Word: silberman
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...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...
...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 numbers are roughly...
...reason does not lie in black genes, says Silberman, or the "cultural baggage" that blacks brought over from Africa. Rather, violence is something blacks learned in the U.S. "For most of their history in this country, in fact, blacks were victims, not initiators, of violence." As one Southern police official summed up justice for blacks before World War I, "If a nigger kills a white man, that's murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that's justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills another nigger, that's one less nigger." Or, as a Negro blues song put it, "White...
Some 35 years ago, Black Poet Langston Hughes bitterly warned: "Negroes, sweet and docile/ Meek, humble and kind: Beware the day they change their mind." They have changed their minds, with a vengeance, says Silberman. "After 350 years of fearing whites, black Americans have discovered that the fear runs the other way, that whites are intimidated by their very presence; it would be hard to overestimate what an extraordinarily liberating force this discovery is." The almost pathetic hopefulness of the motto of the Tuskegee Institute class of 1886?"There's always room at the top" ?finally gave...