How are we to overcome the inertia which our present ignoirance about crime imposes on attempts at reform? Like the rest of nature, the human brain abhors a vacuum. If we do not help people move toward an understanding of how complex the issues and the facts in this field are, they will continue to think in terms of meaningless and often destructive oversimplifications. It will be difficult to get support for the process of change if discussion of issues is confined to whether to be for or against the Supreme Court, whether to be tough or soft on criminals, whether to support or leash the police. The issues are complicated, and our thinking must be equally complicated.

For example, we must begin to explore whether the criminal system as now operated and other institutions in society, such as schools, employers, recreation programs and welfare agencies, are reinforcing patterns of delinquency by some of their practices, and this requires detailed examination of these practices and attempts to measure their effects.

When we talk about higher calibre police agencies we must consider in detail what kinds of education and background we want our policemen to have and what changes must be made in what we ask the police to do in order to attract the men we want.

If we seek bail reform, we should consider whether we are prepared to throw out the whole money bail system; whether some people who are arrested are so dangerous that there should be some procedure to keep them locked up awaiting trail; and, if so, whether we can design such a procedure which will work less unfairly than money bail.

And we must decide in what kinds of cases we are prepared to take some immediate risks by early release and employment of offenders in the hope that for their sake and ours they will be less likely to return to crime.

More Money

The process of change also depends on pumping more money into the system. There must be money to experiment with any money to finance the establishment of new programs which increased knowledge tells us should be adopted. Thus, if a better way is found for handling the men who account for more than two million drunkenness arrests each year than the present never-ending cycle of police, court and jail, we will need money for the facilities and staff to deal with them.

If new data processing techniques are shown to be capable of providing better and faster information to police, prosecutors, judges and correctional officials to guide their decisions, very large initial investments will be required.

If we persuade ourselves that better educated people would produce improved results at each stage of the system, we will have to find the funds to educate them or attract people who have gotten the education on their own.

The federal government has in recent years taken some limited steps to make research funds available for work in the criminal field, and one of the important questions now before the Crime Commission concerns the amount and sources of financial support which will be needed in the field. Investment of funds to give us information and to carry out changes in this field could turn out to be a great bargain for our society.

But more than anything else, we need people with ability working in the criminal system and doing research about crime. Great efforts are now under way to get more able lawyers into criminal practice. This is a hard and slow process because now the pay and prospects are poor, and since even the able defense lawyer is destined to lose most of his cases, deciding on such a career has similarity to being condemned to spend the rest of one's days with the Boston Red Sox.

More Trial Lawyers

The significance of getting the ablest law school graduates into criminal practice goes beyond the importance of providing good defense and prosecution lawyers. Experience has shown that when these people begin doing criminal work their impact is felt far beyond the cases they handle. They ask questions and put pressure on everyone in the system to examine what they are doing and why. They organize reform and research projects and become a powerful force for change.

In the next few years we will need several times as many lawyers in criminal practice as today, and they must be among the best -- not the least -- able of the bar. It will require a major reorganization in the allocation of legal personnel in our society to achieve this, and the bar, law schools, foundations and government will have to find ways to make criminal practice sufficiently attractive so that first-rate lawyers will spend at least a part of their professional lives in this field.

But the opportunities for graduates of law schools and other parts of the universities to play a role in bringing criminal administration out of the darkness are even broader. A whole range of new jobs is opening up. People are needed to organize and run local bail reform projects; to work with neighborhood legal service offices; to administer government research and grant programs; to work for the criminal administration planning committees which state governors are setting up in response to the recent request of the President. Police departments are beginning to see the advantage of employing house counsel as well as others from the social and behavioral sciences, and I predict that whenever energetic and imaginative people occupy these jobs, they will be enormously influential in helping the police break out of their present isolation.