Up in Arms Over Crime

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Faced with the same dilemma, some states are choosing to keep prisoners convicted of violent crimes imprisoned, while releasing those involved in theft or financial skulduggery. However expedient, that practice has some inequities. The convicted embezzler of millions might be set free, for example, while a small-time robber would stay behind bars.

Long sentences and sufficient prison capacity are by no means a perfect solution. Critics rightfully consider prisons as "colleges in crime," where serious efforts at rehabilitation have largely been abandoned. They argue that only criminals convicted of the gravest crimes and repeat offenders can be locked up until they die, if only because prison is so expensive--upwards of $15,800 annually for each prisoner, more than it costs to send a student to Yale. The American Civil Liberties Union argues that greater certainty of some kind of punishment is a better deterrent to crime than stiff sentences.

Long sentences, however, can make a difference where chronic offenders are involved. A Justice Department study of male convicts who entered state prisons in 1979 shows that 61% of them had been jailed before and that nearly half of these repeaters committed new crimes shortly after their release --crimes that would have been impossible if they had served their full sentences. A recent study of 1,672 convicts released on probation in California was equally disturbing: fully 1,087 of them were arrested on new charges after being freed.

Many experts see the Goetz-like urge to attack an assailant as self- defeating. A new study done for the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice suggests that passive resistance is a more effective tactic than is a counterattack. The study found that the victim is far more likely to get hurt when attempting to subdue the aggressor, particularly one with a knife or gun. The kind of resistance that has the best chance of success, explains Richard Block, a sociologist at Loyola University of Chicago, who conducted the study, is to attract the attention of possible rescuers or to try to flee. Block predicts that if too many citizens take up arms, criminals will respond by adding to their own weaponry or by selecting more vulnerable victims, such as defenseless older women.

When citizens take it upon themselves to fight crime, they run the risk of treading on the civil liberties of others or using unnecessary force. Indeed, most law-enforcement authorities object when individuals or neighborhood-watch groups, such as one in Sun City, Ariz., carry pistols. Handguns in untrained hands are a clear menace. Last year, for example, a homeowner in El Cajon, Calif., shot a 13-year-old boy who set off an alarm in the man's storage shed. In San Diego, an 87-year-old man fired at a policeman investigating a fire next door. Both men were lucky; the shot missed.

"The little child in each of us would kill any person who infringed our slightest right," argues Rex Beaber, a clinical psychologist at UCLA. "A reservoir of rage exists in each person, waiting to burst out. We fantasize about killing or humiliating our boss or the guy who took our parking space. It is only by growing up in a civilized society of law that we learn the idea of proportionate response."