"As American as Jesse James"

It has long been liberal dogma that to eliminate crime, society must eliminate the causes: poverty and racial inequality. But even as the U.S. was pouring billions into social welfare programs, and systematically attacking discrimination, during the '60s and early '70s, violent crime was booming. Since 1960 the rate of robbery, murder and rape has almost tripled. Lately it has become fashionable to target the culprits, not the causes--simply to catch criminals and lock them up.

The liberal line may be Utopian. But believing that more cops and tougher judges will stop crime is wishful as well, says Charles Silberman in his important new book, Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice.* Silberman's searching study faces some uncomfortable truths--like the fact that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime--and debunks a host of myths along the way.

For starters, Silberman points out that crime is "as American as Jesse James." Abraham Lincoln called internal violence America's biggest problem well over a century ago; Herbert Hoover anticipated Richard Nixon's law-and-order campaign by four decades; an 1872 guidebook to New York City warned tourists to avoid Central Park after sundown. What was abnormal was a quarter-century of stable or declining crime rates between the end of Prohibition and 1960, an era that ended when the baby boom produced a huge generation of 14-to 24-year-olds, the prime age for crime.

A former member of FORTUNE magazine's board of editors and the author of highly acclaimed studies of race (Crisis in Black and White) and education (Crisis in the Classroom), Silberman began his Ford Foundation-funded research six years ago. His "working assumption," he told TIME, was that "the criminal justice system could make a huge difference." That proved overly hopeful. Police commissioners around the country, he learned, "simply do not know what to do to reduce crime." For example, expensive new communications systems have been widely installed to cut down the time it takes a police car to reach the scene of a crime. Yet the speedup proved only marginally useful; as one study revealed, victims usually wait up to an hour before they even call the police. Without citizen cooperation, says Silberman, police can do little to crack crimes. They are better off trying to stay close to the community and just walking the streets.

If police are overromanticized as crime solvers, says Silberman, courts are underrated for punishing criminals. He argues that the courts are not the revolving doors that they are popularly thought to be, and that they have not been hamstrung by the criminal-rights safeguards of the Warren Court. He also questions whether courts are more lenient than they used to be; available data indicate that a higher percentage of felons go to prison than 50 years ago. "Most importantly," writes Silberman, "it is not true that the guilty escape punishment." Sooner or later, criminals get caught--and know it ("If you want to play, you gotta pay").

Juvenile courts are another matter. There the real criminals do get off, while "offenders" like runaways, "incorrigibles" and "ungovernables" get locked up or sent to institutions that often do more harm than good. Adult prisons are no better.

No evidence exists that longer prison terms or fixed mandatory sentences will deter crime, says Silberman. The real problem with the court system is not that it works badly but that it appears to work badly. Image is of no small importance. Making people believe that the law works --and works fairly--is a better way to stop crime, says Silberman, than stuffing more criminals into already overcrowded jails. Bringing plea-bargaining negotiations out into the open, establishing formal sentencing guidelines, and simply treating victims and witnesses more decently would help restore respect for the law. Nevertheless, Silberman cautions, the courts alone cannot do the job.

Which brings him back to Square 1. Violent crime is committed by society's outcasts, the poor and left-behind minorities who see no stake in preserving the way things are and who see crime as the only way "to get one's fair share in an unfair world." But, asks Silberman, how does one explain why blacks have a much higher crime rate than Hispanics, who are usually just as poor and suffer just as much discrimination? In New York City, for instance, a recent study shows that blacks commit four times as many robberies as Hispanics, though their numbers are roughly equal. In the Southwest, the black crime rate runs from two to seven times as high as the Hispanic. It is typical of Silberman's book that he does not mince around this troubling fact.

The reason does not lie in black genes, says Silberman, or the "cultural baggage" that blacks brought over from Africa. Rather, violence is something blacks learned in the U.S. "For most of their history in this country, in fact, blacks were victims, not initiators, of violence." As one Southern police official summed up justice for blacks before World War I, "If a nigger kills a white man, that's murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that's justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills another nigger, that's one less nigger." Or, as a Negro blues song put it, "White folks and nigger in great Co't house/ Like Cat down Cellar wit' no-hole mouse." The melting pot was a myth for blacks. While 60% of white immigrants in Boston moved from unskilled to skilled or white-collar jobs after a generation, blacks stagnated in "Negro jobs" --as porters, janitors, servants. Indeed, their mobility was often downward; as white immigrants moved into blue-collar jobs, blacks were often moved out.

Some 35 years ago, Black Poet Langston Hughes bitterly warned: "Negroes, sweet and docile/ Meek, humble and kind: Beware the day they change their mind." They have changed their minds, with a vengeance, says Silberman. "After 350 years of fearing whites, black Americans have discovered that the fear runs the other way, that whites are intimidated by their very presence; it would be hard to overestimate what an extraordinarily liberating force this discovery is." The almost pathetic hopefulness of the motto of the Tuskegee Institute class of 1886--"There's always room at the top" --finally gave way to the angry oath of a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee leader in 1965: "If we can't sit at the table, let's knock the f-------legs off."

The wonder, says Silberman, is that blacks did not explode sooner. Instead, they sublimated their rage with elaborate "toasting sessions" at which they would spin tall tales about underdogs outfoxing their oppressors, or celebrate the likes of "the Great MacDaddy" ("Got a tombstone disposition and a graveyard mind"), who would turn white values on their head by being the "baddest nigger." In the 1960s black militants used such folk heroes as role models; Black Panther Bobby Seale named his son after a famous badman of 19th century ballads named Stagolee, "a bad nigger off the block."

Today the mythic has become real; cheap handguns and narcotics have become the outlets for aggression. Ironically, desegregation is partly responsible. Middle-class blacks, once a restraining force in the ghetto, have moved out and left behind lower-class enclaves. Social ties that still bind Hispanics, like family and religion, have worn away. Though blacks increasingly attack whites, most of their victims are other blacks.

Silberman is left with the unconsoling conclusion that until blacks and the poor are brought into society's mainstream, there is not a great deal courts and cops can do to cut down on crime. He finds a few examples of the poor taking a stake in improving their own communities, but more thoroughgoing solutions will take more money--and patience--than the country has so far been willing to give. "It's a gloomy book," admits Silberman. But an enlightening one.

*Random House; 540 pages; $15.

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