CRIME & THE GREAT SOCIETY

CRIME in the U.S. is a national disgrace. Police blotters are mired in the petty misdeeds of shoplifters and purse snatchers; courts are clogged with the violent felonies of rapists and murderers. By any standard of measurement, the statistics are staggering, and their impact can be felt at every level of American life. One boy in every six will turn up in a juvenile court for a nontraffic offense before he is 18. In some urban areas, nearly half of all the residents stay off the streets at night for fear of attack, a third have grown too cautious to speak to strangers, a fifth have become so terrified that they would prefer to move out of their present neighborhoods. More and more people report that they keep firearms at home for self-protection; watchdogs are becoming as popular as the friendly family pet. There is a growing tendency to believe that the Government cannot or will not protect the average citizen.

At its best, the situation seems virtually impossible. But the truth is even worse. After 18 months of interviews with every available expert, after countless visits to courts and prisons and police stations, President Lyndon Johnson's 19-man Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice concluded that the full story of U.S. crime simply cannot be told. The available statistics, after all, reflect only visible crime; most successful crime is, by definition, secret or invisible. All too numerous are the felonies that intimidated victims never report. And no figures can account for the ordinary consumer or the bilked businessman who does not know that he has been cheated. Embezzlement, price-rigging, tax evasion, bribery, graft, are all far more prevalent than the number of cases that are prosecuted.

But if the whole truth can never be known, the partial observations that make up the commission's report are dreadful enough. In a 300-page book delivered last month, it offered the most exhaustive study of U.S. crime to be made in decades. It described a situation so bleak that it threatens the very foundation of the Great Society. It painted a picture so ominous that the implications have yet to be fully appreciated by legislator or layman. The overall crime rate has been spiraling dizzily year after year: it shot up 13% in 1964, 5% in 1965, another 11% last year. In 1965 alone, there were almost 2,500,000 recorded burglaries and major thefts--one for every 80 persons in the nation.

So shocking are the commission's facts that, to the average reader, the only satisfactory solution might seem to require: 1) the razing of all large cities, which spawn one-sixth of the nation's murders, one-third of all its robberies; 2) the strict segregation of all youngsters from 15 to 16 years of age, easily the most lawless group in the country; 3) the destruction of all automobiles, for they are stolen at the rate of half a million a year, and are a vital tool in just about every caper from bank robbery to smuggling; and 4) the elimination of big business, which wittingly and unwittingly encourages illegal financial operations and offers attractive investment opportunities to big-time racketeers.

The committee, of course, was charged with producing more practical suggestions. As might be expected, it began with an examination of the police, the courts, and the prison and parole system--the agencies with which society apprehends, judges, punishes and attempts to reform its criminals. In every area the commission found dangerous deficiencies that are compounding swiftly expanding problems. And in every area it offered recommendations for reform.

The Police

For most individuals, the first brush with the law begins as an encounter with the police. Yet few citizens realize the policeman's true power, the wide area in which he must exercise his discretion, the largely undefined range of his authority. "Crime does not look the same on the street as it does in a legislative chamber," explains the commission. Police do most of their work in tense, fast-moving situations that have few similarities to a calm court of law. And there are no easy prescriptions for any part of a policeman's immensely varied job. "Keeping streets and parks safe is not the same problem as keeping banks secure. The kind of police patrol that will deter boys from street robberies is not likely to deter men with guns from holding up storekeepers."

Beyond all that, lax gun laws help to ensure that a policeman's life is always on the line. Clearly, the U.S. expects a great deal from its law enforcers--and gives them little. Everywhere in the country, police facilities are understaffed, policemen are underpaid and inadequately trained. To make matters worse, outmoded traditions require all novice policemen, no matter what their education or skill, to start their careers alike--at the bottom. As a result, it is almost impossible to recruit the college graduates and specialists so desperately needed to combat today's sophisticated criminals.

Police chiefs and legislators have been complaining for years about the lack of uniform, countrywide police standards--a problem that is exaggerated by the incredible fragmentation of local police agencies. In the 212 sizable metropolitan areas across the country, there are 313 counties and 4,144 cities, each with its own police force. Many are so small that they must do without crime laboratories.

The commission is convinced that the only way to improve the situation is by amalgamating or pooling thousands of such small police forces so that a single authority can oversee population groups of at least 50,000. It also recommends: -- New, standardized communications equipment to provide most patrolmen with cigarette-pack-size walkie-talkies that would keep them in constant touch with headquarters.

> Computerized operations for large departments, which would vastly increase the speed with which a telephoned alarm can be processed at headquarters and flashed to the squad car closest to the scene.

> Community-relations programs, including regular meetings with neighborhood committees, to explain police problems and purposes and to hear citizens' grievances.

The Courts

Difficult as it is for the police to perform their appointed jobs within the restraints of the law, the problems facing the courts may be even tougher. A U.S. citizen haled before the bar has every right to expect swift and impartial justice. Too often he gets neither. "Our system of justice deliberately sacrifices much in efficiency and even in effectiveness in order to preserve local autonomy and to protect the individual," says the commission. "Sometimes it may seem to sacrifice too much."

Thousands of cases have been pending in local and federal district courts for years. In the crush, prosecutors and magistrates are tempted to bypass the judicial process by dismissing many cases wholesale. Snowed under by the work load, harried judges seldom have the time to learn what they should about the man in the dock. Sentences are handed down to fit the crime, not the defendant.

Conditions in the lower courts are particularly scandalous. Lawyers, witnesses and influence peddlers mill through dank, malodorous corridors as prisoners accused of minor misdeeds are brought before a judge and sentenced by the dozen. President Johnson's commission suggests that misdemeanors should be handled in the felony courts, with their better judges and higher standards. The commission would also abolish the justice of the peace, rural counterpart of the lower court. Today the J.P. still operates in 35 states, and in most of these his pay comes from the fees and fines extracted from parties brought before him. His duties, says the commission, should be transferred to circuit or district courts.

The commission also agreed that the majority of crimes that flood the courts should not be there in the first place. Drunkenness, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, gambling and minor sex violations account for almost half of all arrests. Such behavior is "too serious to be ignored," but "its inclusion in the criminal-justice system raises questions deserving examination." Drunkenness, for example, should be treated at public health "detoxification" stations and kept out of courts entirely, unless it is accompanied by disorderly conduct.

Other recommendations:

-- Selection, rather than election, of judges--with a non-partisan commission of laymen and lawyers screening the choices, and periodically reviewing each judge's performance. >Judicial seminars at which judges are taught proper courtroom techniques, learn uniform sentencing standards, meet prison authorities to discuss correctional programs. >Reexamination of bail rates to reduce discrimination against poor defendants and put a stop to what has become "a standard crime-pricing system."

Prisons & Parole

For all the troubles of the police and the courts, the prison and parole system seems to be in even deeper difficulty. "The most striking fact about the correctional apparatus today," says the commission, "is that, although the rehabilitation of criminals is presumably its major purpose, the custody of criminals is actually its major task." It is bothered by a vast imbalance. On any single day it has authority over 1,300,000 offenders, but only one-third of them are behind bars. The rest are on probation or parole. It is in the prisons and jails, however, where four-fifths of the system's billion-dollar-a-year budget is spent, where nine-tenths of the correctional employees work.

Most urgently needed is a quick and major increase in the number of parole and probation officers. Many officers carry a work load of over 100 cases each. The average, says the commission, should be 35 cases per officer.

The commissioners are convinced that many more inmates should be paroled. For prison experience unquestionably boosts the chance that an offender will break the law again. In one experiment, conducted by the California Youth Authority, a group of convicted juvenile delinquents were given immediate parole and returned to their homes or foster homes, where they got intensive care from community parole officers. After five years, only 28% of this experimental group have had their paroles revoked, compared to 52% of a comparable group that was locked up after conviction.

Even those who do end up in prison should get far different treatment from that handed out to most of the 426,000 who are now serving time. Too many prisons are grey, forbidding fortresses; some are 100 years old or more. And too many emphasize punishment, to the detriment of rehabilitation. The commission suggests that new prisons should be kept as small as possible. They should have a residential air, and be located near cities and universities, where cooperation with industry and academicians could be easily arranged. At the federal penitentiary at Danbury, Conn., the Dictograph Corp. sponsors a training program for micro-soldering of hearing aids, then employs the trained convicts after their release. Such efforts have proved far more successful than employment of inmates trained in such presently popular prison industries as digging potatoes and turning out auto license plates for the state.

In addition, the commission urges:

--Expanded prison furlough programs to permit prisoners to keep up family ties or hold part-time jobs outside. --1mproved prison industries to increase prisoners' vocational aptitudes. --1ntegration of local jails into state correctional systems.

Beyond the Laws

In all, the commission made 200 practical recommendations that add up to an urgent call for new and badly needed laws. The President used the commission's report as the basis for the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act, which he proposed to Congress last month. With $50 million spent in the next fiscal year, and another $300 million the following year, Johnson would like to encourage community crime-control programs, coordinate the police, the courts and the correction system, spur new police academies, build new crime labs. Such efforts are sorely needed, but they are only a beginning.

It is true enough, says the commission, that "America's system of criminal justice is overcrowded and overworked, undermanned and underfinanced, and very often misunderstood." But even if its operational faults are corrected, it can hardly be expected to offer an appropriate punishment for every imaginable offense, or appropriate prison or parole facility for every type of offender. New York Court of Appeals Judge Charles Breitel sums up succinctly: "If every policeman, every prosecutor, every court, and every post-sentence agency performed his or its responsibility in strict accordance with the rules of law, precisely and narrowly laid down, the criminal law would be intolerable."

The ideal, after all, is to prevent crime, not to concentrate on the arrest, punishment and correction of criminals. And even to work toward that goal means to embark on more research, collect more information than has ever been available before.

The possible areas for investigation are limited only by the imagination of the engineer charged with the building of new technical aids for the police, by the capabilities of the social scientist who is seeking dependable methods of crime deterrence. How is murder to be prevented? The traditional answer is the threat of drastic punishment, but that threat has never been enough. Today, most murders lead to convictions. Yet people continue to kill each other at much the same rate year after year.

Are the young, who are more numerous than ever and promise to expand in numbers faster than ever, really more crime-prone than they have been in the past? Statistics suggest that they are. But how are they to be handled? Increasing urbanization seems to exacerbate their restlessness and their desire to rebel. Affluence all around them, reports the commission, beckons them toward trouble. "An abundance of material goods provides an abundance of motives and opportunities for stealing, and stealing is the fast growing kind of crime."

That so large a proportion of American youth yields to the temptations of crime is ample evidence of a deep malaise. Too often, both the family and the community are failing to fulfill their necessary functions. The commission noted a marked reduction in parental authority; and without strong guidance from a devoted father, it is all too easy for a boy to become a school dropout, to drift aimlessly into petty thievery. Often he sees no alternative to a life of crime, for the vast technological changes since World War II have sharply limited the market for unskilled labor. A high school education is essential for all but the most menial jobs, and frustrated youths, unable to find work, become bored and cynical, convinced that life is a racket, that social responsibility is a joke.

Poverty and the slums it breeds make an enormous problem--for the police, for the churches, for community welfare institutions. They nourish the ghettos of the "inner city," into which embittered, underprivileged millions of non-whites are crammed by social habit and economic necessity. Small wonder that the crime rate is far greater among Negroes than among whites, that they have ten times the white arrest rate for murder, 31 times the arrest rate for burglary. It is equally impressive that under conditions of economic equality, those drastic differences tend to disappear.

In the end, concludes the commission, "a community's most enduring protection against crime is to right the wrongs and cure the illnesses that tempt men to harm their neighbors." Thus the improved police techniques, courtroom reforms and the better jails proposed by the commission will amount to little unless the filth of the slums is attacked with vigor, unless the humiliations of racial discrimination are eased. Until real progress is achieved, the U.S. will have to live with its crime indefinitely. And that, most Americans would agree, is an intolerable prospect.

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