Across U.S., the Social Fabric Looks Increasingly Threadbare

Whatever else it may be, crime is mostly neither glamorous nor mysterious. A quotient of antisocial behavior has figured in every known society. In the Denmark of the human soul there is something eternally rotten. Some have peered into the dark heart of criminality and found, not inscrutable evil or anguished reaction to an oppressive system, but untrammeled self-interest. "All the lofty talk about the ‘root causes' of crime," writes social thinker Thomas Sowell, "fail[s] to notice the obvious: People commit crimes because they are people-because they are innately selfish and do not...