Fighting Crime: Debate Between Rhetoric and Reality

Monday, Mar. 26, 1973 By JOS

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One major result of such priorities is that all but 10% of criminal cases must be disposed of by plea bargaining, a tactic that inevitably results in significantly lower sentences. Moreover, Kaplan warns, if stiffer sentences are mandatory for a large number of offenders, the already creaking system would break down altogether; the promise of a lower sentence is usually the only incentive for a guilty plea. Says Kaplan: "If even 20% of defendants had to be tried, there would be chaos." The short of his point is that increased penalties are at best peripheral, at worst inimical, to the goal of actually punishing a substantial number of the offenders who are caught.

There are equally serious questions about the efficacy of the death penalty. Evidence marshaled for arguments against capital punishment last year in the Supreme Court tended to show that there is no proof it deters criminals. States that abandoned executions found no increase in capital crimes; nor did murder rates differ significantly in neighboring states with and without the death penalty. Eight abolitionist Western European countries have reported a decline in once-capital offenses. The evidence is not strong enough, and probably never can be, to allow an absolute judgment either way. But neither is the President justified in saying, as he did, "I am convinced that the death penalty can be an effective deterrent against specific crimes" and leave it at that. All he can really mean is: "I just have a hunch it will work." Further, there is the moral argument that capital punishment has become a barbarism unacceptable in civilized society. Reminding that it does, after all, involve killing, Clarence Darrow said: "Capital punishment is too horrible a thing for a state to undertake."

Despite the cogency of their criticisms of harsh sentences and the death penalty, many liberal critics can also be trapped in a too-narrow vision. Few, for example, seem to remember that besides rehabilitation and deterrence, the classic reasons for criminal punishment are retribution, isolation of the offender, and expression of society's condemnation. It may be that the brutal facts of the city street tap an almost atavistic need for the regulated violence of harsh punishment. The law, after all, must be a responsive social organism.

But what should be the basic purpose of that response: to punish or to rehabilitate, or both? Even as liberals and conservatives reinflate their debate about what will really work, evidence is building that something is, in fact, working. In the next few weeks the FBI will announce its final crime figures for 1972. The first nine months had already showed only a 1% increase in the number of serious crimes committed; the final quarter may well show no growth at all. Already the figures for auto theft have leaked out; and for the first time in history, the number of stolen vehicles dropped—by 4%. Washington, D.C., which is totally under federal jurisdiction, reports a 50% serious-crime-rate drop between one 1969 month and the most recent month of 1973.