While the slightly libertarian bent at the Volokh Conspiracy may give some people reason to question the writers’ conclusions, one can rarely question the intellectual integrity of the regulars, Eugene, Orin and others.  Not that they would hang out with a trench lawyer like me, but I admire their thoughts just the same.

But the lawprofs have this thing about bringing in guest bloggers. And so James Q. Wilson enters the blawgosphere, where he posts:

We are frequently told that America should be ashamed of having sent so many people to prison. We are compared unfavorably to most of Europe. But these complaints rarely ask what benefits flow from prison.

The best scholars have estimated that between 25 and 30 percent of the recent decline in crime rates is the result of imprisonment. A comparison with England is helpful. At one time it imprisoned a higher fraction of offenders than did the US, but in the 1980s it changed by imprisoning fewer people. As a result (I think), the British crime rate soared while ours fell.

Between 1980 and 1985 the American prison population increased by more than half and between 1985 and 1990 it again increased by half. But from 1987 to 1992, the British prison population dropped by about five thousand inmates despite a sharp rise in the crime rate.

Rarely, if ever, will one see so bald an assertion.  Forget the mix of percentage against a meaningless raw number, but raise an argument without any foundation whatsoever is shocking.  This is the sort of argument made at loony neo-con blogs, where they don’t need no stinkin’ facts to make their point.

So who is James Q. Wilson?  According to Wikipedia (yes, he’s listed in Wikipedia):

James Q. Wilson (born May 27, 1931) in Denver, Colorado is the Ronald Reagan professor of public policy at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy in California, and a professor emeritus at UCLA. From 1961 to 1987 he was a professor of government at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. (1959) and masters degree (1957) from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree from the University of Redlands (1952) where he was the national collegiate debate champion in 1951 and 1952.

Not an unimpressive vita.  And there’s more:

He is a former Chairman of the White House Task Force on Crime (1966), of the National Advisor Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention (1972–73) and a member of the Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime (1981), the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985–90), and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is a former president of the American Political Science Association. He has served on the board of directors for the New England Electric System, Protection One, RAND, and State Farm Mutual Insurance.

He is the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute. Wilson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the International Council of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.

Plus, he received “the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2003.”  This fellow is not a slouch.

But what happened to intellectual rigor?  Is it acceptable for a person, even someone with very substantial academic and professional credentials, to made bald-faced, facile assertions and then base his argument on them? 

Lawprofs are generally intolerant of normal lawyers (like me) who argue a position without having first substantiated the factual basis upon which we rely.  Good lawyers don’t do this, though we generally try to frame our points in common language, eschewing the jargon of paternalistic pedagogy so beloved by lawprofs to distinguish their fine clarity of thought from our more mundane efforts.

Why then, I’m constrained to ask, is this sort of strawman garbage foundation acceptable from James Q. Wilson at the Volokh Conspiracy?

Perhaps, I thought to myself, it’s an accident.  A one-time error that slipped past Wilson in a moment of weakness.  But then came Wilson’s next post at Volokh :

It is true that the proportion of inmates described as drug offenders has gone up dramatically, but as Jonathan Caulkins and Mark Kleiman point in their essay in Understanding America, very few are in prison because of drug possession. Many are either major dealers or plead down to a drug possession charge in order to avoid being convicted of a more serious offense. There are more than one million arrests every year for drug possession, but very of them result in prison or jail time.

So much for the accident theory.  Perhaps he’s so attuned to drug culture because he’s done a bit too much field research?  Nah, I’m not going there.

The best guess I can make is that Professor James Q. Wilson sees the academic blawgosphere as the wild west, unworthy of the intellectual rigor that one would demand of a first semester undergrad, where otherwise distinguished thinkers can vent their spleen to the chorus without fear of scrutiny.  Perhaps he feels that he’s been through the ringer enough that he no longer needs to base his wild and woolly politics on facts, seeing himself as the font of truth and thus feeling it sufficient that if he says something is so, it is so.

This is the sort of stuff that undermines the fabric of the blawgosphere, where one can anticipate that a post on the Volokh Conspiracy can pass intellectual muster, whether you agree with its conclusions or not.  Some day, someone will link to Wilson’s guest-blogging posts and affirm that it must be true because it’s posted at the Volokh Conspiracy.  

These posts fail to pass minimum standards of intellectual rigor.  I am deeply disappointed that Eugene has allowed these posts on his blog. 

Update:  Responding to criticism of his blogging style, Wilson posts this :

A lot of readers have suggested that I am not a helpful blogger because I refer people to other studies for data to support my arguments. These critics are probably right. Were I devoted to blogging full time, I would quote all the data and summarize all of the studies, thereby getting nothing else done. I had assumed when I started my blog messages that people would pause, think, and look up facts. A few have, but most seem to have opinions they like to express quickly. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it doesn’t advance knowledge.

It’s hard to imagine a more ironic and disingenuous  mea culpa.  To help Prof. Wilson understand better, he’s not the teacher and we’re not the students.  If you want to express an opinion based on fact, source your fact.  It’s not our job to do your legwork.  Too difficult for you?  Then go back the classroom.