The Criminal Law System

Our highly civilized nation has the most crime of any country in the world. Our beloved President was only recently assassinated by a nonentity who was himself assassinated before a trial could be held. Our jails are full, our court dockets are jammed. Every state is enlarging its prison facilities at the very moment that all progressive states are reducing the capacities and populations of their state hospitals. While four-fifths of the patients in our state hospitals are now discharged within a few months of their admission, seventy per cent of the people in jail receiving the standard penological treatment have been there longer, and have been there before. They have already had our idea of treatment once or twice or thrice. And over and beyond all the felons who are locked up and re-locked up, released and rearrested, retried and resentenced (at great and wasteful expense to the body politic) there is the much larger number who are never detected, never convicted, never serve a sentence. Crime is costing us twenty-eight billion dollars per year in this country, and a pall of darkness extends over the entire administration of criminal justice. Many people are distressed about this situation. Many are alarmed and say so publicly. And, let it be said in fairness, many are trying to remedy it—either by piecemeal changes in the process here and there-improved police science, for example—or by more radical proposals. I. The Role of the Psychiatrist II. The Role of the Judge III. The Role of the Prison IV. The Role of the Parole Board V. The Role of the Public VI. Conclusion