Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [174]
In 1965, Congress passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA). Under this law, the attorney general could make grants to improve local law enforcement. The Office of Law Enforcement Assistance administered the program. Johnson also established a Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice; his mandate to the commission sounded a somber message: “Crime is a sore on the face of America. It is a menace on our streets.... It is a corruptor of our youth.... We must bring it under control.... We have taken a pledge not only to reduce crime but to banish it.”61
Of course, Johnson’s war on crime did not banish crime any more than his war on poverty abolished poverty. The year 1968 was another election year. It was also a year of serious rioting, the year in which Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated; and in which George Wallace, roaring up out of the white South, frightened mainstream politicians with his blatant appeals to racism—and his shouts about law and order. Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, for his part blasted away at the decisions of the Supreme Court, which (he said) coddled criminals and worse. Partly in response to these rumblings, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.62 This law set up a separate body, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of. Justice, to handle the new war on crime.63
Mostly, the weapon of this war was money. The LEAA during its ten years or so of vigorous life was mostly a tube for siphoning money out of the federal government and funneling it to the states, in the form of grants. The strategy of the act was to “establish the federal government as a source of money and technical assistance to state and local agencies.” These agencies would “use this assistance to support planning, self-study, and new and innovative projects.”64 Billions of dollars flowed out of Washington. The grants to local agencies were supposed to foster innovation, to stimulate research on issues of law enforcement. Whether they ever accomplished much is doubtful. Ultimately, LEAA faded out of the picture. But crime has stubbornly remained an issue, a rude, insistent item on the national agenda. Candidates run for federal office on anticrime platforms; they accuse each other of being soft on crime, and they promise, once in office, to do something (not usually specified) about the terrible problems of violence and corruption.
It is easy for people to vent their anger on crime. The anger is justified after all. But it is also a way to vent feelings against poverty, race, and other issues for which crime is a convenient stand-in. Politicians pick up these fears and emotions on their antennae and broadcast what they think their people want to hear.
In general, today, the public, or at least some large part of it, has gotten the message. It holds the federal government responsible for a good deal of what it finds wrong with criminal justice. The narcotics nightmare is a good example. The federal government, as we shall see, has been in this quagmire since 1914. It digs itself in deeper and deeper; it spends more and more, flailing about madly, fighting, spending, arresting. The programs, state and federal, have been, on the whole, exercises in futility; but frustration only fuels a desperate determination to get tougher.
The federal government, in fact, may be helpless to do anything about drugs. Drugs flood into the country; there are millions of people buying, selling, sniffing, snorting, shooting up, smoking, and the like. Still, the federal government has the muscle and the jurisdiction to make a big noise, to mount campaigns, to wage “wars,” with airplanes, Coast Guard cutters, and all sorts of paraphernalia. After all, there is precious little that Michigan or the city of Omaha can do to keep heroin and cocaine away from their streets and houses. And the American public, by and large, refuses to believe that some problems simply do not have current solutions, at least not workable ones. (This is