Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities by George L. Kelling and Catherine Coles is a sociology book about petty urban crime and strategies to contain it. It is based on Broken Windows by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, which appeared in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. The title comes from the following example:
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book's authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less).
Republican Mayor Giuliani adopted this strategy in New York City. He had the police strictly enforce the law against subway fare evasion and stopped (some say persecuted) the "squeegee men" who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment. Rates of more serious crimes fell significantly.
It’s similar to the “brokenwindows” theory of urban decay, which holds that if a single window is left unrepaired in a building, in fairly short order, the remaining windows in the building will be broken.
Many Windows users are simply resigned to the fact that their computers contain software that is not under their control.
Windows apologists have long argued that the only reason the Mac has been so strikingly free of security exploits is that it has such a smaller market share than Windows.
One of the inevitable critiques, maybe a fundamental critique, of BrokenWindows is that the types of "disorderly conduct" it targets are notably offenses typical of the poor.
And yet the windows themselves have become a metaphor for problems actually blamed on people who are generally not in a position to fix windows.
Testing "brokenwindows" was not the point of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the study planned and conducted by Dr. Earls and colleagues to unravel the social, familial, educational and personal threads that weave together into lives of crime and violence.
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