Crime-Stoppers' Textbooks

Morgan O. Reynolds from the August/September 1995 issue

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Wilson closes the book with a scare scenario: There will be 1 million more 14- to 17-year-olds--roughly half of them boys--in the year 2000 than today. Since the top 6 percent of males commit a majority of serious youth crime, it promises to get worse. "Get ready," Wilson says, although he doesn't say how. Two thoughts occur: Does he mean arm yourself? That's doubtful. And 30,000 more vicious punks? If we can't handle them, then we aren't prepared to handle much of anything.

In a marked contrast to Crime, Bidinotto's Criminal Justice? draws a tight bead on the helpless individual theory. "The ordinary citizen believes individuals are responsible for what they do," writes Bidinotto, "and thus should be held accountable for harm they do to others." By contrast, he says, the academic and legal communities start with the premise that the individual criminal has little personal responsibility because he is "shaped by a wide variety of forces--biological, psychological, or social--over which he has little volitional control."

The Wilson-Petersilia book never states it that clearly but hardly refutes the characterization. Bidinotto believes that the public is right and the experts--whom he calls the Excuse-Making Industry--wrong, although the experts have acquired the power to ruin the criminal justice system, twisting its purpose from the punishment of wrongdoers to their treatment and rehabilitation.

Bidinotto claims that the fundamental error of the social science establishment stems from its embrace of the philosophical doctrine of determinism, the idea that there is only one possible action for an individual at each moment, the net result of all the causes operating up to that moment. He tags it a "billiard ball" theory of human action. Free will or volition, by contrast, supposedly sounds "causeless" and therefore unscientific. In truth, organisms are purposeful. They are goal-
directed. Humans have the additional capacity to think and direct their awareness. Acting in accord with our nature as reasoning organisms, we initiate actions in pursuit of our purposes and therefore we are causes, not just effects. To treat criminals as if they don't act purposefully, continually accepting or rejecting courses of action, implicitly ignores their humanity, and therefore the source of their criminality. This is a scientific approach to human behavior and, rather than violating the law of causality, it accurately diagnoses the nature of things.

In his contribution to Criminal Justice?, philosopher David Kelley characterizes criminals as individuals with "a gross deficiency in what used to be called the moral faculties" and as "profoundly amoral." The psychopath is "a prototype to which criminals conform more or less closely."

Kelley argues that the same conflict between free will and determinism arose in philosophy but that the trail of "scientific inquiry keeps circling back" to our capacity for conceptual thought and choice. The old assumption that science is a witness against free will turns out to be false. Human beings turn out to be far more complicated than determinists believe, and that explains why the correlates with criminality are so loose and will always be so.

Bidinotto claims that the deadened conscience of criminals has been encouraged by the moral relativism of the 1960s, as well as the continuing erosion of the moral landscape courtesy of the Excuse-Making Industry. Within the corrections industry, the practical consequences are that discipline has been relaxed and punishment largely banished: The likelihood of speedy release shapes the whole environment. Inmates pretend to reform themselves, and their keepers pretend to believe them. Community-based corrections continue the fiasco.

Stanton Samenow, who has interviewed thousands of criminals, insists, "The criminal is rational, calculating, and deliberate in his actions. Criminals know right from wrong....A habit is not a compulsion. On any occasion, the thief can refrain from stealing if he is in danger of getting caught."

Samenow's findings lead to his critique of his scientific rivals: "Sociological explanations for crime, plausible as they may seem, are simplistic. If they were correct, we'd have far more criminals than we do....Criminals claim that they were rejected by parents, neighbors, schools, and employers, but rarely does a criminal say why he was rejected.... [Criminals] chose the companions they liked and admired....Far from being a formless lump of clay, the criminal shapes others more than they do him....[W]e must see the criminal as the problem, not society." John DiIulio and Charles Logan add, "Punishment is an affirmation of the autonomy, responsibility, and dignity of the individual."

The Bidinotto volume has a respectable showing of statistics, but its strength remains its wisdom. Judge Ralph Adam Fine may offer the most penetrating line in the book: "We keep our hands out of a flame because it hurt the very first time (not the second, fifth, or tenth time) we touched the fire."

In terms of specific public policies, Criminal Justice? recommends various changes in the rules of the game, such as a ban on plea bargaining; a ban on psychiatric testimony on the "state of mind" of the accused at the time of the crime; replacement of the Miranda and search-and-seizure exclusionary rules; repeal of the legal insanity defense; capital punishment as the standard penalty for premeditated murder; repeal of drug laws; greater use of private incentives and contractors to administer criminal justice; more work for prisoners; more prison space; truth-in-sentencing for violent criminals (serve 85 percent or more of sentences); juvenile records available for adult sentencing; restitution actually enforced; and parolees supervised intensely by armed officers. Bidinotto admits that as long as men (and over 90 percent of criminals are male) have the power to choose evil, crime will exist. Yet it can be kept low if the justice system treats them as fully responsible for the harm they do.

To Protect and To Serve is about the cops, not the robbers--but given that its subject is the Los Angeles Police Department, the disparity in author Joe Domanick's mind may not be so great. Domanick has as much admiration for the LAPD and its chieftains as the O.J. Simpson defense team does. He grinds out a relentless and fascinating 400-page indictment of the LAPD: Since World War II, it has been brutal, disrespectful, and unaccountable. The Rodney King beating and the subsequent "insurrection" in South Central Los Angeles were inevitable, Domanick argues.

Despite his tendency to fall into boiler-plate leftism and egregious obscenities, Domanick draws up a surprisingly good case for his indictment. Once the most admired department in the country, the Sgt. Joe Fridays of L.A. robocop efficiency are now demoralized roboscrap. It's a colorful story well told, filled with rogues, and energized by a Lord Acton-like moral: An autonomous, paramilitary bureaucracy must absolutely run amuck. Despite my general admiration for the police, this is a plausible conclusion to a public-choice economist.

Some of the political reforms recently imposed on the LAPD actually make sense--such as an independent board and a police chief with limited terms and vulnerability to dismissal--though Domanick doubts their efficacy. He has no real reform ideas because he spends most of his energy emoting on behalf of the downtrodden. Real reform of the police would begin with Judge Fine's dictum that, "A finely tuned criminal justice system will punish the guilty and leave the innocent unmolested." Following this philosophy requires adjusting incentives to make the personal interest of the police coincide with that social interest.

Just as with misfires in other big city police forces, the LAPD leadership gave cops the wrong incentives--namely, to be aggressive full-time on the street and to focus on the number of arrests as a sign of productivity. Yet the real aim is reduction in crime, which often calls for a soft touch. Rather than garnering blind praise for increased arrest rates, police departments should be financially rewarded for verified reductions in crime, not arrests per se.

And, like all governmental bureaucracies, the police need to be decentralized and made accountable to the people they are supposed to protect. Neighborhoods that hire their own security forces tend to expect and get action when they report crimes, which increases their sense of ownsership and community and helps to further reduce crime. Such incentive-based reforms of the criminal-justice system -- with their attendant benefits accruing to the non-criminal population -- unfortunately receive too little attention in these books.