Word: silberman
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...black violence, if understandable, is still wrong, particularly because the victims are generally black. As Silberman writes...
Given the nature of criminality in America, what can be done to the criminal justice system to reduce crime? Not much, says Silberman. Custom and internal constraints keep crime down, not police, courts or prisons. Ultimately, we depend on our own willingness to obey the law. Yet certain reforms can play a small part...
...SILBERMAN'S BOOK is most useful in debunking already proposed panaceas. Put more cops on the street, improve telecommunications, repeal the "exclusionary rule" developed by the Warren Court, stifle corruption, and you will reduce crime--so goes the litany on police reform. Silberman rejects these nostrums, demonstrates their inefficacy, and offers his own. The most crucial reform in policing, he says, is to change its very focus, from law-enforcement to public service. "The closer a police officer's relationship with the people on his beat," Silberman writes, "the greater his chances of reducing crime... improving police-community relationships...
...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...
...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...