Nor does it seem likely that the universities will continue to play as limited a role in this field as in the past. There is an increasing demand for those who combine an interest in teaching, research and direct participation in the process of social change. There is great excitement and satisfaction in devising, testing and helping to implement projects which may make the difference between jail aind freedom for thousands of people or which may result in reducing the frightful burden crime imposes on both the victims and the offenders. I can personally attest that the intellectual demands of the problems in this field are no less challenging -- and are perhaps even more frustrating -- than fighting one's way through the reorganization provisions of the Internal Revenue Code or Article IX of the Uniform Commercial Code.
Of course, we cannot be sure what the results will be if we apply to the problems of crime resources of money, understanding and ability commensurate with the scope of the need. But it is my strong belief that if the criminal system can be brought out of the dark, the unfairness and futility which marks its operation today will begin to yield to the process of change.
But I believe the public is seriously misled by a tendency to regard crime as a simple phenomenon, rather than distinguishing among offenses by type and degree of seriousness. For example, I suppose most people in this country today assume the danger of their being murdered or raped is increasing all the time. But the reported figures indicate that the rate of these crimes -- while high enough to be a continuing source of worry -- has barely kept pace with the overall population increase, and I believe we can assume that reporting is quite complete on homicides and unambiguous rapes. The dramatic relative increase in reported rates has taken place in the property crimes, particularly larceny, burglary and auto theft. To identify and understand changes in the danger the public faces, and to allocate preventive resources, it is necessary that we break crime trends into their component parts before seeking to draw conclusions from them.
Who's Responsible
Another reason why we need to understand the extent and nature of changes in the rates of serious crimes is that today the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, the moral decadence of American youth, new rehabilitation techniques, and the Supreme Court are individually and in combination being held responsible for making our streets, parks and homes less safe. It is, of course, important to try to understand these relationships, although it is very difficult to show that increases in crime are or are not "caused" by such factors. But as a starter, those who seek to establish such a relationship should be sure the trend itself has been properly identified and interpreted.
We know even less about the effects of what we try to do about crimes and criminals than we do about the facts concerning crime itself.
The police, for example, have virtually no measure of the success of steps they take to prevent crime. New York City recently invested an estimated 20 million dollars a year in subway guards, and the number of attacks on riders dropped sharply. People were indeed safer in the subways, but there was no way of knowing whether crime was reduced or just driven out of the subways into the streets, stores and homes. The investment may have been justified by the alleviation of people's great fear about riding the subways, but we should be clear that in terms of crime prevention, we do not know whether a similar sum spent on other prevention techniques, such as juvenile gang programs or better radio equipment, would or would not be a better investment in actual, overall safety.
A few weeks ago, in one of our cities which had been trying a number of new crime-prevention approaches, I congratulated the chief on having a smaller than average monthly increase in reported crime, and I asked him what he thought accounted for it. He said it might be the increased draft calls, or an unusually rainy month, or poorer reporting of crimes by some of his men, or something he was doing right -- but, if so, he didn't know what it was. His position -- shared by officials all through the criminal justice system -- is like that of a retailer trying to decide whether to change his markup on goods or his advertising policy without having the means to test the effect on sales and profits.
Invisible Decision
Our prosecutors and judges are faced with the same lack of tools to measure the success of what they are trying to do. Each day in a municipal criminal court hundreds of decisions are made to drop some cases without prosecution, to accept pleas of guilty in other cases in return for relatively lenient sentences or probation, and to prosecute a few cases to the limit. While we are all warmed by the glow of Perry Mason's courtroom brilliance, it is, in fact, this informal and invisible negotiating and adjusting process -- and even more invisible police decision on whether to arrest in the first place -- that constitutes the great bulk of the administration of justice in this country. There are virtually no rules or guidelines governing the decisions made in the more than 90% of the cases which do not get tired but which involve liberty or imprisonment for millions of people each year. The cases never show up in the printed reports, and it is extremely difficult to get even a "feel" of the basis on which most of these decisions are made. And, of course, there is no data on the effectiveness of such decisions, whether effectiveness is judged by the rate of repeated crime, the deterrent impact of the criminal law, or the respect and confidence of the public for the criminal process.
Occasionally there is a glimmer of light. There