Fighting Crime: Debate Between Rhetoric and Reality

THERE are those who say that law and order are just code words for repression and bigotry. That is dangerous nonsense. Law and order are code words for goodness and decency in America." So spoke President Nixon as he explained his new crime initiatives. It was a purely Nixonian sentiment, grounded on his belief that he and the majority of Americans were resonating to the same moral pitch.

Nixon is not alone in that belief. New York's Nelson Rockefeller is urging his state to adopt mandatory life sentences without parole for any convicted adult drug pusher. In many cities, police are riding a renewed crest of respect; New York and Los Angeles each have two ex-policemen campaigning to join Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo as tough mayors with a no-nonsense attitude that was forged in a blue uniform. At least four state legislatures have reauthorized the death penalty and half the remaining states are considering similar legislation. The President was very much participating in a trend. With a passing swipe at "permissive judges," he seemed confident that the Warren era of Supreme Court concern for criminal defendants is all but a bad memory.

Clearly, Nixon felt no embarrassment about the harshness of his program. Still, he might have been embarrassed by his own rhetoric. To say that "Americans in the last decade were often told that the criminal was not responsible for his crimes . . . but that society was responsible" is a gross oversimplification of the view that true crime control requires dealing with root causes. And when he refers to "our returning prisoners of war" as examples of the sort of "tough moral fiber" that will help bring about a nation that is "free from crime," he is guilty of both irrelevance and exaggeration.

If the President's words are loose, however, his proposals are quite precise. And he gave his highest priority to two of the most controversial—stiffer sentencing and the death penalty. They raise complex questions. Will tougher sentences reduce crime? One hint of a negative answer may lie in the fact that the U.S. has long imposed the lengthiest sentences of any industrialized nation in the world, while also being one of the most crime-ridden. A more direct rebuttal came last week from the Fortune Society, a New York-based self-help group of former convicts. Distressed that politicians never ask ex-cons "about what deterred us and what did not," the society's monthly newsletter reported that "those of us who were small-time pushers, thieves, stickup artists, recall that we were too busy fighting to survive on the streets to be deterred by legislation. When we were committing crimes, we did not think about getting caught."

Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan comes to a similar conclusion about lengthier sentences, but for quite different reasons. "In large areas of the U.S., there is no substantial cause for criminals to fear the criminal law," Kaplan says. "The reason is that government is not willing to pay the money it would take to really get tough." That is, authorities are not willing to build and staff the necessary new courthouses and penitentiaries. Only one-tenth of next year's $2.6 billion federal anti-crime budget, for instance, is earmarked for court or penal purposes.

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