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Capitalism, Class,
and
Crime in America*
DAVID M. GORDON
Research Associate, Center for Educational Policy Research, Harvard University
Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1971-72
B.A., 1965, Harvard College; Ph.D. (Economics), 1971, Harvard University
BRUSH
FIRE,
crime in the
be
raging out
of control. The
pub-
same
publishers.
163
Downloaded from http://cad.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on December 16, 2009
164
to fan the flames rather
than douse them. We seem to have as
much trouble understanding the problem of crime as we do effecting its
solution.
Weanwhile, amidst the confusion,
orthodox economists have been striding elegantly to our rescue. Cool, fearless, the perfect picture of professionalism, they have been promising to
guide us toward &dquo;optimal&dquo; crime prevention and control. Off with our
silliness! Off with our psychological
intentions,
theory
of criminal behavior
dispense with special theories of anomie, psychological inadequacies, or inheritance of special traits and simply extend
the economists usual analysis of choice.&dquo;1
can
ior.2
1. Crime in America
book.3
2. I
Relying primarily
am not an
expert
on
on
the basic
to
support my arguments.
165
facts documented in those sources, I
have tried in the following paragraphs
to outline the most important questions about the problem of crime
which any analysis must try to resolve.
It seems important to emphasize,
first of all,,that crime is ubiquitous in
the United States. Our laws are so
pervasive that one must virtually retire to hermitage in order to avoid
committing a crime. According to a
national survey conduoted in 1965 by
the Presidents Crime Commission, 91
per cent of all adult Americans &dquo;admitted that they had committed acts
for which they might have received
jail or prison sentences.&dquo;4 The Crime
Commission also found that in 1965
&dquo;more than two million Americans
were received in prisons or juvenile
ubiquity, it seems equally important to emphasize our extraordinary selectivity in our attention to the problem of crime. We
focus all our nearly paranoid fears
Given that
(1967),
impor-
tance.
forcible rape,
aggravated assault,
rob-
most
frequently
in
ghetto
areas.
comparable crimes,
say,
7. Id
., p. 38.
183
also there
after I got
there, or a little bit before I left. They
always seemed to make the scene. In the
California prison system, they carry you
from Juvenile Hall to the old folks colony, down in San Luis Obispo, and wait
for you to die. Then they bury you there.
...I noticed these waves, these generations
graduating classes moving up
from Juvenile Hall, all the way up.65
...
And those who succeed finally in understanding the trap and in pulling
themselves out of it, like Malcolm X,
Claude Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, and
. cit. supra
op
note
35, pp.
67. One
should
importance of this
184
Each
own
Those who
put through
are now
By keeping
its victims
hidden and
rendering
ently inhuman,
our
so
thoroughly
them
so
appar-
system of crime
and
how
op.
cit.
supra
note
185
5. A Normative View of Crime
procedure
proposition
official
power.&dquo;189
reply to Packers article, John
Griffiths argued that Packers two
models represent qualitatively similar
views of the relationship between the
criminal and society, deriving from
some
common
ideological assumpIn
mutually supportive-interests,
71.
., p. 371.
Id
186
The Battle Model, as Griffiths describes it, obviously reflects not only
&dquo;liberal&dquo; and &dquo;conservative&dquo; views of
crime but the manifest reality of our
social treatment of criminals in this
country; it is reflected exactly in a
psychiatrists recent description of the
ideology underlying the California
prisons:
The people who run these places ...
believe that the way to get a mans behavior to change is to impose very strict
controls and take away everything he
values and make him work to get it back.
But that doesnt make him change. It just
generates more and more rage and hostil-
ity.72
Family Model, in contrast, illusthe fundamentally different priorities which might motivate instituThe
trates
pursuit.
72.
7,
Quoted
1971, p. 64.