any of the killings we questioned him about." On trial for his life, Bell spent his time amusing himself by sticking out his tongue and making obscene gestures.7
The Jacksonville sheriff's office has created a composite portrait of future Michael Bells. Called SHOs, for serious habitual offenders, they are juveniles who have a minimum of five arrests, including three felonies within a twelve-month period, and have a record of violence or drug charges. Four of five SHOs are black males. One in twenty lives with both parents. Their average age is 16.7 years.8
No trend continues forever. After 1991, rates of homicide and other serious crimes began declining again following their spectacular run-up in the late 1980s. The decline has been attributed to a leveling off of crack consumption and the stabilization of urban drug markets; the mass incarceration, often on drug charges, of young black men; and the creation of larger, more aggressive police departments, of which the "unchained" NYPD is taken to be the model. Having been defined down for so many years, deviancy has begun to be defined back up, at least in New York City.9
What is often missing from the discussion of the recent past is the idea that the crime statistics should have been falling, given the movement of the baby boomers into sedate middle age. Viewed in perspective, the decline in the five years after 1991 is more a restoration of normal demographic trends than a law-enforcement miracle. And it may well prove short-lived. Crime and violence among juveniles remain at unprecedented levels and several experts have predicted that they will actually worsen, both because of a projected increase in the number of teenagers and because more of these teenagers will be illegitimate.10
This is the other key difference between the old and the new patterns, the outer and the inner frontier. Western violence and disorder were passing migratory anomalies in a society dominated by Victorianism and the work ethic. The vice-linked troubles of a Dodge City or an early San Francisco were intense and deadly, but of brief duration. The same cannot be said of the ghetto, where violence and disorder have become endemic in the context of very different social and demographic circumstances. There is no built-in mechanism to balance inner-city populations as there was along the frontier, where the population inevitably moved toward balance and any large male surplus usually disappeared within a decade or two. Nothing in contemporary ghetto life assures that the numbers of marriageable men and women will come into balance, or that prospects for family formation will thus be enhanced.
The entangled problems of social order described in this book are not going away any time soon, either in the ghetto or in the larger society. What has happened in the inner city may well be a harbinger of worsening problems for the entire nation. Changing labor-market realities and the new dispensation of sexual individualism in an eroticized, youth-oriented, media-based consumer culture have undermined family stability and self-discipline throughout the United States, not just in urban ghettos. Levels of family disruption and illegitimacy among whites three decades into the sexual revolution are almost exactly where they were for black families when Moynihan sounded the alarm in 1965."
Seen in perspective these events are a continuation, possibly the culmination, of a momentous historical trend, the decline of the family as the basic social unit and the appropriation of its functions by the state, professions, and corporations. Two centuries ago American families were society, or at any rate its centers of desire, conception, labor, production, consumption, authority, discipline, training, credit, and care for the sick, aged, and dying. But in the course of the nineteenth century families began losing power and authority. The usual suspects are the commercial and industrial revolutions, the decline of agriculture and rise of cities, the spread of public schools, factories, asylums, prisons, hospitals, and the creeping intrusions of bureaucracies and professions into the lifeworld of the home. In the course of the twentieth century (aside from the temporary and perhaps anomalous marriage boom of the 1940s and 1950s) the nuclear family itself began to break up. More and more of its socializing and punishing functions devolved upon the professions, private enterprise, and the state, the parent of last resort.12
State parenting is neither a cheap nor a satisfactory solution to the problem of maintaining social order. The voice of familyinstilled conscience is always more cost-effective than that of a police officer, especially if the officer is part of a criminal justice system that has become irrelevant to all but serious offenses and then not guaranteed to produce results. Voters have obviously become frustrated over this failure, which has been a conservative warhorse since the 1968 election and has contributed heavily to the Republican ascendancy in state and national politics.
Some of this anger might be better directed into a mirror. While it is true that politicians have often affected the amount of violence and disorder—think of the failure to protect Indians or the success of the educational provisions of the GI Bill—they have usually done so at the margins. Those who think that the right array of policies will quickly and painlessly reverse the post-1960 trends are deceiving themselves. No one who considers the history of American violence and disorder should be a policy nihilist. Lives gained or lost at the margin are still lives gained or lost. Statutory details matter, and so does the effectiveness of law enforcement. Yet it is equally hard to escape the conclusion that the key to controlling young men's violence and disorder lies not in the legislative process or in simply adding police and prisons but in society's basic familial arrangements, which means with all of us.
This insight is at the heart of the "new familism," a movement that has attracted a diverse group of social scientists and journalists. The basic point of the movement, that families nurture, control, and integrate, is the same one Durkheim made more than a century ago. When families do not perform these functions the larger society always suffers. Too many boys with guns, sums up the writer David Blankenhorn, is the result of too few boys with fathers.
The policy corollary is that the prison-building spree of the last two decades, whatever its partisan dividends, has been socially misguided. Prisons, Blankenhorn continues, are just a costly quarantining strategy for dealing with the consequences of illegitimacy and fatherless families. Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi reach a similar conclusion in their widely discussed book A General Theory of Crime. In their view law-breaking originates in poor self-control, which is in turn caused by negligent parenting in the first six to eight years of life. Unconcerned or absent parents who fail to supervise young children and to recognize or punish their deviant behavior breed impulsive delinquents who will persist in breaking the law until they are incapacitated, killed, or burned out. Observing that governments are neither the cause of nor the solution to the crime problem, they advocate policies to enhance the ability of families to socialize children as the only realistic hope for substantial reduction in crime."
The psychologist David Lykken has gone a step further. He argues that skillful parenting is crucial, especially for boys whose genetic makeup inclines them toward fearlessness, aggressiveness, impulsivity, and sensation-seeking. Tough kids need tough love from vigilant parents. But widespread illegitimacy (to which Lykken attributes the high black crime rate) has undermined parenting and produced a bumper crop of mostly male sociopaths, "stowaways on our communal voyage who have never signed the social contract." Because each sociopath generates large social costs, drastic preventive measures are in order: more foster homes, boarding schools, and even parental licensing. People who are not competent to be parents should not reproduce, Lykken asserts, and if they do they should be subject to forced contraception.14
Few of the new familists share Lykken's enthusiasm for state eugenics. They do, however, share his basic idea, that life's script is written early. Much in this book supports this view, though much also qualifies it. To look at the American situation over four centuries is to realize that there is more to antisocial conduct than parental non-, mis-, or malfeasance acting upon a child's innate temperament. Other factors such as population structure, cultural and subcultural norms, racial prejudice, economic opportunity, the interactive effects of male groups, the availability of guns, drugs, and alcohol, and the restraining effect of marriage are necessary to make sense of the historical pattern of violence and disorder.
Stated logically, defective socialization is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for increased violence and disorder. Consider California during the Gold Rush. With the possible and partial exception of the Sydney Ducks and some French paupers, the California immigrants were self-disciplined men raised in intact families.15 The vice, violence, and disorder of their lives were products of demographic, situational, and cultural factors, such as the racially motivated exclusion of Chinese women. It was not a matter of broken families or inattentive parenting. The same might be said of the cowboys, hard workers whose payday blowouts had little to do with early childhood and much to do with the temptations of the cattle towns. That said, those who emphasize early upbringing still make an important point. Families rather than governments are the first and best line of defense against violent and disorderly behavior.
The family advocates are also right about cost effectiveness. Societies that attempt to control behavior by relying on police and prisons rather than families will have more crime and heavier taxes, plus ever-larger outlays for private security. This is the other great virtue of attentive parenting in stable families: it is by far the least expensive way to maintain social order. Men who are raised by two parents and who then marry and become parents themselves will not require costly legal deterrence or medical treatment as often as those who are not.
There are, to be sure, exceptions. Family life is not for everyone, and there are certainly married men (and women) who drink too much, attack their spouses, brutalize their children, and run afoul of the law, just as there are children of conscientious parents who turn out willfully, inexplicably bad. But in an aggregate statistical sense society will always be more orderly and less costly if more of its male members are domesticated.
Domestication does not mean a patriarchal family, or one in which the father is the sole breadwinner. The one belongs to the past, the other is no longer feasible for millions of Americans. Nor am I suggesting that women have an obligation to marry, or that they should marry poorly behaved men in an effort to "rescue" them. Let the louts fend for themselves. However, other things being equal, the total amount of violence and disorder in society is negatively related to the percentage of males in intact families of origin or procreation, and therefore it is desirable for governments and other institutions to encourage marriage.
Some might reply that marriage, far from dampening male violence, merely transfers it within the family: the wives and kids get hit instead of the boys in the bar. This is, in a tautological sense, true. There would be no spouse abuse if there were no spouses, no child abuse if no children. But it is unrealistic to suppose that men would pose no danger to women and children if marriage did not exist or that society would somehow be safer and more orderly without the institution. Monogamy and married fatherhood reduce the likelihood of sexual jealousy and the uncertainty of paternity, two potent causes of violence against women. In one study using data from 1990-1991, unmarried pregnant women were found to be more than three times as likely to report physical attacks by their boyfriends than married pregnant women were to report similar abuse by their husbands. Not being married was a better predictor of abuse than education, race, age, or any other factor.16
In the broadest terms, marriage and family life restrain men because they change the mix of significant others, roles, expectations, resources, and consequences, and so change behavior. If this principle is false, it would be well to jettison the whole interactionist school of sociology as well as the conclusions of this book. The regionally, racially, and temporally skewed pattern of violence and disorder in America's past and present is simply not comprehensible without taking into account marriage markets and other structural or cultural determinants of family life. Where married men have been scarce or parental supervision wanting, violence and disorder have flourished, as in the mining camps, cattle towns, Chinatowns, black ghettos, and the small hours of the morning. But when stable family life has been the norm for men and boys, violence and disorder have diminished. That was one important reason why, during the mid-twentieth-century marriage boom, violent death rates showed a sustained decline.
Whether politicians can legislatively rescue the comparatively tranquil days of the 1950s from the riptide of modern history is something we may reasonably doubt. What we should not doubt is the social utility of the family, the institution best suited to shape, control, and sublimate the energies of young men.