Crime long ago emerged as one of those peculiar phenomena of modern life – the permanent crisis. For twenty years or more, politicians and editorialists have ritually condemned the rising crime rate in American cities: crime, it was de, dared again and again, had become intolerable. Meanwhile, year after year, Americans continued to tolerate it.

Enter Bernhard Goetz, who, by shooting four teenagers last December in a New York City subway car, not only became a national celebrity but added a new twist to a depressingly familiar plot. Goetz’s action forced people to confront their own inaction. Why is nothing ever done about crime? Perhaps because be, hind what we call the “crime problem” stand larger, more intractable problems, which the mechanisms of government cannot reasonably be expected to solve. What exactly do Americans mean when they com, plain about crime? To what extent can changes in our criminal justice system affect the crime rate? Does such a vast and complicated problem even admit of a solution? Harper’s recently invited a police chief, a judge, a social scientist, a novelist, and several others long interested in the subject to try to distinguish between the perception and the reality of crime.

LEWIS H. LAPHAM: Crime, and the fear of crime, make up the stuff of newspaper headlines. Hardly a week passes but that another study by another police chief, politician, or psychologist doesn’t add to the sum of national anxiety. And yet, despite the air of perpetual crisis, little seems to change. The nation spends at least $40 billion a year for the various forms of police protection, but nobody feels safe.

Why is this so, and why does the problem of crime remain so insoluble among a people who pride themselves on their problem solving? Our object in this discussion is not to run through the familiar list of answers – putting more police officers on the street, mandating stricter sentences for convicted felons, building bigger and better prisons. All these proposals have been offered before, many, many times; some of them have even been put into practice, usually without much noticeable effect.

Is it possible that we choose not to define the problem of crime in a way that would allow for its solution? Perhaps a rising crime rate is as necessary to a democratic society as a prospe ous economy. Are we talking about a measurable reality or about a perception of our best loved fears?

Charles Murray is a social scientist who for many years has studied crime and the strategies for its elimination. Mr. Murray, what exactly is the crime problem today?

CHARLES MURRAY: Nothing is more difficult to count than crime. Many, many crimes are not reported; there is no way to know precisely how many. And the classification of crimes can hide a lot; two crimes classified as aggravated assaults may vary widely in seriousness.

But the statistics do allow us to characterize the general shape of the crime problem. As far as we know, crime has been going down in the very recent past. The Uniform Crime Reports released by the Department of Justice indicate that in 1983, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the rate of “crime index offenses” – the most serious crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft – declined by 7 percent. What accounts for this decline? Are we witnessing the positive effects of changes in our criminal justice practice, or do we owe the improvement to the changing demography of the United States?

It is well known that the great majority of crimes are committed by young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. The arrest rate for violent crimes peaks at age eighteen, and for property crimes at age sixteen. The number of Americans in their late teens and early twenties – the Baby Boom generation- peaked in the 1960s and has begun to decline. But my own view is that there has been a great- er reduction in crime than what we’d expect because of the shrinking number of young men.

Although crime has declined in the past several years, the situation is qualitatively different from that in the 1950s; the crime rate is much, much higher than it was then. During the 1950s – again, given all the ambiguities inher- ent in the numbers – the crime rate appeared relatively stable. But during the 1960s, when the economy was surging and Americans were enjoying huge gains in their standard of living, crime just soared. From 1965 to 1970, for example, homicide increased by 55 percent, aggravated assault increased by 48 percent, and robbery shot up by 124 percent – and this is after adjusting for the population rise. This increase, no matter how we try to account for changes in reporting procedures and so on, is rather mystifying.

During the 1970s, reported crime continued to increase steadily. But “victimization surveys,” which should be a more accurate guide to the crime rate, suggest that the increases were smaller than the police reports indicate. However one reads the data, the level of crime today remains at least at the plateau reached in the 1960s – which means that despite the recent decline, crime is still drastically greater today than it was in the 1950s.

LAPHAM: Director Williams, you’ve been a member of a big-city police department for more than twenty years. What do you make of the huge increase in crime in the 1960s?

HUBERT WILLIAMS: Well, it’s not at all mystifying to me. Although crime may have been lower in the 1950s, seeds were being planted in our inner cities that would grow and flourish in the 1960s. Narcotics, which began to be widely used in the fifties, is the most obvious one. An awful lot of robberies, burglaries, and homicides are directly related to drugs.

But the drug problem points to deeper changes that have occurred during the past thirty years, which together constitute an enormous shift in the values and norms that determine how people behave. During the 1950s people in the inner cities still generally believed that by working hard they could improve their lives – jobs were available; unemployment was much lower than it is today. And television. which is constantly flaunting the wealth of some Americans while rarely giving any hint of the effort it usually takes to acquire such wealth, was not so influential then. Today, inner-city kids are well aware of the symbols of success – the fancy cars and clothes. TV makes sure of that. But they see no way to obtain these things while keeping within the law. What is important in our inner cities today is that you get it, not how you get it. Such an ethic makes crime and violence and social deviance inevitable.

What accounts for this shift in values? We’d have to examine what happened to the larger society during the past quarter-century to come up with a real answer. But we do know that in the inner cities kids were growing up without the guidance they’d had in the past. During the last two decades the number of single-parent households increased tremendously: by 57 percent in the 1960s and 71 percent in the 1970s.

LAPHAM: Would you agree, Judge Roberts, that despite the recent decline described by Charles Murray, the crime rate in this country remains intolerably high?

BURTON B. ROBERTS: Of course the crime rate is still high, but the decline of the last few years is important. In the city of New York, for example, crime has decreased by 17 percent during the last three years. In the last year, robbery has decreased by 5.4 percent, and burglaries and homicides by 10.6 percent.

CLAUDE BROWN: Judge, if crime in New York City has declined by 17 percent during the last three years, why has the population of the state’s prisons grown by almost a third during that time?

ROBERTS: It’s true that the state prison population has increased from 12,500 in 1972 to more than 33,000 today. The increase is mainly due to the fact that the criminal justice system is working more effectively than it has in a decade. The legislature has passed laws imposing mandatory sentences for people convicted of violent crimes and for recidivists. The courts and the prosecutors’ offices have reduced the case backlog. And the police are making more arrests.

JONATHAN RUBINSTEIN: If there has really been a great improvement in our criminal justice system, why is the public still railing against high crime in the cities?

ROBERTS: Because people’s perceptions of what’s happening are as important as the reality. The media prefer to tell the public that crime is rampant, that it is continuing to rise, that people are afraid to go out at night. After all. that’s what sells newspapers and makes exciting television. But the reality is that crime is going down: the streets are safer and the criminal justice system is more effective.

The politicians, meanwhile, find it convenient to blame the judges, and the judges climb into their ivory towers and don’t respond. As Mr. Williams pointed out, numerous social problems contribute to the crime rate, as do demographic factors. So why do politicians always point to the judiciary? Because blaming judges is much easier than looking in the mirror, easier than examining what has really happened to our inner cities.

ADAM WALINSKY: It just so happens, Judge, that the drop in crime you have been congratulating yourself about may be at an end. Indeed, we’ve had comparable, and temporary, drops in the crime rate before – between 1974 and 1977, for example. Then, too, everyone said, “Isn’t it wonderful that we’ve tUrned the corner on crime, that the system is working more effectively?” But in 1977 we saw the biggest rise in the crime rate in American history, and the increase continued for four years. In all the excitement about the decline in crime last year, no one seems to have noticed that the number of violent crimes in New York City in December 1984 was higher than in December 1983. What is more, the number of minority teenagers will soon begin to increase again.

About five years from now, the children of the Baby Boomers, more than half of whom were born into non-intact families – the illegitimacy rate among blacks shot up to 50 percent in 1976 -will become teenagers. These are the kids that our school system does not seem able to reach or help, and they are going to make themselves felt as juvenile problems of one sort or another. To sit back congratulating ourselves on the recent small drop in crime would be a disaster – especially since, in my view, those congratulations are undeserved. The victimization surveys show that only a third of crimes are reported. And crime itself has changed – it has become more violent, for one thing.

ROBERTS: The system deals effectively with the more violent crimes; the higher courts, as 1 said, are becoming more efficient all the time. But the system has grave problems dealing with the so-called quality-of-life crimes – shoplifting, vandalism, and so on – the petty crimes that are channeled to our lower courts. These courts are completely overburdened.

Why is this important? Well, the young criminals we’ve been talking about usually have their first experience with the system when they commit a petty crime and come before a lower court. Usually their cases drag on until they are dismissed, or they are given unconditional discharges. Very little retributive punishment is handed down in the lower courts. After seeing how it operates at the lower level, these kids become contemptuous of what goes on in the criminal justice system. Of course, as far as the system is concerned, the kids are only little acorns of criminal activity; but out of the acorns grow the huge oaks that cast their shadows over our society.

We should be educating the public, convincing taxpayers that the lower courts are important and that imprisoning violent criminals is not the only function the criminal justice system must perform. The public must come to understand that a probation officer with a caseload of, say, twenty kids instead of 200 really can supervise them and prevent them from com- mitting other offenses. And if we educate the public about the value of intensified supervision of those on probation or parole, we won’t need all those prisons.

The public must recognize that even when all the components of the criminal justice system work as they were designed to, they still can’t solve the crime problem. There is a limit to what the courts can do. After all, only a small percentage of all crimes result in arrests: 26 percent of reported robberies, 15 percent of reported burglaries, and so on. We can’t expect the courts to do everything.

RUBINSTEIN: Of course the judiciary is not responsible for the crime rate. But the public, continually threatened and increasingly frightened, is only too happy to attack the courts.

The rate of crime is intolerable – yet we have managed to live with it at least since the sixties. 1 believe the crime rate actually shot up much earlier, but in the forties and fifties Americans were so involved in building a new suburban civilization and abandoning their big cities that the escalating crime rate went unnoticed. At that time, the police didn’t treat “Negro crime,” as it was called, seriously. In New York, for instance, they noticed it only when it began to move from Harlem, where there never was any public order – or police presence – to the white neighborhoods downtown.
The crime rate we endure today, and have endured for the last twenty-five years, stems from conditions that show absolutely no sign of changing. American cities are filled with a large, youthful, and disaffected minority population. The unemployment rate among these kids is near 50 percent, more than six times that of the society as a whole. They have no hope of finding a decent job; they are subject to incredible racism and indifference; our educational system is unable to teach them the ABCs; heroin and other drugs are freely available. And the prosperity of the United States is there, ripe for the picking.

But what is new about this? No one has ever thought it was normal or right. People always say it’s “intolerable.” But what do we ever do about it? When 1 was a kid in the 1950s, it was fashionable to fire police chiefs when crime was on the rise. Sometime in the 1960s we stopped holding police chiefs responsible for reported increases in crime. Eventually people gave up even criticizing the police.

What is particularly frightening is that American cities now have police they can’t afford and court systems that gobble up hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But despite all the money they’re spending, Americans do not feel safe. They have grown increasingly frustrated, and are now demanding the right to kill their fellow citizens. This sentiment, which Bernhard Goetz helped bring to the surface, is being expressed daily in the press.

SUSAN JACOBY: People are supporting the right to kill in “self-defense” for the same reason they have been screaming for the death penalty all these years; they feel-misguidedly, I believe – that at least it would be a strong response to a problem that has come to seem utterly intractable and hopeless. In the same way, people don’t know what to do, so they demand the death penalty, which symbolically expresses society’s outrage. An ineffective criminal justice system such as ours leads people increasingly to demand these extreme, symbolic, but largely useless penalties.

MURRAY: It is my impression that the white middle class generally believes things are getting better, and that in many parts of the country crime is receding as a major issue. Perhaps this is because many white folks have sealed themselves off from the imler cities. I’d like to ask Claude Brown what the sense is in the inner cities – in Harlem, for instance. Do people believe crime is getting worse, or better?

BROWN: They believe it’s getting worse. Maybe fewer people are victimized in Harlem-and 1 suspect this is true across urban America – because they have learned to live defensively. In any Harlem building, whether a tenement or a relatively luxurious high-rise, every door has at least three locks on it. Nobody opens a door without first finding out who’s there. In the early evening, or even at midday, you see people – middle-aged men and women-lingering outside nice apartment houses, peeking in the lobbies. They seem to be casing the joint. They are actually trying to figure out who is in the lobby of their building. “Is this someone waiting to mug me? Should I risk going in, or should I wait for someone else to come?”

If you live in Harlem, USA, you don’t park your automobile two blocks from your apartment house because that gives potential muggers an opportunity to get a fix on you. You’d better find a parking space within a block of your house, because if you have to walk two blocks you’re not going to make it. In 1950 my grandparents could take a walk in Colonial Park in Harlem at three o’clock in the morning. Today that would be suicide. Most people make sure they’re in the house by nine or ten o’clock.

In Harlem, elderly people walking their dogs in the morning cross the street when they see some young people coming. They try to act casual, but of course they aren’t. They are very aware of those young people – you can almost feel the tension as the youngsters get closer. And what those elderly men and women have in the paper bags they’re carrying is not just a pooper scooper – it’s a gun. And if those youngsters cross that street, somebody’s going to get hurt – you’re going to hear it. Everybody knows this.
That’s Harlem, USA, in 1985. Fewer victims, maybe, but crime is worse.

WALINSKY: As Claude and Susan and everyone here has said, people today are terrified of crime. Whatever the small year-to-year variations in the official crime rate, people are becoming more afraid.

We cannot continue to ignore the consequences of this fear. The most obvious example of those consequences is the public response to Bernhard Goetz’s actions in a New York City subway car. Goetz shot four kids, two of them in the back, and people overwhelmingly approved of what he did.

Another consequence is that people are running away. In Harlem, for example, the population has dropped by over a quarter during the last fifteen years, which is one of the reasons the crime rate has declined. Blacks in Harlem are doing exactly what whites did. Because the government seems unable to protect them, blacks are fleeing their homes.

We now have far more private police officers in the United States than public police officers. A whole industry has grown up to protect people and their possessions from crime. Communities sell themselves by boasting about fortified walls, electronic security, and private police forces. We seem to accept this, to accept car alarm systems and multiple locks on our doors.

WILLIAMS: When one out of every three American households is directly victimized each year, it isn’t long before everyone has either been a victim himself or had someone very close to him victimized. The problem is not just what crime does to people’s lives; it is also what the fear of crime does to our society. As this fear feeds on itself, any decisive action to fight crime becomes less likely. People take strong collective action only when they have confidence in themselves and in their society. When people are afraid, they tend to act as individuals. The result is an increasingly atomized society. That’s when people flock to the suburbs and buy the extra locks – or a gun.

JACOBY: In 1978 I wrote an article about this titled “Fear Taxes.” All those people who move into the middle of the street when they see someone coming, all those women who will not ride the subways and therefore take cabs they can’t afford, the countless dollars spent on locks and gates and hired cars. Even if you or someone you know well has never been a victim – which, as Mr. Williams pointed out, is unlikely – crime still has an enormous effect on your life.

WILLIAMS: One way to combat both crime and the fear of crime is to work to strengthen the foundation on which the criminal justice system was constructed in the first place – a strong sense of oneness between the police and the public. The public must provide the police with information and support. And the police in turn must help reduce citizens’ fear by encouraging them to participate in making their neighborhoods safe.

Let me give an example. In 1979, we had to layoff 200 police officers in Newark. People were very upset; they organized “crime marches” on police headquarters. One group came from the housing projects to meet with me. “Look, Mr. Director,” they said, “we know you have lost a lot of men. But we want you to understand that we cannot live under these conditions. We are scared to death, and you’ve got to help.” My response was, “Well, if you look at the statistics, you don’t have any crime in your area.” People in the projects don’t report crime even though a lot occurs there. I told them that they had to tell the police what was going on. “We’re afraid to,” they said.

We finally persuaded them to meet with us – outside police headquarters – and tell us what was going on. Later we slipped a police officer into a vacant apartment in one of the projects to gather evidence. After we had compiled a book on the criminals, we met with this group again and said, “Look, we know who is committing the crimes. We are going to arrest these people, many of them for relatively minor offenses. You will not have to go to court or give evidence publicly, but you must make clear to the judges privately the problems these people are creating in your neighborhood. Just tell the judges what you told us.”

Well, we arrested those guys. We arrested one for possession of a knife. But the judge, who had been told what was going on, sentenced him to six months in jail. The people in the projects were ecstatic. That’s the kind of cooperation we need to encourage.

BROWN: 1 think we should talk a little about what happens to people after they’re arrested. After all, many are professional criminals, and until we eradicate that class – the people who are constantly moving in and out of prison – we are never going to have a real effect on crime.

Years ago, “professional criminal” meant petty criminal – someone who pulled stick-ups on the street and that sort of thing. Nowadays, professional criminals kill people. Many mug- gers and robbers kill people as a matter of course. The only way to eliminate this criminal behavior is to change our prisons. The rehabilitation programs in our correctional facilities, as they’re now called, are a farce. This society incarcerates hundreds of thousands of semiliterate, unskilled people, but offers them no education, teaches them no salable skill. It is ludicrous to expect someone who was making $1,000 a day as a petty drug dealer to go out and work as a dishwasher for $150 a week. Why not teach them to program a computer, or to fix air conditioners and refrigerators? Many of them can’t even read. Why can’t we teach them?

I propose that anyone convicted of a felony must learn to read and write and must acquire a salable skill before he can be released from prison. Of course, such a requirement would keep prisoners in jail longer, and we don’t have the facilities for that because no one wants to pay taxes to build new prisons. Well, the state of Kentucky has recently come up with a way to raise money to build prisons without increasing taxes. Kentucky now collects a ten-dollar tax from every person convicted of a misdemeanor. This tax brings in $300,000 a month, and the state is using the money to modernize existing facilities and build new ones.

WILLIAMS: It’s true that if we do not create a different mind-set in the people we incarcerate, their natural tendency on being released will be to return to their former lifestyle. But we must not ignore the circumstances that breed criminal behavior in the first place.

Drug addiction is the most obvious. Drugs – not only heroin but all narcotics – must be kept out of the hands of our children; the penalties for peddling drugs to children should be extraordinarily harsh. And people who already have drug habits should be separated from the larger society.

RUBINSTEIN: Are you proposing a quarantine?

WILLIAMS: The criminal justice system ought to be used as a giant vacuum to suck these people in. Addicts are constantly committing crimes, and the criminal justice system gets hold of most of them. But city jails and state prisons are clearly not the places to treat people with chronic drug problems. The federal government should set up a large-scale treatment program for drug of- fenders, a program emphasizing medical help and psychotherapy, and eventually job training. Or perhaps after treatment these people could take part in some sort of “youth corps.” Maybe they could be trained to cut trees, or whatever. Even if such a program didn’t eliminate their addiction, at least it would remove them from society.

RUBINSTEIN: I think drugs themselves are a trivial issue – at least compared with the extraordinary ideas that have been suggested here by Claude Brown and Hubert Williams. Their proposals reflect perfectly the sentiments being expressed in our society today, particularly in the debate over Goetz, whose actions have become the great symbolic crime of this generation.

Consider some of the proposals made at this table. Hubert Williams, a very distinguished police chief, is suggesting that we quarantine drug users – that we create a gulag, in effect. Preventive detention-imprisonment without trial-is now legal; now people are talking about creating prison colonies. Claude Brown is talking about keeping sixteen- and seventeen- year-old inner-city kids in prison until they can read and write. We can’t teach them in the schools, so we’ll send them to prison to learn. What do we propose to do with the thirty-year- olds?

LAPHAM: But why do we even need to confine all these people in the way that Hubert Williams has described? Why don’t we simply make narcotics legal?

WILLIAMS: Frankly, I think we should consider the idea very seriously. It is clear that the money being made in drugs has corrupted our system, our judges, our police officers.

WALINSKY: The extent to which drug use causes crime is overestimated. The fact that large numbers of the people who are arrested happen to be drug users does not mean drug use causes crime. People inclined for one reason or another toward antisocial behavior often use drugs for similar reasons.

Over the last twenty years, politicians have had to rationalize their miserable record in coping with crime. Every police chief in America has learned to say that the causes of crime are “really” poverty, degradation, bad housing, unemployment – problems he cannot be expected to solve.

Although they still use poverty as an excuse, politicians now talk more about drugs. Rather than devote any more resources to courts, police, prosecutors, and prisons in their own states, politicians blame the State Department for not getting tough with Turkey or Colombia. Meanwhile, New York State, which proposes to give its citizens a $2 billion tax cut, manages to eke out less than 6 percent of its budget for the criminal justice system.

JACOBY: Well, we seem to be pointing our fingers at the politicians, the prisons, the courts, and the police. No one has said much about the victims. The United States is the only country in the industrialized West that does not have a mechanism to routinely provide some compensation to crime victims. We need some way to help people after they’ve been victimized – perhaps some form of publicly financed “crime insurance.” The maintenance of public safety is a social responsibility, which we should acknowledge not only by punishing criminals more swiftly and surely but by literally paying victims if we fail to maintain the “freedom of the city.” And victims must become more visible in the criminal justice process. A number of states now require victims, or the relatives of victims who have died, to testify. This should be extended throughout the country. The state is supposed to represent the victim in court by representing society as a whole. We need to establish special advocates who will present vivid portraits of the victims in court. Crime must be treated as a total public responsibility, not simply the domain of the police or the courts.

RUBINSTEIN: That won’t happen until the police begin to think that all crime is equally important. The fact is, the kind of crime that has attacked the whole society during the last twenty- five years has always been a part of the lives of poor people in large cities.

JACOBY: Certainly whites must change their attitudes about black-on-black crime. A few months ago, a young white Harvard graduate was murdered on the roof of her New York apartment building. It made the front page. The Police Department put forty detectives on the case and made an arrest in a few days. Soon afterward a black housewife was murdered in Harlem. The incident merited only a small item in the paper; three detectives were assigned to the case. Now what on earth do the people living in fear in Harlem and Bedford StUyvesant think when they read about those forty detectives? Does that encourage the community’s “sense of oneness” with the police?

We must guarantee that our criminal justice system exacts punishment with some consistency and reliability. And not only for murder and rape. Certainly one of the reasons that the crime problem is so bad, and that people perceive it as being even worse than it is, is that they don’t see any punishment exacted for “small” crimes. The person who is mugged, who feels the knife against his throat, does not consider that crime small. A friend of mine was hit on the head with a blunt ‘instrument and wound up in the hospital for two days. But to the police officer who came to interview her she wasn’t “really” hurt – she wasn’t in the inten- sive care unit or in a coma. The officer told her that because she would recover, hers was not a “high-priority” case. He was telling the truth. But what does this say to people? Someone must be stabbed through the heart for the crime to be important. A society cannot give the impres- sion that a criminal who doesn’t gravely injure someone is not worth punishing. Punishment is important in both a real sense and a symbolic sense: people must feel that society regards their lives and their property and their peace of mind as important.

MURRAY: Our goal should be: Let us do justice. We can’t catch all criminals, but when one is apprehended, it is essential that justice be done. And justice must consist of some action by the state that says unmistakably, “You shouldn’t have done that, and here is the penalty.”

I remember the juvenile delinquents in Chicago whom 1 studied ten years ago. The average youngster committed for the first time to an institution in Cook County had thirteen prior arrests. He had been told thirteen times that it was O. K. to do what he did. If he had been given a small punishment after his first arrest, and a slightly larger one after his second, society would at least have done justice. And some kids would have been discouraged from doing the same thing again.

WALINSKY: While we continue to argue about whether to cook the bird, put it on ice, or flay it alive, I feel obliged to point out that those we have chosen to govern us – the men and women who make the decisions about where to spend the public’s money, whether in city hall, the statehouse, or Congress – do hot happen to agree with you. They don’t seem to feel that “justice must be done, and be seen to be done.” Why is that? I’ve decided that the reason elect- ed officials don’t feel the need to do much about crime is that there is no real money to be made in public safety. Except for building more prisons – a popular cause among politicians – there are no big contracts to be let.

When we discuss crime, we tend to focus so much on the magnitUde of the penalties, the procedural safeguards, and the state of our prisons that we ignore the fact that public order has broken down. People in this country don’t feel safe walking in their own neighborhoods, for God’s sake! The overwhelming problem today is one of public order and public safety.

We have to increase the safety of our neighborhoods. And that can be done. If we simply augmented our police forces we might not eliminate all crime, but we would create islands of safety where citizens could begin to live their lives and recover their confidence. If a police officer patrolled the street that Claude Brown talked about, the old people walking their dogs wouldn’t feel the need to carry guns in paper bags.
Jonathan and I have proposed a “police corps,” which would double our police forces by giving young people a college education in return for three years of service as police officers. The proposal would give us more police, at ari affordable cost. And it would make citizens feel they were doing something concrete to fight crime. But it is useless to pretend that we are not going to have a significant public-order problem as long as the situation at the core of our cities is so desperate.

Governments have preferred to spend money elsewhere, and they have found it expedient to invent a whole mythology about the causes of crime. I think the judge is correct in saying the judiciary has long been treated as a scapegoat. It’s much easier, after all, to make a speech about weak-kneed judges than it is to provide adequate police protection. It’s much easier to attack the State Department for not pressuring the governments of Turkey or Colombia than it is to do something about the condition of the schools. The fundamental issue is whether we have the political will to do something about crime. That this issue, which by every account is the single greatest concern of the American people, is not receiving more attention at all levels of government is absolutely stunning.

LAPHAM: Judge, how would you account for what seems to be a gap between people’s concern about crime and the efforts of the criminal justice system to do something about it?

ROBERTS: Well, I think there is widespread misunderstanding of what the criminal justice system does. The purpose of the courts is not to fight crime. The courts resolve disputes between the government and a citizen charged with a crime, ensuring that due-process rights are accorded and the Constitution is upheld.

What can the criminal justice system do? It can provide citizens with a certitUde of speedy adjudication and thereby create more respect for the law. It can enlarge the lower courts so they can deal with quality-of-life crimes.

The media are the natural allies of the government and the judiciary In these efforts. They must educate the public about the causes of crime and about the limits imposed by our system of government in combating it. The public must recognize that our Constitution makes it at the very least impractical to eliminate the crime problem overnight by “locking them up and throwing away the key.”

The media should inform the public that the police make arrests and bring charges in only 26 percent of reported robberies, and in only 15 percent of reported burglaries. And the media should turn to the other branches of government, which prefer to pass the buck to the judiciary, arid say, “How about doing something about this? How about more police, for a start?” But the media should make people understand that we cannot build a criminal justice system ten times the size of the one we have now. We don’t have enough money, and even if we did, I don’t think that would be the way to solve the problem. We can build a courthouse in the Bronx as big as the Triborough Bridge and staff it with half of the population of the Bronx, in order to try the other half. But that won’t eliminate crime, and it won’t give us the kind of society we want.