Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker about recent books on crime and incarceration in America. Specifically, he looks at the dramatic drop in crime in the last 30 years. What caused that huge decrease and, more importantly, what caused an even steeper decline in crime in New York City?

Although more people than ever are in prison in the United States (the highest incarceration rate in the world), Gopnik says that research by Franklin E. Zimring, presented in his book, “The City That Became Safe,” shows that isn’t what contributed to the decline in crime. The reason was simpler, Zimring writes: “(S)mall acts of social engineering, designed to simply stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime.” And, once those opportunities were eliminated, the cycle of crime was broken.

Gopnik writes:

Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages, [Zimring writes].” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

It’s a fascinating article that will upend how you view this complex issue.