Books in brief -- Bill James on crime

Popular Crime
by Bill James (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
available at Amazon

I can still remember, 31 years later, where I was when I saw my first Bill James Baseball Abstract -- back shelf at the WH Smith at the Bayshore Shopping Centre in Nepean.  I read the series inside and out until he gave it up in 1988.  As it has been for a lot of people, the series was one of my favourite things growing up.  At that time, of course, there was no internet, and almost no way to know if anyone else was reading the same thing.  Since then, I've bought some of the books (the Hall of Fame book, the historical Abstracts), but as I don't play fantasy baseball, I haven't bought any of the annual stats books.

I vaguely remember that when Popular Crime was published, the reviews were not very favourable.  This is a strange book.  James is a tremendously entertaining writer, never boring, but this book never really proves the things that he wants to prove.  His overall point is that stories and books about popular crime are not harmful to the (American) public, and that much good can come from reading about crime, such as increased awareness of the problems with the criminal justice system.  That may be true, but most of the book, rather than engaging the central issue, is a recitation of the facts of various popular crimes in American history, and criticism of the many crime books that he's read.  I have to admit that I learned a lot about crimes that I was only vaguely aware of or crimes in my lifetimes that I just haven't followed (e.g, Lindbergh kidnapping, JonBenet Ramsey, Lizzie Borden, and Sam Sheppard).  But James hasn't tried to build up an argument; he stops along the way to make various points about crime, most of which are completely unrelated to the central argument.  For example, James develops a kind of classification system for crime, so that a CJ9, for example, is a celebrity story involving the justice system.  The system does almost nothing to improve anyone's understanding of crime.  And, early in the book, he begins to develop a scoring system for evaluating guilt -- so many points for an eyewitness account, so many points if the accused stood to gain from the crime, etc.  Again, there is nothing to be gained from this, and he rarely revisits the idea afterwards.  Because of this, the whole book resembles a collection of blog posts.

Another significant problem is that James does not use any references, either in the text or as a bibliography.  He often states which books he has read about a case, but even here you are not sure whether his retelling of a case is based on those books or others he doesn't mention.  The lack of references is especially significant because James at several points makes an argument without pointing to any external evidence.  In chapter 18, he argues that the Warren Court's decisions about the rights of the accused caused an increase in crime rates from the 1960's.  He explicitly rejects the idea that demographic shifts had anything to do with it.  Now it may be that police were hamstrung by stronger procedural rules in the 1960's, but I am not going to believe that this led to an expansion of crime unless I see how this was supposed to have happened.  Similarly, James argues that in 1914-15, the United States was on the verge of revolution.  Again, if you're going to make a big point about political change in the U.S., you can at least refer to what others have said on the issue.

Part of the problem with the book is that James has an explicit disregard for intellectual, academics, lawyers and other similar people.  From the first chapter, "If you try to talk to American intellectuals and opinion-makers about the phenomenon of famous crimes, they immediately throw up a shield: I will not talk about this.  I am a serious and intelligent person.  I am interested in politics and the environment.  I do not talk about Natalee Holloway.  It is as if they were afraid of being dirtied by the subject" (emphasis in the original).  In chapter 16, he attacks the "intellectuals, the commentators, the smart-money crowd" for ridiculing the issues that voters were talking about during the U.S. presidential election.  "The smart people who thought they knew what was 'really' important turned out, in retrospect, to be just entirely wrong."

In one of the Abstracts (maybe 1988), James wrote for several pages about how professional baseball would benefit from a "revolution."  The idea was that the minor leagues should be freed from major league control; the result would be something like English soccer, in which dozens or even hundreds of teams compete for players and fan support.  At the end of Popular Crime, he attempts something similar.  He argues that many of the problems affecting American prisons (violence, a lack of rehabilitation and training) could be eliminated by small prisons.  And he means small -- no more than about 24 prisoners per facility.  It's an intriguing idea, and I wish he would have examined it more closely.