textfiles-politics/politicalTextFiles/criminal.txt

              INSTEAD OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

                   By. J. Neil Schulman

          Copyright (c) 1992 by J. Neil Schulman. 

      This article may be reproduced without further
   permission on computer bulletin boards provided that
           it is reproduced whole and unchanged. 
                All other rights reserved.



     Is there any relation between crimes and arrests, or
 crime and punishment, for that matter?  On this second
 question, we know there is not: according to the Department
 of Justice, 75% - 80% of violent crimes in this country
 are committed by repeat offenders.  Further, a chart in
 the \Los Angeles Times\ provides good evidence there is
 little relationship between crimes committed and arrests
 made, as  well.              

     As a sidebar to an article in the February 27, 1992
 \Los Angeles Times\ on the brutality of the Japanese
 criminal justice system, the \Times\ provided a chart of
 Violations of Criminal Law per 100K of population in
 various countries, and another chart comparing the Arrest
 Rates in those countries.

      The Violations chart shows Britain leading the pack
 with 7,355 criminal law violations per 100K, West Germany
 with 7,031 (the stats are from 1989, pre-German-
 unification), France with 5,831, the U.S. with 5,741, Japan
 with 1,358, and South Korea with 912.

      The Arrest Rate chart (also 1989) shows South Korea
 with 78.8%, West Germany with 47.2%, Japan with 46.2%,
 France with 38.8%, Britain with 33.6%, and the U.S. with
 21.1%

      Since every country on this list aside from the U.S.
 has a virtual prohibition of private ownership of firearms,
 gun control doesn't lead to a less-criminal society. 
 Obviously that is a blind alley for those seeking a
 reduction of crime.

      Further, a comparison of the West German crime rate
 with its arrest rates also seems to blow out of the water
 the argument made by American law & order advocates that a
 greater certainty of arrest and punishment will necessarily
 lead to less crime: West Germany has both the second
 highest crime rate and the second highest arrest rate --
 possibly the first highest arrest rate, since the South
 Korean arrest claims, requiring superhuman powers worthy of
 Sherlock Holmes, strain any sensible person's credulity.


           INDICTING THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

      Libertarian critics of the policy of crime and
 punishment have long argued that crime is a necessary
 product of the very nature of the State, created by it
 along with provoking foreign threats to justify a military-
 industrial complex, as a way of manipulating the public
 into submission to political control.  It is a sweeping
 charge and one which is likely to be dismissed as crackpot
 by anyone who can't conceive of an alternative way of
 thinking about the subject.   

      But if we were to indict the criminal justice system
 as a criminal conspiracy might be so indicted, and look for
 evidence to support the charge, what do we find as the
 system's "modus operandi"?

      First, the State creates a set of laws which mix the
 concept of crime as an attack upon an individual's life or
 property with the idea that a crime is anything the State
 says it is -- and thus crimes without victims -- or with
 "the State" as the sole "victim" -- are created wholesale. 
 Thus "possession" of a prohibited substance or object, even
 if such possession has inflicted no actual damage upon
 another person, in many cases receives as much punishment
 from the State as a robbery or murder.  Additionally, the
 State sets itself up as the judge of what is an offense
 against itself, the judge which decides whether someone is
 guilty of an offense against itself, and the judge which
 decides what pains and costs to inflict upon a transgressor
 against itself.  Then it sends out armed agents to enforce
 its decisions.  Thus does the State treat itself as a God
 or Sovereign, whose will is to be feared and obeyed, and
 everyone else treated as one of its subjects.

      Second, the "protection" of the "public" from crime,
 defined however the State decides, is turned over to the
 State which taxes the public on the basis that they "need"
 protection from crime, then hires police to "enforce the
 law" -- but police have no legal obligation to protect the
 public which is being taxed to pay them from criminals, and
 suffer no liability from failure to do so. 

      Third, a "criminal justice" system is set up in which
 the guilt or innocence of a suspect bears only passing
 resemblance to the sentences imposed on them after plea
 bargains which trade ease of conviction for reduced
 sentences -- regardless of whether the person charged is
 guilty or innocent.  No compensation is given to those who
 are charged but found innocent, and often have their lives
 ruined by the accusation; compensation of the victim of a
 crime exists only as an occasional sideshow: the center
 ring is reserved for imprisonment of the criminal at
 taxpayer's expense, imposing additional costs upon the
 victim. 

      When the system is supposedly "working," those who are
 found guilty are sent into prisons which ensure that a
 prisoner will learn the craft of crime as a permanent
 lifestyle, creating a revolving-door criminal class which
 provides permanent employment for police, lawyers, prison-
 guards, and "crime-fighting" governors and legislators --
 while everything these officials do, regardless of their
 rhetoric, \increases\ the number of attacks by criminals
 on the innocent.

      When the system is supposedly "not working," this
 massive prison bureaucracy is so clogged that convicted
 criminals are sent back out the street in short order, to
 attack more innocent victims and provide more grist for the
 criminal-justice mill.

      Meanwhile, the same system which creates crime and
 does little to protect the public from it also demands that
 the public disarm and rely on the government for protection
 against criminals.

      Is the libertarian indictment fantasy?  Or is it a
 stripping away of the Emperor's New Clothes?  It seems
 hard to avoid the conclusion that if you put all this
 together, Criminal Justice is the protection shakedown of
 the public by professional organized criminals in control 
 of an entire society: a system set up to terrorize the
 public into a condition where it will abide any amount of
 legalized theft and police control in order to be
 liberated from constant criminal invasions engineered to
 justify the system itself.

      In a precise metaphor: the disease is being spread by
 the very doctors the public relies on for the cure.


             A NEW THEORY OF CRIME MANAGEMENT

      The alternative to the game of Cops and Robbers by
 which the criminal justice system encourages criminals to
 prey upon the public so there is an excuse for the State to
 catch and imprison them, is to eliminate the State from the
 system as much as possible.

      First, the public must come to realize that the first
 line of defense against criminal invasion of their lives
 and property is: themselves.  No one cares about protecting
 you, your loved ones, and your neighbors as much as you do
 -- and no one aside from the potential victim is more
 likely to be able to provide effective counter-measures
 against invasion.  The defense against criminal invasion
 requires vigilance, planning, and a willingness to fight
 back.  The best and surest way to reduce crime is to make
 it unprofitable and dangerous for the criminal.  The
 likelihood that a criminal attack will result in the
 criminal's being injured or dying during the attack is,
 both logically and practically, the surest way to achieve a
 low-crime society.  The example of Switzerland, a society
 organized along the lines of universal defense by all
 citizens, and where criminal attacks are  virtually non-
 existent, comes to mind immediately.

      Second, the public must realize that there are three
 "criminal justice" systems already at work in our country,
 and the system of police, criminal indictments, trial, and
 punishment is the least effective of the three.  The other
 two are the system of civil laws by which individuals who
 cause damage to another can be sued and compensation
 collected, and the insurance industry, by which victims can
 measure the statistical likelihood of victimization against
 the costs of potential attack, and calculate proper
 "compensation" for themselves in advance. 

      Third, the public must realize that the criminal
 justice system promotes crime and protects criminals rather
 than fighting it, and move to eliminate it as quickly as is
 humanly possible.  This requires a massive awakening by the
 American people to the actual functioning of the criminal
 justice system, so they can evaluate for themselves whether
 it is "failing," or whether it is doing precisely what it
 is designed to do: victimize the public at all turns.  The
 concept of "crime" must be completely severed from its
 statutory definitions, and replaced with a simple test: If
 a crime has been committed, (a) Who committed it, (b) Who
 is the victim, and (c) What costs has the criminal invasion
 imposed upon the victim?  If these three questions cannot
 be answered clearly and firmly, there has been no crime
 committed.

      Fourth, the solution of what to do with a criminal who
 is not killed in process of the crime -- a criminal who is
 captured alive or manages to escape, or must be hunted down
 -- must be made as much as possible contingent on the
 accountable costs the criminal has imposed upon the victim. 
 Instead of "rehabilitating" a criminal or "punishing" a
 criminal, the object must be to calculate as much as is
 humanly possible the costs that a criminal has imposed upon
 a victim (and the costs of apprehension and conviction as
 well), and extract as much value as possible from that
 criminal so that it may be used in compensation to the
 victim. 

      The object of "criminal justice" must be restricted to
 (a) augmenting the public's first-line self-defense with
 additional lines of response, such as armed response to
 burglar alarms; (b) detective work to locate, identify, and
 capture those who have committed criminal invasions or
 thefts; and (c) a trial system to assure that those
 charged with an invasion or theft actually committed it,
 and upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt, to calculate the
 costs of that invasion and extract that cost from the
 criminal so that it may be used to compensate the victim. 
 In the case where a criminal invasion has produced
 irreparable harm such as the death of a victim or victims,
 the murderer must be regarded as the property of the
 victim's heirs, to dispose of as they wish, limited only
 by such mitigations that the precepts of society deem
 humane.

      The current criminal justice system has failed.  On
 that there can be no doubt.  A proof of this failure is
 that each year the increased crime rate is used as an
 excuse to ask for more money and wider powers. This sort of
 reward for failure occurs only in the public sector; in the
 private sector, where competition is allowed, merchants who
 operate on this basis are driven out of business by
 customers going elsewhere and, if the failure is deliberate
 policy, the merchant indicted for fraud.  They are not
 given more money and told to keep trying.

      The question remains: do the American people have the
 courage and clarity of thought to identify the cause of
 the failure of the criminal justice system as its very
 design, and re-design the system so that it makes sense?

      On that question, only time will tell.

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