Crime and human nature.

• Author: Fallows, James

CRIME & HUMAN NATURE

In one of his not-for-network-TV routines, Richard Pryor stops in the midst of a stream of dirty jokes and talks pensively about his film, Stir Crazy. To prepare for their roles as men unjustly thrown behind bars, Pryor says, he and Gene Wilder spent time with convicts from an Arizona penitentiary. The two stars talked with these unfortunates, heard their stories, got to know them and their families, caught glimpses of their souls. The experience of living and working with these men made a deep impression on him, Pryor says, with the sobriety that has come over him since he nearly burned himself to death while free-basing cocaine. It left him with a message to bring to those who'd never had the same cross-cultural exposure. And the message was, thank God for the penitentiary!

The idea that criminals really are different from other people, and not just hapless Jean Valjeans locked up for no graver offense than a desire to feed their young, is the initial proposition of James Q. Wilson's and Richard Herrnstein's new book*. Since that contention rests, in turn, on Wilson's and Herrnstein's theory that certain people are genetically predisposed to a life of crime, it has provoked most of the controversy surrounding the book. Crime and Human Nature is a provocative book, but not because of its hereditarian views. Its most unsettling message does not concern what happens to future criminals before they are born but rather what occurs thereafter.

* Crime and Human Nature. James Q. Wilson, Richard Herrnstein. Simon & Schuster, $22.95.

Crime and Human Nature is a dense, academically oriented, and encyclopedic work, which divides the sources of criminality into three broad categories. The first is the innate characteristics--or, as the authors put it, the "constitutional factors'--that distinguish violent criminals from people at large. This is the section that has dominated discussion of the book, and it is easy to understand why. One simple reason is that this topic comes first in a book that is such arduous going that many readers never reach section two. Of the book's 20 chapters, only three or four--on the influence of parental discipline and the history of attitudes toward crime-- are carefully constructed essays, systematically building an argument and deploying evidence deftly. Both Herrnstein and Wilson have previously shown themselves able to write lucid prose, but in most of Crime and Human Nature they dutifully plow furrows through acres of facts, leaving the reader to trudge behind.

Another reason for the emphasis on heredity in the controversy is that, to the general public, Richard Herrnstein is best known as the author of I.Q. in the Meritocracy. That book, published a dozen years ago, offered an unyielding view of the connection between heredity, intelligence, and occupational success. (The "meritocracy' had begun to work so smoothly, Herrnstein argued, that the smart people were all rising to the top; as they passed their intelligence on to their children, a new hereditary aristocracy was being born.)

Bad boys

In this new book, the discussion of inborn "constitutional' factors is more modest and carefully phrased. Wilson and Herrnstein are not talking about anyone who has ever broken the law, but rather about the handful of repeat offenders who continue to commit crimes until they are caught, killed or injured, or rendered less dangerous by the enfeebling forces of age. Certain physical and mental traits, they say, show up far more often among this group than among the population at large; and while no one is "born' a criminal (as one might be born a hemophiliac or color-blind), some people are born more likely to become criminal than others. "There is no "crime gene,'' the authors write, "but some traits that are to a degree heritable, such as intelligence and temperament, affect to some extent the likelihood that individuals will engage in criminal activities.'

The most important "genetic' factor is gender: not all men are violent criminals, but almost all violent criminals are men, especially young men. The precise proportions vary from country to country, but around the world, "males are five to 50 times as likely to be arrested as females.' For example, in the United States, 90 percent of those...