Abstract 

This chapter considers some questions of crime, criminal justice, and criminology in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604). In this play, Shakespeare represented the theories of criminology and criminal justice that George Kelling and James Wilson recommended nearly four centuries later in their famous essay “Broken Windows” (1982). While this observation allows us to consider the possibility that Shakespeare was doing criminology centuries before there was an organized academic discipline called “criminology,” a close reading of Measure for Measure also allows us to identify some of the faulty thinking in “broken windows” policing. Specifically, Shakespeare’s play shows the abuses of power that can occur when individual law enforcement agents receive both a mandate to crackdown on social disorder and the authority to decide for themselves what counts as disorder and how to fight it. Thus, while recent social scientific research has cast doubt upon “broken windows” policing, this approach to crime control was already discredited by William Shakespeare more than 400 years ago. 

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