'Thinking About Crime' at 50

There’s an old joke that in the 1970s and 1980s, James Q. Wilson waged a one-man battle against a thousand sociologists, criminologists, and other academics. The punchline: “A thousand to one against Wilson—that’s almost a fair fight.” The quip captures both Wilson’s towering intellect—recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, author of dozens of books, and arguably the most important conservative social scientist of the late twentieth century—and the impact of one major strand of his work, launched in high-profile magazine articles and expressed most powerfully in 1975’s Thinking About Crime.