Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [285]
To begin with, a “celebrity” is not the same as an “authority.” The celebrity is an object of envy and wonder, but not of deference. Of course, people fawn on celebrities—disgustingly so—but in the hope that some of it will rub off on them, not because of the kind of charisma that surrounded the ancient offices of king or chief. The celebrity is, psychologically speaking, close to the man or woman on the street. Celebrities are mostly people who have special talent at doing what many of us do ourselves; only they do it better. A Nobel prize-winning physicist is not a celebrity; a rock star or basketball player is. They are heightened forms of the popular, commonplace selves, the man and woman on the street. Thus celebrity culture rests on a paradox: being different means being just like us.24
The celebrity, then, is the idealized modern self. It is what we want to be, and what we might be with luck or skill. The celebrity, as a model, is morally neutral—a movie star, the president, a great criminal. It would be wrong to say that people admire or model themselves on, say, serial killers; but a celebrity culture weakens ideas of deference and respect, it erodes standards of inherited morality, all of which are the sunken piles that hold up the system of criminal justice.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the criminal justice system cannot compete with the culture, cannot go against the grain. In the battle of norms and goals, it is distinctly marginal; more than a spear-carrier, but very much less than a star. It cannot—in our society—even hope to crush crime. Crime is far too complicated; its roots are too deep. Thus the eternal sense of frustration, the smell of failure that surrounds the system.
I cannot repeat often enough that I am talking about marginal changes, tendencies and shifts, which may be quite slight. After all, as we said, most people are not criminals, no matter where they stand in society, or what they do. They live out their lives without major violations of law (everybody breaks a rule or two now and then). But it takes only a few thousand burglars, out of the millions of people who live in Philadelphia or Los Angeles, to turn the city topsy-turvy. A tiny band of armed robbers is enough to generate the need to spend millions of dollars on police, security guards, locks, burglar alarms, safes, and so on—and even so, nobody is safe. One reason it is so hard to craft social devices to “solve” the crime problem is that criminals are a small minority. Trying to prevent crime, or “cure” crime, is like trying to track down some rare disease. The criminal justice system is far too blunt an instrument. There must be other ways—but what are they?
In the next chapter, we will discuss whether criminal justice actually deters crime. This is, in a way, a raw economic issue: Does the system deliver a big enough electric shock to tell potential criminals, “Hands off”? It is, in part, a matter of benefits and cost. Here we raise (and do not answer) the other question: What has happened to the criminal justice system as a moral teacher and preacher? The system has always been dramaturgic, giving lessons, showing and telling. The colonial system leaned heavily on open trials and public executions. Show trials still exist, but exactly what message do they deliver?
I have the impression—and it is only an impression—that whatever else it does, the criminal justice system does not deliver a strong moral lesson. It delivers, primarily, entertainment. Perhaps it never did deliver an effective moral lesson. Perhaps the penologists and the judges and others were fooling themselves. Maybe Beaumont and De Tocqueville and the men who ran the prisons deluded themselves about what they were accomplishing. Very likely they did. But whatever