CRIME AND THE ELECTION

...Many of the elements for change are present—concern over Attica, a growing determination to shut down prisons (San Quentin, juvenile institutions in Massachusetts), the existence of new state planning agencies dispensing billions, increasing judicial intervention to limit bureaucratic discretion and enforce convict rights, and the disintegration of the myth of the effectiveness of treatment...

...that criminal justice is a conspiracy to enforce conformity on blacks and Puerto Ricans...

...the enraged victim—something has to give in this gloomy picture...

...One must chip away simultaneously at a number of points...

...The central paradox can be phrased as follows: "deprivation of liberty is increasingly damaging in a society which fails to provide democratic opportunity, and yet demands skillful and uncoerced effort from its citizens...

...Evi dence is accumulating that the system (courts, probation, prison, parole) may punish, conCOMMENTS AND OPINIONS 560 trol, or incarcerate but that it cannot rehabilitate...

...Assuming that confinement is always more damaging than probation or parole, long-term criminal-career costs will be reduced...

...organized and politicized resistance has begun to create an unprecedented crisis in criminal justice...

...This rhetoric simply enrages the victims among all races and economic conditions, giving birth to a very tough counterrhetoric recently displayed, for example, by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP...

...Efforts are increasingly focused on the agencies of criminal justice, especially the prison...

...Except for very minor innovations (reduction of penalties for marijuana, but not legalization), the whole crime issue is apparently to be played down by the Democrats...

...But the political problem is to convince the potential victim to trade off a shortterm increase in risk for a less criminalistic society in the long run...

...One central way to accomplish this is to reallocate the savings produced by lower police costs to provide concrete and visible protection against the most feared crimes—robbery, burglary, purse snatching, rape by stranger, mugging...

...A failure to face it squarely, however, could contribute to conservative victories...

...He wants the institutions of criminal justice to serve the middle and not merely the well-todo...

...Since there is lack of consensus on such issues as abortion, sexual behavior, marijuana, vagrancy, public drunkenness, prostitution, obscenity, and so forth, this policy simply removes the behavior from the penal codes or reduces penalties...

...BUT THE NIXON ALTERNATIVE is clear enough: more and better prisons, enriched with more and better programs...

...a focus on crime prevention reminds many of the confusion and failures of the war on poverty...

...It should by now be clear that the fear of crime is a political fact and not merely a code word for racism or backlash to the social turbulence of the 1960s...

...LET US CONSIDER the new context of the politics of crime in the last quarter of the 20th century and then turn to a brief critique of current "solutions" from the standpoint of the victim or potential victim...

...James Vorenberg charges that "there is little to show for the almost $1 billion that has been spent...

...If it is the lack of social opportunity in an affluent society rather than the brutality of prison that is responsible for soaring crime rates, crime prevention is the core of a solution...

...It would be much too optimistic to suppose that these views on the prison system won't cause still further disputes among people in the liberal, labor, and Left communities...

...The Nixon administration claims some success in its "war on crime...

...This leaves the field to the Republicans who can be expected to make the most of it...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS of "correctional treatment," the faltering torch is seized by the hard-liners...

...Let us briefly examine—from the standpoint of the victim—four major "solutions" currently advocated: • Decriminalization asks the public to tolerate more deviant behavior and cease using the law to enforce moral conformity...

...In this sense, the editors of Life were correct when they recently charged that "the machinery of restraining crime [has become] an incubator of it...

...By1970 the rate of crimes against property hadincreased 147 percent and the rate of crimes of violence had increased 126 percent...

...Attorney General Kleindienst has even announced that the "Bureau of Prisons has launched the largest construction program in its history...

...Is the dangerous leap in public disquiet— sometimes leading to bursts of neighborhood neovigilantism—primarily the result of a given generation experiencing such epidemic increases...

...may alienate the middle-American and labor element...

...The difficulties of arriving at a long-run perspective to confront the hardliners should not be understimated...

...In the absence of knowledge, technological gimmickry and bureaucratic log-rolling will continue with little gain to the public...

...First, it is not clear how the fear of crime can be "normalized" (say, like the fear of auto accidents), if we continue to have an increasing crime rate...

...One result is rampant recidivism and a tremendous increase in criminalcareer costs...

...wealthy in the 19th to underclass vs...

...Crime-control planning on the state level was introduced through block-grant funding...

...The correctional systems have become less repressive over time but there has been an increase in the inadvertent damage done to offenders through their removal from society at critical junctures of the "life cycle...

...This has given birth to an increase in expecta tions for protection of hard-earned gains...

...There is no space to spell out the specific reforms that follow from this perspective...

...As James Vorenberg has noted, The figures for the last five years of the sixtieshave convinced all but the most skeptical thatsomething more ominous than populationchanges or reporting errors is involved...

...that all guards are brutal racists...

...Change mechanisms, such as probation subsidy (paying counties not to send offenders to prisons), reversing the burden of proof at parole hearings, speedy-trial Iegislation, and prohibition of imprisonment for certain classes of property offenders are immediate measures to implement the strategy...

...Programs that minimize deprivation of liberty—work release, halfway houses, expanded probation, early release, pretrial vocational programs—are more likely to be consistent with such a nonviolent approach than programs that enrich the prison systems, such as vocational training, more psychiatrists, etc...

...By removing offenders from society, the prison damages their capacity to take advantage of opportunities even if they were provided...

...a focus on law enforcement stirs liberal fears of a police state...

...If this new demand is not met, cities will be further torn by struggles over the allocation of fixed resources to the detriment of the ghettos and high-crime areas...

...To COMBINE `organizational intelligence" and public disquiet in order to produce substantial change in criminal justice systems is a political problem...

...If crime rates were to decelerate and level off, I would still argue that there has been a secular shift in the characteristics of the offender-victim relationship from poor vs...

...After five years of the "war on crime," even Attorney General Kleindienst can only argue that crime is being "decelerated" under the Republicans...

...There was little evidence among the Democrats of the rhetorical excess of the New Left: that Rockefeller is a "murderer...

...blue collar and middle class in the 20th century...

...If social-planning agencies accumulate more knowledge, they can learn how to maximize the police dollar to effectuate a general lessening of crime and not simply its displacement from areas of high political power to those with less...

...A focus on abortion, marijuana, etc...

...The primary reason for this is not lack of money or good will...

...Democratic crime prevention fell into disrepute during the period of "maximum participation of the poor...

...All the elements for change are present except the acquiescence or cooperation of the victim and potential victim...

...The political problem is to make it palatable to those required to tolerate such behavior— urban dwellers, ghetto inhabitants, small business people...

...a focus on "justice for the offender" enrages police and correctional officers' unions and wins no votes among the victimized...

...Increasing crime...

...This "solution" is especially appealing to persons who live in high-rise apartment buildings or well-to-do suburbs...

...It has emphasized law enforcement, building of new prisons, expanded use of wire-tapping against organized crime, military forays that mainly drive up the price of heroin (Operation Intercept), and evidence of "political" use of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funds in eight "high-impact" cities with an eye on the coming election...

...the politicized offender...

...The delegates at the recent Democratic convention had to listen to Governor Wallace's formulations ("get the thugs off the streets") but showed little inclination to face the problem squarely with a rational alternative...

...This growth can no longer be explained away by reference to the "dark figures" of unreported or undetected crime...

...This approach has been rounded out with a spate of show trials against political dissidents and (except for alcoholism) a stubborn refusal to budge on the issue of so-called victimless crimes...

...Thus, the centuryold program of rehabilitation has now become the last line of defense of the prison system...

...Beginning with Goldwater in 1964, the hardliners have chosen and defined the issue...

...Finally, there has been a critical transformation in the mood and psychology of the increasing streams of black and minority-group persons processed through the machinery of criminal justice...

...Programs such as Mobilization for Youth promised (but failed) to provide information testing "opportunity" theory—the idea that real expansions of economic opportunity will reduce crime...

...A new strategy of diversion ("divert" offenders from confinement to community supervision) is quickly becoming the new orthodoxy among correctional insiders...

...Ironically, as the reform movement has begun to recognize the futility * See, Robert Martinson, "The Paradox of PrisonReform," New Republic, April 1, 8, 15, and 29,1972, for a fuller statement...

...He blames "militant police and correctional officers' unions" and lack of a "push for reform" from the federal level...

...Behavior brought within the scope of the penal codes doubled (perhaps tripled) during the 19th century, giving birth to the "twin phenomena of growing affluence and growing criminality...

...The recently founded National Prisoners Coalition presented a convict version by coming out for a "nonviolent approach to the systematic reduction of prison populations...

...With a change in administration, crime prevention may become something more than a slogan...

...Clearly, one aspect of the politics of crime will be a struggle to wrest these LEAA agencies (and the billions they dispense) from the `old-line representatives of the state and local police departments, courts, prosecutors, and correctional agencies that need to be changed...

...The opportunity to build a movement to transform these institutions was (ironically enough) advanced through the passage of the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act in 1968—that first bitter fruit of hard-line fear of crime...

...For a century the central effort of the forces of reform has been the improvement of the brutal prison regimes with the hope of using them finally to rehabilitate the offender...

...This policy advocates bail reform, work release, increased probation, local supervision—devices that curb input pressures and reduce the contact between offender and "correctional" system...

...Organized in trade unions, small business associations, citizens' lobbies and local political groups, the new victim does not have a psychology of dumb acquiescence to fate...

...a focus on radical reform of criminal justice disquiets those who still maintain faith in the myth of correctional treatment...

...This will become the central problem of the politics of crime in the 20th century...

...Convict culture used to combine sentimental chauvinism with a free-born hatred of the lunch bucket...

...The President has joined Ramsey Clark in denouncing the prisons as "universities of crime," not with a view to dismantling them but to enriching them with more "program" since the "protection of the public depends primarily on the correction of the offender...

...Modest progress can be made through increasing the operational efficiency of existing agencies, especially the police...

...Attica, for example, seemed to be a new form of collective disturbance, as much a revolt against "prison reform" as a demand for it...

...From a 17% rise in 1968, the annual increase was slowed to only [!] 6% in 1971...

...However, the potential victim in precinct A will not support a policy that merely chases the crime from precinct B into his backyard...