Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities by George L. Kelling and Catherine Coles is a criminology and urban sociology book published in 1996, about petty crime and strategies to contain or eliminate it from urban neighborhoods.

The theory in action
Critics point to the fact that rates of major crimes also dropped in many other US cities during the 1990s, both those that had adopted 'zero tolerance' policies and those that had not. (See, e.g., Bernard Harcourt, Illusion of Order 2001).
Other research has pointed out that the 'zero tolerance' effect on serious crime is difficult to disentangle from other initiatives happening at around the same time in New York. These initiatives were 1) the police reforms described above, 2) programs that moved over 500,000 people into jobs from welfare at a time of economic buoyancy, and 3) housing vouchers that enabled poor families to move to better neighborhoods. Critics of the theory
Andrew Hunt and David Thomas use Fixing Broken Windows as a metaphor for avoiding software entropy in software development in their book, The Pragmatic Programmer Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-61622-X, 1999. Item 4 (of 22 tips) is Don't Live with Broken Windows. The term has also found its way into web-site development.

See also