Word: crimeds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Highly readable and hugely convincing, Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice may be the most important book on the topic published this year. Silberman has seized the issue from the troglodytes and returned it to the liberal metier, made it possible to think not only clearly but humanely' about crime. Buy it and read it, and tell your congressman to do the same. It's a lot cheaper than a German shepherd...
Silberman goes on to puncture the rightist dogma of severe punishment and electrocution enthusiasm. Certainty of punishment, not severity, deters crime; overcrowded, bestially violent American prisons pile punishment on to no recognizable end, and the animals they create of men make prison government impossible. "The fatal flaw in the traditional approach to prison government," Silberman writes, "is that by expecting the worst, it succeeds in bringing out the worst." Prison government might proceed more efficiently and humanely, indeed more constitutionally, by treating inmates like citizens in a community...
...long term, the answer to crime in America is elimination of racism and a period of sustained economic growth, although there is some question as to whether either of these, and particularly the latter, is possible. What can be done now is to change the way poor people, young people, and black people, see themselves, to make them masters of their own destiny instead of victims of fate. As Silberman writes...
...possible to infuse poverty-stricken neighborhoods with a sense of community and purpose, and thus to develop the internal controls that help reduce (or prevent) crime...
...sense of dignity, which may transcend race, age and status, is our greatest weapon against crime...