One December night in 1984, a white electrical engineer named Bernard Goetz took a seat on a New York subway next to four young black men, who, it would later emerge, were on their way to steal coins from video arcade machines. One of the young men, Troy Canty, walked up to Goetz and said, “give me five dollars.” Canty and his friends would later testify that they were just panhandling, but Goetz, who had been brutally mugged on the subway three years earlier, believed he was being attacked. He pulled a .38 caliber pistol from his pocket and unleashed a barrage of bullets, hitting three of the four men. He then approached the fourth, who was uninjured, shot him in the back, and fled. (All four would survive, though one was paralyzed).

After the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a number of journalists compared Zimmerman to Goetz. Both had shot unarmed young black men, both offered at least somewhat dubious claims of vigilante-style self-defense, and both were ultimately acquitted by a jury of their peers. But there was at least one important difference: while public opinion about Zimmerman’s actions was sharply divided along on racial and party lines, polls consistently showed broad sympathy for Goetz. One survey conducted shortly after the shooting even found 72 percent support for “the subway vigilante” among African Americans in New York City. And while the Zimmerman affair lent further momentum to ongoing efforts to reform the criminal justice system and reduce racial disparities, the Goetz affair presaged the intensification of the law-and-order crackdown in the Big Apple and around the country.

One major reason for the difference is the dramatic disparity between the crime rates of the latter half of the 20^th century and those of today. As Barry Latzer, emeritus professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, documents in his accessible new history, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America, U.S. cities were very nearly torn apart by an unprecedented and still partially-unexplained crime wave between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. This outpouring of violence transformed American politics, poisoned race relations, and generated a law-and-order backlash that gave us both militarized policing and mass incarceration. When we argue about policing and prison reform today, we are arguing about the legacy of the Great American Crime Wave and the politics it produced.

At least, that’s one interpretation of our current debates. With violent crime rates near record-lows (despite an uptick this year) a different argument is increasingly gaining traction among some liberal intellectuals: namely, that the hardening of the U.S. criminal justice system had very little if anything to do with the breaking of the crime wave—and, indeed, that it was never intended to. In a powerfully argued Atlantic cover story, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ta-Nehisi Coates (echoing Michelle Alexander and others) contended that mass incarceration is first and foremost a means through which whites perpetuate their long history of state-sponsored domination of African Americans. In the wake of the civil rights movement, instead of trying to amend the crimes they had perpetrated against the black population over the course of hundreds of years, American whites moved to continue their assault through mass incarceration—“the warehousing and deprivation of whole swaths of our country.” The criminal justice system, in this view, is not and was never about crime—it was always about racism, or at least so polluted with racism that any other supposed purpose is almost irrelevant to the debate.

The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America can be read as an extended rebuttal to the emerging progressive understanding of crime and punishment in the 20^th-century United States. It’s also a textbook of sorts, offering a range of facts and figures that should be broadly interesting to students of U.S. social history. I was surprised to learn, for example, that throughout the 19^th century, crime in the United States was actually lower in cities than in the countryside, and that Chinese immigrants had sky-high murder rates in the 1920s. Less surprising was the fact that crime fell sharply during World War II and the Korean War because so many young men were sent abroad. But these and other historical tidbits are tangential to Latzer’s primary aim: to offer a history of the crime wave that contradicts many of the theories of the progressive criminal justice reform movement—about culture, about poverty, about discrimination, and about race relations.

Some of these efforts are useful and persuasive, such as Latzer’s documentation of the extent to which street crime rattled the American psyche. “The frequency of violent confrontations between 1970 and 1990 reached the point where the word terrifying was not inapt,” he writes. Based on crime rates between 1975 and 1984, according to one study, “83 percent of all Americans aged 12 at the time would, in their actuarial lifetimes, be victimized by an attempted or completed violent crime, and 40 percent would be injured as a result of a robbery or assault.” The numbers were even grimmer for African Americans. So while law-and-order appeals of that era may have been racially coded at times, they were not manufactured out of thin air as a means of rolling back the gains of the civil rights movement. To urban residents of all races cowering in their apartments for fear of being assaulted on their way to church or the grocery store, U.S. society really was dissolving into a sea of violence and disorder.

Latzer is less persuasive when he asserts that the disproportionate rates of violent crime (and crime victimization) among African Americans were the products of cultural norms rather than external factors like poverty and racism. The relative role of culture versus structure in shaping behaviors is a long-running, and probably intractable, debate between liberal and conservative intellectuals, and while Latzer makes room for the role played by structure, he also makes a point of arguing that culture is an independent phenomenon with a life of its own. “Impoverished African Americans shared in the southern culture of violence and transported it to the North during their migrations,” he says. “There, social isolation and discrimination perpetuated a version of this culture among lower-class blacks, accounting for the high rates of black-on-black violence.” The fact that Haitian immigrants to Florida in the 1980s had lower-than-average crime rates, he says, supports his cultural hypothesis: “Something about Haitians—call it Haitian culture—enabled them to transcend economic and social disadvantage.”

For his repeated insistence that “culture trumps adversity,” progressive readers are sure to accuse Latzer of “blaming the victim.” This is always a lazy critique. But Latzer really is too loose with his cultural theorizing, too certain of his historical conjectures, and insufficiently attentive to the possibility that systematic ghettoization and neglect of African American communities in Northern cities made social stability virtually impossible. When he asserts, for example, that “few serious analyses have proved that the imprisonment rate differentials between whites and blacks were due to systematic race discrimination,” relying on studies showing that racial sentencing disparities for most crimes are smaller than is often assumed, he demonstrates a frustratingly narrow conception of what “race discrimination” might mean. After all, we know that discrimination in housing, employment, education and other institutions had profound effects on the life prospects of black people arriving in Chicago and New York in the 1960s and 1970s—stacking the deck against many defendants long before they set foot in a courtroom.

Latzer’s various findings—that the crime wave was the product of demographic and cultural changes, rather than poverty and social failures, that it was devastating to the social order, and that the criminal justice system is essentially colorblind—naturally lead him to conclude that the ensuing law-and-order backlash was salutary and appropriate. “It is very unlikely,” he writes, “that the cost of the reinvigorated system of justice would outweigh the terrible price of failing to act aggressively.” Tougher policing and the dizzying growth of the prison system were not the only factors in the sudden decline of crime in the mid-1990s—the aging of the Baby Boom Generation, the end of the crack epidemic, and “positive social contagion” (that is, the spread of good healthier attitudes and habits) in high-crime communities also played a significant role—but Latzer insists that law-and-order policy changes were a “big gun in the crime-reduction arsenal.”

There are now signs that our society is starting to roll back some of these policies. A bipartisan consensus in favor of criminal justice reform has been building throughout the Obama era; liberals have often led the charge on civil rights grounds, but budget-conscious libertarians and social conservatives have also signed on, leading many states, red and blue, to start modestly reducing their prison populations. After increasing fivefold since 1970, the ratio of Americans behind bars has been falling since 2009. The racial disparity in incarceration rates is also starting to narrow. Last October, a bipartisan group of Senators introduced legislation easing federal sentences for some nonviolent offenses. Though modest and mostly symbolic, such a bill would have been unimaginable had crime not declined greatly over the past twenty years.

Though Latzer doesn’t explicitly condemn these efforts or link them to this year’s highly publicized and hotly contested rise in violent crime in certain cities, he warns obliquely that making the criminal justice system less punitive could jeopardize the relative peace America’s cities have achieved since crime started to fall in the mid-1990s. “There are signs that the social controls on crime are weakening and will continue to do so,” he says, citing the Obama Administration’s early release of federal drug offenders, as well as the heightened scrutiny of law enforcement in the wake of recent police shootings. While he suggests that the aging of the population is likely to hold down the crime rate in the long run, he leaves readers with the possibility that episodes of violent crime may be cyclical, quoting a criminologist who speculates that “when the murder rate ebbs, control efforts get relaxed, thus creating multiple conditions causing the next upswing.”

One problem with Latzer’s approach is that he tends to treat the criminal justice system as a one-dimensional institution—one that is either relaxed and forgiving or robust and punitive. He doesn’t give much consideration to a second dimension, highlighted by National Review’s Reihan Salam and others: the extent to which criminal justice is experienced as a legitimate institution—as opposed to an arbitrary force—in those communities most affected by it. Some successful crime control efforts—like Ceasefire, an early-intervention program for gang members that makes use of law enforcement, community leaders, and ex-convicts—focus on reinforcing the legitimacy of the criminal justice system without softening it. Mark Kleiman’s idea of a “graduated re-entry” program for prisoners similarly aims to make the system more rehabilitative even as it remains relatively unforgiving of transgressions. These and other initiatives, if implemented with due care, could make the system more effective without compromising public safety or locking more people up.

It’s tempting to hope that technocratic policy fixes like these could resolve the entanglement of race relations and criminal justice, and obviate the need to make difficult tradeoffs between mercy and public safety. It’s even more tempting to hope, as Coates and a growing number on the Left do, that criminal justice reform is a relatively straightforward proposition—that dramatically reducing the prison population will have little-to-no-effect on the violent crime rate (since the hardening of the U.S. justice system was never really about fighting crime, anyway). The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America is a flawed book, but it offers a bracing account of how we got here that complicates any illusion that the situation can be easily remedied. The toughening of the criminal justice system beginning in the 1970s was not just a function of racism or misguided drug laws, and it was not thoughtless or irrational. It was a response to a long-running crisis—a devastating tsunami of violence that made parts of U.S. cities almost unlivable—and it probably played an important role in finally bringing the violence under control.

I use the term “under control” deliberately, as the tough-on-crime crackdown did not make the violence disappear. Rather, it controlled it—moving violent young men away from urban centers and into penitentiaries, out of view of the rest of society. In addition to being inherently coercive, these institutions witness rape and inmate-on-inmate violence on a shocking scale. The United States conquered one urgent social crisis, in part, by creating another. And even as we try to reform the system in a way that keeps crime low while putting fewer people behind bars, it’s important to remember that no matter what causes crime—broken families, racism, poverty, or culture—the criminal justice system, as Ross Douthat has written, is nothing more than “a tourniquet on what remains a gaping wound.”