For the last twenty years, people have assumed that "physical and social disorder in a neighborhood lead to increased crime."  This is the "broken windows" theory.

It turns out not to be true.  Improving order by fixing windows may or may not reduce crime.

But a professor of human behavior and development at the Harvard School of Public Health named Dr. Felton Earls has figured out that what he calls "collective efficacy" will have an effect.  The Times ran a story about him and his empirical work debunking the "broken windows" theory yesterday:

"If you got a crew to clean up the mess," Dr. Earls said, "it would last for two weeks and go back to where it was. The point of intervention is not to clean up the neighborhood, but to work on its collective efficacy.  If you organized a community meeting in a local church or school, it's a chance for people to meet and solve problems."

"If one of the ideas that comes out of the meeting is for them to clean up the graffiti in the neighborhood, the benefit will be much longer lasting, and will probably impact the development of the kids in that area.  But it would be based on this community action -- not on a work crew coming in from the outside."

Dr. Earls is also expecting to show that where you grow up is very important to your development -- he thinks that genetics plays a minor role at best.  As far as policy goes:

Dr. Earls said that rather than focusing on arresting squeegee men and graffiti scrawlers, local governments should support the development of cooperative efforts in low-income neighborhoods by encouraging neighbors to meet and work togehter.

The link to the accountable net is clear:  what we need are tools that help peers (both individuals and ISPs) work together cooperatively to combat the emergence of security/spam/identity bad neighborhoods on their networks.  Unilateral or top-down decisions to "clean up" neighborhoods may not have long-term effects.

Note Earthlink's snide response to AOL's announcement that it's including spyware tools in its next release to consumers:

Jerry Grasso, a spokesman for Earthlink, a competitor to AOL, said the company welcomed the initiative. "We applaud any Internet service provider that's trying to help their customers better protect their Internet experience," he said. "We, of course, did it last quarter."

heheh.