Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [293]
To be sure, there are other factors we have to take into account. Demographics make a difference. Most of the people we arrest are young males; when this age group bulges in the population, arrests and crimes go up, all else being equal; and when the age group shrinks, crime goes down. The drug epidemic—or, rather, the criminalization of drugs—also makes a big difference to many aspects of the system. The appalling number of guns loose in society must shoulder some of the blame—for the murder rate at least. Real progress in gun control seems politically impossible; some perverse streak in national politics, or national character, seems to guarantee that nothing much can be done, even when fourteen-year-olds “pack rods” in school and semiautomatic weapons are as common as microwave ovens.
The gun lobby does have a point (or a pointlet): people kill, not guns. The Swiss are armed to the teeth, and so are the Israelis; rates of violent crime in these countries are fairly low. But we are not either Swiss or Israeli. If we got rid of the guns, the murder rate might go down. Fewer children, certainly, would blow their brains out by accident. We would surely ameliorate the effect of assaults and the like. Of course, the murderous impulse would still be there, under the skin.
Race, too, is a factor in crime, but a mysterious and convoluted one. As we have seen, black men are accused, arrested, tried, and jailed out of all proportion to their numbers. There is no denying the corrosive impact of racism and the social position of the black underclass. To repeat a point made earlier: for many young men trapped in a black ghetto, crime offers an attractive route to money, fast cars, and some kind of comfort; the main alternative is the misery and humiliation of the welfare system, or a job at a taco joint or burger bar, or washing dishes, or scrubbing floors: hard work at minimum wage.
Yet, certainly, this is not the whole story. Racism is not worse than before; blacks were once enslaved. After emancipation, they were still little better than serfs in most parts of the country. Crime is obviously related, in some way, to oppression and repression; but, paradoxically, it seems to flourish most when the repression lifts somewhat. Moreover, crime rates in the United States are so high, compared to most other countries, that even if we excluded every arrest and conviction of a black, an astonishing, and abnormal amount of white crime would still remain, which can hardly be fobbed off on race. The crime explosion must mean the collapse of a system of restraining values, for whatever reason.
Thus there seems no way to avoid the message we began with: crime is imbedded in the culture—and in this particular culture, and at this particular time. The situation is organic to society; it is part of the very cell structure, the nucleus. It is like a virus that seizes control of some part of the organism and its genetic structure; and cannot be destroyed with any of our present instruments of cure.
Of course, there are great pressures on the criminal justice system—pressures to do something, to provide some relief. The frantic activity of the eighties, which continues into the nineties—the furious building of prisons, the stiff laws, the cries for more, more, more in the way of punishment—what has the upshot been? The effect on crime: imperceptible. On individual defendants, yes; there are, indisputably, results. Felony filings in state courts grew from 689,718 in 1984 to 1,032,053 in 1989. In the District of Columbia they more than doubled in this period. West Virginia was the only state with fewer felony filings in 1989 than in 1984. In large states such as California, New York, and Texas, filings grew by more than 50 percent in this five-year period.27 The so-called war on drugs, of course, accounts for much of this growth. The prison population, too, has been