Criminals & Liberals
Bishop, Joseph W. Jr.
Joseph W. Bishop, Jr. CRIMINALS & LIBERALS Are liberals by nature infatuated with criminals or has society made them that way ? It is probable that the first crime followed the first law by not...
...Silberman amply demonstrates elsewhere in the volume, it doesn't work...
...Silberman does agree with almost everybody else about one class of criminal tribunals, the nation's juvenile courts...
...For one thing, although Mr...
...I find it hard to follow his statistical argument-especially when he repeatedly concedes that there are no reliable figures on crime and punishment...
...We have a somewhat similar punishment, when nonviolent convicts are thrown to the feral inmates of maximum security institutions-sometimes, it is said, for the purpose of persuading them to inform or testify against higher-ups...
...the Grangerfords and Shepherd-sons were not mere creations of Mark Twain's imagination...
...We need not run a maximum security institution as the SS ran Dachau, but it is silly and dangerous to regard the incorrigibles (who are a high percentage of the prison population) as "patients" or "clients...
...Until fairly modern times bank robbers stood at the head of the criminal profession...
...Criminals are greedy and improvident and tend to push their luck too far...
...Silberman...
...Silberman simply finesses this awkward fact...
...highly beneficial effects on violent juveniles...
...Their place has been taken by bungling amateurs, almost too stupid to consider the risks...
...There are fascinating descriptions of such things as the economics and structure of the numbers business...
...It is not often that useful jobs can be found for convicts: Unions and employers naturally dislike competition from cheap prison labor...
...Fines are of no use with violent criminals, who squander their gains immediately...
...and that punishment never does any good, is sadistic and barbarous, and is therefore itself a crime...
...In the shadow of such homicidal despotisms, who would notice unofficial, individual murder or robbery, even if the despots were to collect and publish statistics...
...The stupid mistakes of criminals arc evidence that they really want to be caught and punished...
...The Romans, in fact, managed to extract both pleasure and profit from offenders by condemning them to the arena, Joseph W. Bishop, Jr., is Richard Ely Professor of Law at Yale University...
...I don't share Mr...
...In those days, and for long after, the propriety of punishment was rarely questioned, even by the criminals themselves...
...A terrorist murderer in prison, for example, simply invites the seizure of hostages to extort his...
...It sounds good, but it also sounds hard to transfer to Bedford-Stuyvesant or the South Bronx...
...The second is the removal of a dangerous pest from the streets...
...The large and growing numbers of one-parent, female-headed families have emerged in recent decades," says Sowell, "as the welfare system has subsidized both male desertion and teenage pregnancy...
...Silberman recognizes, the structures of the Puerto Rican family and community differ for the better from those found in the slums of mainland cities...
...The Center would not do for the goons who are left behind in Stateville and Joliet...
...The judges have far too much discretion in their treatment of truants, runaways, and other troublesome but noncriminal adolescents (known in the trade as PINS, persons in need of supervision) and the most vicious young thugs, and they tend to confuse the two categories...
...The fact is that the United States has been no more violent than most other societies and in one major respect has been much less so...
...The police, says Mr...
...There may be something in the idea that the inflammatory rantings of Huey Newton, the unreformed Eldridge Cleaver, and other black militants of the sixties and early seventies, all swallowed as gospel and fervently endorsed by white radicals, have persuaded some young blacks that the murder, rape, and robbery of whites is a way of achieving social justice...
...Nonetheless, there are lucid intervals and some real, if not wholly original, insights...
...For another thing, as Mr...
...Where Mr...
...If so, as Mr...
...But, of course, if the ordinary felon commits a hundred felonies, the odds are strong that sooner or later he will be punished for one of them...
...Practically, we have only three types of punishment...
...In the last couple of centuries, at least in advanced and more or less humane societies, there has been vast debate and endless theorizing, questioning the efficacy and morality of the traditional cures for crime...
...He cites examples which I do not think are applicable to most slums or most criminals...
...By a stroke of good fortune, the only ambulance services in the area were run by undertakers, and when the Illinois legislature for some mysterious reason passed a statute barring undertakers from the ambulance business, the inmates organized a service that filled the vacuum...
...But suppose the cops and the criminal courts between them can produce a reasonable number of convictions: What are we to do with the convicts...
...Who has any idea of the incidence of violent crime in West Africa (where most of the slaves came from) two or three hundred years ago, or what it is now in Uganda, Chad, the Central African Empire, or Zaire, beyond a general impression that there is a lot...
...Professor Sowell's message is that the black community needs new ideas, departing from the conventional left-liberal pieties, and new and mpre representative leaders, less closely, allied with white goo-goos...
...Similarly, there are many pages intended to demonstrate that street thugs are morally no worse than their economic, betters...
...Silberman, today believes that the only proper purpose of punishment is to treat the criminal's psyche, to reform him...
...Silberman's view that the old outlaws were "folk heroes"-they were regarded by their fairly honest contemporaries as pests and strung up by lawmen or vigilantes...
...He is addicted to psycho-sociological baloney...
...Nobody really knows how many crimes are never even reported, except that the number is high...
...Inevitably, Silberman cites Watergate...
...Silberman is right in saying that white-collar thieves steal far more than muggers and burglars...
...Silberman gives, in passing and almost inadvertently, an interesting example of the benign results, and also of the sometimes unexpected consequences, of punishment...
...Methadone programs actually encourage crime, because they free criminal addicts from the need to spend time making connections...
...Although penology and its sister, criminology, have been around for many millennia and generated much public interest, they cannot be described as progressive sciences...
...Silberman's thesis...
...There are many things we could do to increase the rate of conviction and punishment...
...Broadly, Silberman is probably right, despite the unreliability of his statistics, in concluding that the police are performing their role fairly effectively and that the answer to crime is not a huge increase in the number of flatfoots pounding beats...
...Such crimes (except the use of marijuana) are not to be condoned, and ought to be taken more seriously than they are, but they are not violent and instill fear in no one...
...He is lower class, a member of a slum, welfare, often single-parent family...
...But Mr...
...Silberman, ascertain to their own satisfaction the identity of the persons who commit most violent crimes-often by making an arrest-in only about a fifth of all Index crimes (the rates are low in burglary and other nonviolent thefts), but in 79 percent of murders, 63 percent of aggravated assaults, and 52 percent of rapes...
...All this stuff is in fact largely irrelevant to Mr...
...Such arguments do not adequately explain the difference in criminality between blacks and other ethnic minorities...
...Karl Menninger that the proper treatment for a murderer is a candid conversation with his psychiatrist is deader than W.T...
...The Hardnoses believe that compassion should be reserved for the vietims of crime, that punishment is the best treatment for predators, and that the only question is what sorts of punishment are best calculated to deter and otherwise minimize the incidence of crime...
...I certainly do not condone business or political crimes...
...Essentially, the thinkers are of two schools, Mushheads and Hardnoses...
...His trouble is an occasional inability to ignore facts and a willingness to look unblinkingly at some facts that are very painful to liberals, notably the inordinate propensity of poor blacks for violent crimes...
...If we want to deter violations of the constitutional rights of criminals...
...Business, especially big business, is likewise among the most heinous of miscreants...
...Blacks account for nearly 60 percent of all robberies and more than half of all murders...
...His moral and religious principles are non-existent...
...Interestingly, until after World War II, Orientals were the objects of intense racial persecution, legal, economic, and physical...
...most housebreakers and many robbers would starve if they could not fence the things they steal...
...Of course the elite professionals are more interesting than the slobs who knock down old women and steal their grocery money, but the pros cause concern principally to insurance companies...
...Nonsense...
...More and better run pens will cost money, but-less than leaving predators at large because the judges are understandably reluctant to throw them (especially if they are young, as most are) into such snakepits...
...Silberman's emotions incline him to the Mushhead, or liberal, end of the spectrum, but his faith is not pure, and he will probably offend some of the more orthodox liberals...
...We do not need, for example, a long psychological explanation of the fact that even liberals resent being mugged, or to be told that a major motivation of muggers is their desire for money...
...The book is far too long...
...especially the damnum ad bestias...
...And conviction is not the same thing as punishment...
...Today the FBI claims a better than 50 percent conviction record in bank robberies, and the sentences are usually stiff...
...But in some cases it might be possible to set them at forced productive labor, with the proceeds going to their victims...
...His most respected models are affluent criminals...
...Silberman seems to have read every doctoral dissertation on crime and criminals produced in the last 15 years, and accepted their dubious statistics and conclusions, at least when they suited his theories...
...Corruption, especially at the highest levels, encourages low-level crime by persuading muggers and purse-snatchers that law-enforcement is simply one more example of Establishment hypocrisy...
...Nor am I convinced by the second part of Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice, a survey of the cops, the criminal courts, and the various types of penal institutions...
...he is as incompetent as he would be in any other calling, which makes him all the more dangerous...
...it is doubtful that the ordinary street criminal ever heard of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, or Colson...
...Some of his explanations-e.g., poverty and the so-called "culture of poverty"-have some validity...
...The first is deterrence, not so much of the offender himself, for recidivists have obviously not been deterred, as of other potential criminals, who may think twice if they know punishment will probably follow crime...
...Grant Company...
...The only punishment now available is confinement, and the judge knows very well that most prisons are badly overcrowded and cruder than they were intended to be...
...He (female crime is not commonly violent) is young (three-fourths of the hoods are under 25 and more than 40 percent are under 18...
...Silberman has got his priorities wrong...
...CRIMINALS & LIBERALS Are liberals by nature infatuated with criminals or has society made them that way ? It is probable that the first crime followed the first law by not more than half an hour and that the first punishment, probably capital, was separated from the first crime by an interval equally short...
...One can think of dozens of such metaphors, mostly very ancient- whereas yellow, red, and brown were at least neutral colors and white stood for probity and virtue...
...Punishment has two, arguably three, purposes...
...How can we expect slum youths to obey the law when they see it constantly violated by affluent and educated honkies...
...His education and work habits are deficient...
...release...
...This suggests that if the violent punks are to be deterred, punishment must be spectacular and widely publicized...
...It creates smog, it pays bribes, it poisons its customers and regularly steals them blind...
...But after all his efforts to show that violent thugs are morally no worse than the rest of us, Mr...
...They should be punished at least as severely as street crime, for the education and wealth of a criminal ought to be treated as aggravating circumstances...
...Most liberals simply avoid the question, usually by disguising it as part of the problem of poverty and crime...
...But many societies, ancient and modern, have had their versions of the lawless frontiersmen-Vi-kings, Algerian corsairs, Malay pirates, to select at random a very few examples...
...And he points to studies showing that "the unemployment of black teenagers has been caused by escalating minimum-wage laws-which are still being pushed by the black 'leadership.' " That leadership has its own reasons for encouraging white guilt-feelings and huge foundation grants...
...The feud is one of the oldest and most widespread human institutions...
...Silberman is not completely blinkered by liberal ideology...
...Negro slaves, although not unknown, were rare, exotic, and expensive...
...that the real culprit is not the "criminal," but an unjust and unequal society...
...Undoubtedly it is to the cops' advantage to be liked and trusted by the public, but I think Mr...
...Silberman's statistics showing that black Africans do not have a particularly high homicide rate are 20 years old and date from an era when most of the continent was under colonial rule...
...The one possible (though partial) explanation of Afro-American rates of violent crime that Silberman never considers is that the black leadership (and the white liberals with whom they live in happy symbiosis) may be doing something wrong, that not every black disadvantage, from one-parent families to teenage unemployment, is wholly attributable to white racism...
...For example, Silberman notes, almost casually, that police, prosecutors, and courts show too much leniency to fences (who are often useful informers...
...A close prison haircut is a symbol of emasculation, intended to make the inmate feel "impotent and dependent...
...Since most people no longer believe in hellfire, punishment should be dispensed now and here on earth...
...In short, ethnic discrimination alone cannot account for the dominant position of blacks in murder, robbery, and similar felonies...
...Silberman is quite wrong in saying were "virtually unknown before the Civil War...
...And so forth and...
...But that is not what his book is about...
...Moreover, he has been led by black and white activists to regard many of the jobs that are available and within his competence- being a busboy, a fast-food worker, a floor sweeper-as "menial" or "degrading...
...An appointment to the juvenile court is all too often regarded as an appropriate reward for a politically deserving lawyer whose lack of legal competence is balanced by an active social conscience...
...He does not really love criminals...
...Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that our forebears' methods were more efficacious, and certainly cheaper, than our own...
...I have never (so far as I know) been the victim of a securities swindle or of unwholesome food or drugs...
...Slum dwellers inevitably differ from suburbanites as sewer rats differ from well-bred laboratory rats...
...so on...
...That leaves death, corporal punishment, and confinement...
...Roughly half the tract is tripe and the other half perceptive and instructive stuff...
...He says that the rule does not affect the outcome of many cases-although he admits that it does play a major role in frustrating the prosecution of drug merchants...
...The basic trouble is simply that there is not enough room and that there are too few guards, and too many well-meant restrictions on their authority, to permit the maintenance of order...
...Silberman does not say so) is more prisons, more guards, and not quite so many rights for inmates...
...Silberman could have shown that The book makes the valid point that a major cause of the soaring crime rates of the last decade or so is the enormous increase in the punk population, attributable to the high post-World War II birth rate...
...Where he differs from other observers is in his belief that the criminal justice system (except for the prisons) is working about as well as can be expected and needs only limited and cosmetic reforms...
...A here might be fewer victims if the criminal were put in the pen after his first or second crime, or if one who is caught after his hundredth crime could be given a sentence based on his hundred crimes...
...Silberman might have added that the toga Candida, snow-white, symbolized the honesty of a Roman candidate [from Candida] for political office...
...But Silberman does feel a need to apologize for criminals, to devise explanations other than natural viciousness...
...But my house has been burgled four times...
...Any lawyer knows that few arrests result in convictions and that all too many convictions result in lenient sentences and early parole...
...But these people, black and descended from slaves (although members of the second group often have white ancestors too), are quite as likely to be the objects of race prejudice-as distinct from class prejudice-as slum blacks...
...We have had, of course, our share and our own particular kinds of violence, shaped by the conditions of American life-e.g., the Wild West...
...Such arguments are essentially pious nonsense...
...Silberman's 65 percent figure comes from, I can believe it, despite the fact that no one really knows how many crimes the average criminal commits...
...Silberman defends the exclusionary rule, under which the most truthful and convincing evidence-e.g., wiretaps-cannot be admitted if it was obtained in violation of the criminal's legal rights...
...Indeed, his accounts of the vicious, brutal, brainless murders, assaults, rapes, and robberies, whose sadism gains the thug nothing more than kicks and adds a new and horrifying dimension to the old problem, are enough to make an ordinary reader reflect that there may be something to be said for the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's brand of Islamic jurisprudence...
...In short, I do not think we have yet given a fair try to the theory that punishment, if it is reasonably swift, certain, and (for some crimes) severe, can deter crime...
...I agree that there is no reason to suppose that blacks are con-genitally any more criminal than Caucasians or Orientals, or that violence was or is a greater part of African culture than others...
...A black slum youth has little chance of finding an honest job paying enough to buy the things he thinks he deserves...
...In short, a curate's egg of a book-very good in place...
...Solicitude for the criminal is irrelevant to this question...
...At the risk of oversimplifying, I think the basic flaw in his argument is that he regularly fuzzes over the difference between the percentages of crimes punished and criminals punished...
...That leaves confinement...
...But it deters only if the odds are high that it will be inflicted...
...But many people have moral scruples about capital punishment, and it is certainly not appropriate in most cases...
...Silberman differs from other students of the subject, and from experienced prosecutors and judges, is in his belief that about two-thirds of all violent crimes are actually punished...
...It is generally agreed that reform and rehabilitation of multiple offenders is virtually impossible...
...But arrests are very different things from convictions: Almost every criminal convicted has an arrest record far longer than that of his convictions, if any...
...But Mr Silberman does not even mention the possibility, and it is probable that the courts would hold whipping unconstitutional without even pausing to consider that it is less cruel than incarceration in most penitentiaries, jails, or reform schools...
...They seem to be reviving to some extent in recent years...
...But what crimes...
...I find his explanations highly unconvincing, although I concede that I can offer no better ones...
...for we receive the due reward of our deeds"(Luke 23:41...
...But it does not persuade me that the criminal justice system is functioning well...
...For another thing, its relations with the people of the surrounding area are better than is usually possible-Vienna and its environs needed the jobs the Center brought...
...Neither are stigmatizing punishments like the military Dishonorable Discharge, for most violent criminals would feel no embarrassment...
...But even he concedes that until this millennium arrives, which may not be right away, some symptomatic relief is in order...
...Poverty is surely part of the explanation...
...He might have added-though the point is implicit in some of the examples he cites-that part of the trouble is the generally low quality of the judges...
...much in about an eighth of the space he devotes to poverty and crime...
...If a criminal commits a hundred crimes and is actually sent to prison once, the punishment rate for crimes is 1 percent...
...But experienced prosecutors blame the rule for many decisions not to press charges, or to accept a plea of guilty to some offense much less serious than that of which the offender is really guilty...
...Silberman ends up with a series of rather Utopian suggestions for reforming the slum conditions which produce violent crime and for planning pens that, if they do not actually reform the criminals, at least make their confinement bearable...
...The rule is not required by the Constitution: The courts can and should abandon it, despite the anguished cries of liberals, on the ground that it punishes the public, not the police, for police negligence or lawlessness...
...Silberman draws a frightful and probably fairly accurate picture of life in our correctional institutions...
...There are reasons for lenience besides excessive judicial mercy...
...If this is where Mr...
...Nor do I think his model clink, the Vienna Correctional Center in Illinois, can serve as a prototype...
...Even such incorrigible liberals as Judge David Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia concede that punishment deters, although that effect is obviously hard to measure...
...let us make the government liable in damages for such violations, as the federal government is today under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but provide that if the accused is convicted, his right to sue is automatically assigned to his victim...
...Silberman, of course, believes that the only cure for crime is the elimination of poverty and racism...
...Silberman's standpoint, very inconvenient...
...So with family blood feuds (which, incidentally, Mr...
...Hence the cool professionals have largely abandoned the field...
...Hence the fact that law-abiding blacks are just as strong for more cops (preferably black) and more convictions as whites...
...Silberman does give a pretty accurate description of the murderers, rapists, robbers, and assorted hoodlums who are his real subjects...
...The idea of the great Dr...
...Criminal behaviour is endemic in every sector of American society" and "distributed much more evenly among social classes than is indicated by police and court statistics," says Mr...
...One is a "delinquency prevention" project in the poorest part of Puerto Rico's second largest city...
...Silberman describes the salient characteristics of the street hoodlum who accounts for about 90 percent of serious violent crimes and a somewhat lower fraction of unskilled burglaries and larcenies...
...He spends one long chapter and parts of others trying to explain the connection...
...Thus was born the science of penology, to which Charles F. Silberman's Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice* is the latest contribution...
...His crimes are unplanned and often bungled...
...It is violent crime that scares common men and women and makes them call for more policemen, more convictions, and stiffer sentences...
...There is no need for statistical evidence: Ralph Nader himself says so...
...One may hope that someone will compare the arrest records of those who hear such lectures with the records of otherwise similar students who do not...
...Silberman's analysis of their deficiencies, and the deficiencies in the places of confinement of juveniles, is cogent...
...Indeed, as blacks continue to suffer from black delinquency, such ideas and leaders (e.g., Professor Sowell himself) seem to be emerging...
...Sowell has pointed out that black leaders and other successful blacks tend to come from two groups, West Indians and the descendants of "Free Persons of Color," who are at least as successful, materially and otherwise, as the average of the white population, and no more likely to take up mugging or pimping as a vocation or avocation...
...Others do not...
...In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, armed robbery has in recent years become such a plague that the government has taken to staging public executions, which draw good houses and favorable reviews...
...What we need (although Mr...
...The Good Thief, the patron of so many prison chapels, who was crucified beside Christ, said to the other thief, "And we indeed [are condemned] justly...
...The police "must change their conception of their role from that of a law-enforcement agency, dedicated to catching robbers, to that of a public service agency, devoted to close relationships with, and assistance to, the people and communities being policed...
...Silberman does not say so, the clear inference is that the Center's inmates are model cons who have behaved them-: selves in tougher prisons...
...But, as Silberman says, "there is no escaping the question...
...The third, more debatable, is retribution-the deep-rooted idea that evildoers should get what they deserve...
...There is no reason whatever to believe that we suffer any less from crime and criminals, or have any better ideas on what to do about them, than did the Babylonians...
...We have never had anything remotely resembling the regimes of Hitler and Stalin, Idi Amin Dada and Pol Pot...
...These are comforting but doubtful figures...
...Thus, he devotes a chapter to an unconvincing attempt to demonstrate that the violent thugs are a natural product of American history and society...
...The United States, he says, has always been uniquely prone to violence...
...This is simply untrue...
...Finally, Mr...
...Here too, to be sure, there is a good deal of interesting but irrelevant material about the upper layers of the profession-for example the crooks, usually from solid working- or middle-class backgrounds, who meticulously plan and execute such major heists as the recent Lufthansa robbery at JFK...
...Hence the mailbags and license plates...
...The Mushhead, in his purest form, believes that there are no bad men (except the Watergate conspirators and some corporate executives), but only sick or oppressed men...
...His statistical underpinnings seem rickety to me, but I have no difficulty believing that most members of what are generally regarded as the noncriminal classes do commit a crime or so, more serious than a traffic offense, at some time in their lives...
...But, as James Q. Wilson and Ernest van den Haag have pointed out, crime rose while poverty fell among Afro-Americans...
...Still more awkward from the liberal standpoint is another fact, very honestly reported in Criminal Violence-that blacks commit two to five times (in some places and for some offenses seven or eight times) as many major crimes against the person as do Puerto Ricans or Mexican-Americans -even though Hispanics are as poor as, or poorer than, Afro-Americans and have been the victims of about as much discrimination...
...The precipitate decline in the birth rate may mean that relief is in sight, although that decline is unfortunately much less marked in the lowest layer of society, which produces most of the violent punks...
...By Silberman's own account, most are petty stuff-thefts from hotels, employers, or the government...
...Africans, therefore, were enslaved "without any qualms" because they were black...
...None of these governments publish figures...
...Hardly anyone, certainly not Mr...
...adolescent shoplifting, smoking pot, and the like...
...Black families were for long as stable as any, despite racism more widespread and deep-rooted than it is today...
...Perhaps Silberman's basic fault is that he ignores an obvious fact, stressed by Professor Thomas Sowell (whose blunt opinions, not at all in tune with orthodox white and black liberalism, Silberman dismisses as "a profound misreading of American history")-that all Negroes are not alike...
...American Communists, if they ever managed to seize power, would no doubt build concentration camps, but they would probably be less brutal than Dachau or the Gulag Archipelago...
...The most ferocious thugs dominate the places...
...But neither is he clear-sighted...
...He even resorts to the preposterous argument that anti-Negro prejudice is based on the unfavorable connotations which our language and culture (like those of most European countries) attach to blackness, as a symbol of mourning or evil-black sheep, black hearts, black lies...
...So with corporal punishment, say a moderate and private whipping under medical supervision, which might have One technique which is currently being tried is lectures to high school students by convicts, describing in vivid and unprintable detail the horrors, from stabbings to homosexual gang rapes, of life in prison...
...He is more likely than not to be black or Hispanic -one-third to one-half of all violent criminals are black and many of the whites are Puerto Rican or Chicano...
...Times have changed...
...Death has two advantages: It removes the predator permanently from the community, and it is far cheaper than prison...
...Offissa Pupp, that immortal symbol of dogged and effective police work, was of course on friendly terms with Krazy Kat, but his first job was to keep an eye on Ignatz Mouse and slam him in the Coconino County jail when necessary to prevent or punish his brutal assaults on Krazy-and this despite the fact that Krazy, a prototypical liberal, was infatuated with Ignatz...
...But nobody complains about illegal lotteries and horse parlors except their governmental competitors, who generally offer worse odds and report any winnings to the Internal Revenue Service...
...For one thing, Sister Isolina Ferre, the nun who directs it, happens to be a member of one of the island's richest and most powerful families, which helps...
...But the theory collides with the reality, well known in the black community and not denied by Criminal Violence, that most of the victims of black crime are themselves black...
...Silberman the hardest time...
...Silberman falls back on the proposition that American white racism focuses on Negroes with unique virulence and that the blacks are simply resisting and revenging in the only way open to them...
...It is the relation between race and crime that gives Mr...
...Until the nineteenth century what debate there was among penologists centered on such topics as the relative merits of axe and gallows, mines and galleys...
...Despite the Civil War and some bloody labor disputes, our violence has been mostly private and unpolitical...
...Silberman tells us nothing about the recidivism rate of the alumni of his model Zuchthaus...
...The fatal objection to such reasoning is the very obvious fact that in classical antiquity the vast majority of slaves were white-Celts, Germans, Asiatics (i.e., people from the Near East), and Greeks...
...In most cases I believe that swiftness and certainty are more effective than severity...
...Justice Macklin Fleming's authoritative book, The Price of Perfect Justice, is listed in the bibliography but never mentioned in the text, probably because the facts adduced by that experienced judge are, from Mr...
...But the Japanese were probably the most law-abiding group in the population, and the only violent Chinese were the Boo How Doy, the ferocious hatchetmen (though they also used pistols and bombs) who fought the Tong wars of the turn of the century over control of gambling, opium, and prostitution...
...One thinks of expert safecrackers like the legendary Jimmy Valentine and George Leonidas Leslie, an architect turned crook, who never himself entered a bank with felonious intent but who planned break-ins to the last detail...
Vol. 12 • July 1979 • No. 7
