Word: crimeds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Classroom), Silberman began his Ford Foundation-funded research six years ago. His "working assumption," he told TIME, was that "the criminal justice system could make a huge difference." That proved overly hopeful. Police commissioners around the country, he learned, "simply do not know what to do to reduce crime." For example, expensive new communications systems have been widely installed to cut down the time it takes a police car to reach the scene of a crime. Yet the speedup proved only marginally useful; as one study revealed, victims usually wait up to an hour before they even call the police...
...police are overromanticized as crime solvers, says Silberman, courts are underrated for punishing criminals. He argues that the courts are not the revolving doors that they are popularly thought to be, and that they have not been hamstrung by the criminal-rights safeguards of the Warren Court. He also questions whether courts are more lenient than they used to be; available data indicate that a higher percentage of felons go to prison than 50 years ago. "Most importantly," writes Silberman, "it is not true that the guilty escape punishment." Sooner or later, criminals get caught?and know...
...evidence exists that longer prison terms or fixed mandatory sentences will deter crime, says Silberman. The real problem with the court system is not that it works badly but that it appears to work badly. Image is of no small importance. Making people believe that the law works ?and works fairly?is a better way to stop crime, says Silberman, than stuffing more criminals into already overcrowded jails. Bringing plea-bargaining negotiations out into the open, establishing formal sentencing guidelines, and simply treating victims and witnesses more decently would help restore respect for the law. Nevertheless, Silberman cautions...
Which brings him back to Square 1. Violent crime is committed by society's outcasts, the poor and left-behind minorities who see no stake in preserving the way things are and who see crime as the only way "to get one's fair share in an unfair world." But, asks Silberman, how does one explain why blacks have a much higher crime rate than Hispanics, who are usually just as poor and suffer just as much discrimination? In New York City, for instance, a recent study shows that blacks commit four times as many robberies as Hispanics, though their...
Silberman is left with the unconsoling conclusion that until blacks and the poor are brought into society's mainstream, there is not a great deal courts and cops can do to cut down on crime. He finds a few examples of the poor taking a stake in improving their own communities, but more thoroughgoing solutions will take more money?and patience?than the country has so far been willing to give. "It's a gloomy book," admits Silberman. But an enlightening...