ABSTRACT
One of the most central of those truths is that a high level of violent crime is a cost of certain kinds of social arrangements: It is not primarily or even significantly explainable as a reflection of innate biological proclivities, the weakness of the criminal justice system, or any of the other views that became fashionable, in the United States and other countries, from the 1970s onward. It is part of the price people pay for maintaining societies that are wracked by a constellation of larger social ills-including extremes of inequality, economic deprivation and insecurity, and a pervasive culture of predatory competition. The US drug problem was not, as some suggested, solely a creation of the drug war itself: It was also a cost, once again, of the enduring structures of inequality and deprivation that distinguished the United States from many other advanced societies.
