Aaron Simowitz, J.D. 2006, reviews Professor Bernard E. Harcourt’s most recent book, Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy, in an interview with Professor Harcourt.  The two discuss Harcourt’s methodology (interviews with juvenile inmates and correspondence analysis) and the conclusions that Harcourt draws from his analysis

Simowitz, Aaron

University of Chicago Law School: Chicago Unbound

Faculty BooksLanguage of the Gun: Youth, Crime,and Public PolicyAaron Simowitz, '06It is impossible to say what type ofscholar BernardE Harcourtis. He is Professor ofLaw and Faculty Director ofAcademicAffairs at the University ofChicago Law School. He is bestknown for his detailed econometric critique ofthe "brokenwindows theory"-the notion that an atmosphere ofdisordercreated by graffiti, loitering, andprostitution encourages moreviolent crime. Harcourt has argued that this is in fact anillusion created by our desirefor orderliness-an illusion thatmasks the deeper effects ofsurveillance and thatgoes unrecognizedby the policy-makers who have championed it, such asformerNew York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and hisfirstpolicechief, William Bratton. At the same time, Harcourt ispartethnographer. He has explored the socio-cultural aspects ofsuchlegal issues as firearm registration, urban redevelopment,andgay and lesbian rights. Finally, a deep appreciation andenthusiasmfor law andphilosophy infoses his work. His studentswill tellyou, some with admiration, others with frustration,thatyou are just as likely to read multiple-regression analysesas you are Michel Foucault in Harcourt's classes.Harcourt's latest book, Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime,and Public Policy (Chicago 2006), neatly reflects these variousfacets. He interviewed thirty inmates ofthe Catalina MountainSchool, a juvenile detention facility outside Tucson, Arizonahousing minors who had repeatedly run afoul ofthe law. Theinterviews began simply: Harcourtplaced threefull-colorphotographs ofhandguns in front ofthe youths and askedthem what they thought. As it turns out, at-risk youths knowtheir guns and have a lot to say about them.Language of the Gun has striking ethnographic elements.It permits the Catalina Mountain youths to speak in theirown voices. In this sense, it has a kinship with PhilippeBdurgois' work in the Puerto Rican barrio, In Search ofRespect, which you both praise and critique in yourbook. You describe, for instance, how gun carrying is not ..just about seff-defense, but about aggressive, preemptiveprotection-about avoiding "getting dogged," "punked,"or "jumped." These subtleties can be lost in the statisticalanalyses that seem to dominate public discourse. Wheredoes ethnographic work fit in the public policy debate?It's true that ethnographic methods have taken a back seatto econometric studies in legal and public policy debatestoday. The reason is that ethnographic interpretations tendto be perceived as overly subjective-as too easily influencedby the preconceived ideas of the researcher. It's precisely tochallenge this tendency that I wrote the book. The methodI develop, which combines in-depth interviews and afree-associational method with quantitative analyses, seeksto render the interpretation of qualitative data more measuredand objective. But beyond that, I'm convinced there's a falsedichotomy between qualitative andquantitative research methods.There is today an illusion aboutthe objectivity of econometricmodeling. In the book, I spend alot of time discussing how tointerpret the Catalina interviews.I try to demonstrate that allempirical approaches and theircorresponding methods-whetherBernard E. Harcourt multiple-regression analysis, surveyquestions, or qualitative interviews-are based on specificassumptions about human behavior. They each adopt adiscrete theory of human action. They each rest on asubjective belief that we act rationally and deliberately, or thatwe follow scripts unconsciously, or that we are determinedby larger structural forces. My central point in the book isthat we need to layout our subjective choices abouthuman action-I call these "ethical choices'v=-and defendthem when we offer interpretations of our data, regardlessofwhether the data are quantitative or qualitative. In thissense, presenting ethnographic detail is no more subjectivethan interpreting a multiple-regression analysis.Language of the Gun is also a statistical work. You handcoded your interviews with the youths to find the distinctivemeanings that the youths associate with guns, such asprotection, danger, attraction, power, commodity, recreation,and jail. You then use correspondence analysis, astatistical technique that measures the connectionsbetween these different meanings and how they matchup with the youths' backgrounds. Why did you choosethis somewhat unusual method? What advantage doesit have over more familiar approaches?I decided to use correspondence analysis precisely becauseit is the most rigorous and effective method to visualfyrepresent the statistical relationships between "social meaning"variables-here, between the meanings of guns for theCatalina youths. This book is a study of the symbolicdimensions of the gun as object. It's a semiotic of the20 THE U N I V E R SIT Y 0 F CHI C AGO LAW S C H 0 0 L • S P R I N G 2 0 0 6gun-an attempt to capture, in a more measured way,the meanings of the gun in order to draw legal and publicpolicy implications. It represents an effort to get seriousabout social meanings-a concept that has received a lot ofattention, especially in the law and social norms movementborn here at the University of Chicago in the early work ofLarry Lessig, Dan Kahan, Tracey Meares, and Eric Posner.Correspondence analysis is a method used in Europe andJapan, and it's perfectly suited to the task because it allowsthe researcher to visually graph how meanings relate toeach other in different social contexts. Pierre Bourdieupioneered the method in his fascinating research on thesocial dimensions of taste and the academy. Using it hereallowed me to map on two dimensions the symbolic realmof guns for the Catalina youths. That's the best way tobegin to decipher the complex world of social meaning.Through correspondenceanalysis, you find that themeanings associated withguns group into three"clusters" that you call"registers of gun talk." Inthe first, youths talk aboutguns as "dangerous yetattractive, necessary foraggressive, preemptiveprotection." In the second,they talk about selling gunsor trading them for drugsand favors. In the third, guns are for hunting, targetpractice, and recreation. These clusters, you show, areclosely linked with actual gun carrying and gang status. Forexample, youths in the action/protection cluster aremore likely to carry a gun, be a gang member, and dealdrugs. What in these findings surprised you? How shouldpublic policy reflect these distinctive approaches to guns?You're getting at the most important contribution of thebook: the effort to develop le"'gal and public policyinterventions that are specifically tailored to the differentregisters that the youths deploy. In other words, theattempt to think about these Catalina youths through thelens of language, rather then race, ethnicity, education,family background, or prior criminal history. The centralinsight here is that language reflects something importantabout how we think, reason, and act. Youths who talkabout guns as a commodity, for instance, are more likelyto be pursuing their goals in an instrumental way and, as aresult, may be more amenable to rational choice interventions.In contrast, youths who talk about guns only in terms ofaggressive, preemptive protection are less likely to beamenable to deterrence approaches. To these youths, gunsare a life or death proposition filled with desire and attractionfor the guns. Increasing the cost of carrying a gun willhave little effect on them. With regard to these youths, amore promising avenue may be to develop practice-basedapproaches that will provide them with different scriptsfor how to resolve conflict, refocus their desires, and spendtheir time. In this sense, the larger theoretical contributionis that the language youths use to talk about guns can tellus something important about the way they think, desire,and act-which in turn can inform the kind of legal andpolicy interventions that might be most effective.You have often been critical in your scholarship ofapproaches to crime policy that rely too heavily ondeterrence. In Language of the Gun, you criticize yourcolleague Steven Levitt for just such an error. However,your work with the Catalina youths is permeated withthe deterrent effect ofpunitive gun laws. One youth statesthat, in a gunfight, "! just froze up, and I was just 'Ohman, please, God, please don't make me use this. I don'twant to go to prison, really,'" and then explained that heno longer carried a gun because he feared the adult justicesystem. How did your experience with the Catalinayouths affect your opinion of deterrent gun policy?You have to realize that for every youth who said "gunscarry too much time" there were others who explicitlyresisted the idea. I spoke with one youth, in fact, who toldme that "I never think the police are gonna catch me... Iknow they'll catch me sooner or later, but I don't thinkthat 'tonight, I'm gonna get caught.' Or I shouldn't havethis gun because I think I might get caught. Because I justthink that's kind of like jinxing myself." He didn't want tothink about the cost of crime because the very thoughtmight jinx him. As a result, it's crucial to avoid taking anall or nothing approach to deterrence. Instead, it's importantto figure out which of the youths might be amenable todeterrence-based strategies and which will be immune. Again,it is in their language that we can begin to decipher thisquestion. The key, though, is to take a more nuanced approachthat acknowledges the possible role of deterrence in some,but not all cases. The larger project is to tailor the legal andpolicy interventions to each individual youth using themedium of the language of the gun.S P R I N G 2 0 0 6 • THE U N I V E R SIT Y 0 F CHI C AGO LAW S C H 0 0 L 21

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