His Republican challenger, Bob Dole, has argued that today's low crime rate results from a huge national imprisonment drive that originated in the 1970s and increased rapidly under Reagan and Bush in the 1980s. In the 1980s political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling teamed up for two famous and often-cited Atlantic articles on crime. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Families move out, unattached adults move in.
Teenagers gather in front of the corner store.
Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers. They found this approach, which was being practiced increasingly throughout the country, to represent the most significant redefinition of police work in the past half century. Another school of thought is much less optimistic and predicts a dramatic rise in juvenile crime as the juvenile population in the United States continues to expand. Kaminer's findings were not heartening. Robert Worth described his visit to McKean, the federal correctional institution in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and reported that since 1989 an institutional emphasis on the humane treatment of prisoners has resulted in no escapes, no homicides, no reports of sexual assaults, no suicides, only three serious assaults on staff members, and only six recorded assaults on inmates.