STEVE SAILER: Broken Window of Opportunity.

This theory of broken windows was Wilson’s second big conceptual contribution to reducing crime. The first—incapacitation—has been forgotten because it’s embarrassing to remember just how inane liberal elites had gotten in their thinking about crime during the 1960s.

Because researchers couldn’t prove that prison reformed or deterred criminals, the conventional wisdom back then became: What was the point of sentencing crooks to prison at all? So, during the 1960s the number of people in prison declined even as crime grew.

But, as Wilson pointed out in the 1970s, somebody can’t be committing more street crimes if he’s in prison rather than out on the streets. At minimum, prison incapacitates criminals.

Granted, Wilson’s first big idea—that if Central Park muggers are in prison, then they can’t mug people in Central Park—doesn’t seem like a genius insight today. But it was, apparently, a blinding revelation in 1975.

It should be even less of a revelation the second time around, which has me convinced that this time going soft on crime is less about criminal justice reform (if it was ever really that in the ’60s and ’70s) and more about lefties working Lenin’s “the worse, the better” dictum.