Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [295]
Not everybody in this country, of course, was and is in favor of more and tougher toughness. The due-process wing has never given up. Civil-liberty forces were never entirely silenced; they have always protested valiantly and continually against cruelty, callousness, and neglect in the criminal justice system, against what they consider the misuse of criminal justice.
Our criminal justice system—maybe every criminal justice system—includes an aspect that is downright oppressive. Criminal justice is, literally, state power. It is police, guns, prisons, the electric chair. Power corrupts; and power also has an itch to suppress. A strain of suppression runs through the whole of our story. The sufferers—burnt witches, whipped and brutalized slaves, helpless drunks thrown into fetid county jails, victims of lynch mobs—cry out to us across the centuries.
Nobody, of course, denies that there are bad people in the world; and, when all is said and done, most of us are only too eager to call on the criminal justice system when we need its help. The criminal justice system has always had two faces: devil and angel, good cop and bad cop. The right wing—the law-and-order crowd—tends to like both aspects of the system. They do not mind some suppression, to keep people down who deserve to be down. Southern whites, for example, used criminal process to crush rebellion among “their” blacks, to “keep them in their place.” On the other hand, sporadic voices on the far left approve of neither aspect of the system. They consider even “ordinary” crime a form of protest against a rotten society. Most of the rest of the country is somewhere in the middle, or just plain confused. But the higher the crime rate, the more people lean toward “law and order.”
Some groups have historically suffered more from the “bad cop,” and these groups tend to lean the other way. Blacks and Hispanics, Native Americans, gays, and others have felt both ignored and oppressed. Police brutality has been a recurrent issue, one that flared up again in 1992 in the Rodney King incident (see chapter 16). The forces at play in the system are highly complex. There is a tendency for uneasy compromise—for example, in sentencing and correctional “reforms.” Reforms often have curiously ambiguous roots, and curiously equivocal results. Neither side triumphs. There is a tendency, of course, in a high-crime, high-fear period, to switch attention from (helping) offenders, to (stamping out) offenses; but the switch is also resisted, and not always futilely. The picture is, and remains, extremely mixed.
A Concluding Word
This book has attempted to trace the history of criminal justice, its changes over the years, its successes and failures. There were plenty of failures to write about. Problems of criminal justice cannot be divorced from problems of crime. Crime, after all, is the main excuse for having such a system at all.
But, whatever the public may think, no solution to the problem of crime is in sight, not in the short run at least. The crime problem, of course, cannot be “solved” in the sense of wiping out crime entirely. What people really want is some way to contain crime; to reduce crime, especially violent crime, to more manageable proportions. Most of us—old and young, black and white, men and women—would settle for the rate of crime the Swiss or the Japanese enjoy. But that, too, does not seem to be in the cards.
If this is so—and I think it is—it is a bitter pill for the American public