Crime, the Public, and the Crime Commission: A Critical Review of "The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society"

Abstract

evidence of the efficiency of the system than it is by actual awareness of the guilty suffering. People may respond to evidence of consistent corruption and venality,138 or to what they interpret as intolerable rate of crime, but in neither case is the response really occasioned by awareness of a low conviction rate or by having been made aware too infrequently of the guilty being punished. Venality exposed may shake the faith of some in their duty to obey the law. Experiencing or knowing of crime does not even do that; rather, it elicits demands for stricter enforcement. This is to be expected, at least within a fairly wide range, because the technical failure of the system does not call into question, as would the moral failure, the legitimacy of the system. More efficient enforcement and more frequent and publicized punishment probably affects the crime rate only through engendering fear. Finally, the criminal justice system may increase the predisposition to obey the law among those whom it convicts. In this case, of course, we are indirectly improving society not by creating fewer criminals, but through the cure of those who have committed crime and been convicted. Penology is, therefore, a science with inherently limited leverage. It can reach, except insofar as a criminal culture is self-propagating, only the relatively few who have already committed crime and been caught at it. But even at that we are speaking with excessive optimism, as if, in fact, penologists know how to prevent convicts from committing yet more crimes after their release. There is little if any evidence that we have such knowledge. There is then little reason for the optimistic belief that any manipulation of the criminal justice system will have any measurable effect upon the belief that the law ought to be obeyed, upon our judgments of right and wrong, or upon our tendency to commit 137. See note 133 supra. 138. See Gardiner, Public Attitudes Toward Gambling and Corruption, 374 ANNALS AM. ACAD. POL. SCI. 123, 128-34. Gardiner's study of Wincanton, an eastern industrial city with a 1960 population between 75,000 and 200,000, id. at 124-25, indicates that the public, while complacent toward the crime of gambling, can become sufficiently concerned when corruption is brought blatantly to its attention. But when corruption is quiet, no one worries about it. May 1968] 1523 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 07:04:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms