It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1995 by John J. Dilulio, Jr.

In 1994, Delaware Democrat Joseph Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee as it groped its way toward a $30 billion-plus crime bill that had something for just about everyone - prison construction firms, Mayberry-sized police departments, drug rehabilitation therapists, midnight basketball referees, and unemployed executioners. Republican ingrates said the Biden-led bill was full of pork. Untrue! As the GOP rushes to steal poor children's lunch money, they must learn the difference between pork and baloney.

The main baloney in Biden's crime bill was its "100,000 cops" provision. On average, it costs $50,000 a year for a cop, and that's not counting the badges, blue suits, patrol cars, and pension liabilities. And with four shifts (three on, one off), non-patrol work (desk supervisory, special assignment), sick leave, days off, and training time, putting ten sworn officers on the payroll buys barely one around-the-clock beat cop.

Last August, instant analyses by conservative critics found that the bill's $8.8 billion for police funded only 20,000 cops, but even this figure was way too generous. In reality, the bill offered only a fistful of seed money for three years. Sunnyvale, California - the city that inspired "reinventing government" - was offered $450,000 in Biden dollars. But to meet its quota of six cops, it found it would have to spend $8 million of its own. The city said no thanks. In February the Justice Department hustled grants for 7,000 cops to 6,600 other small cities.

Wendy Kaminer's It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture is at its best exploring how America's Joe Bidens - well-intentioned lawmakers who know better - have produced such a large, ineffective, dishonest, and downright dopey body of federal anti-crime legislation. Kaminer, who worked briefly as a public defender and is now a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly, examines how over the last two decades the crime issue has turned potential profiles in courage into pandering politicos. The title of chapter seven, "Knowledge is Irrelevant-federal Crime Control," just about sums it up. In a typically pointed passage, Kaminer writes: "Protesting the influence of politics on policy, you feel a little like Claude Rains protesting gambling at Rick's. It's hard not to be shocked! shocked! by the utter politicization of criminal justice debates."

Or for a more contemporary cinematic reference on federal crime policy, how about Dumb and Dumber? In place of Biden's oft-repeated white lie about "100,000 cops," the Contract-bound Republicans have told a whopper, namely, that the best way to "Take Back Our Streets" is by dropping a do-whatever-you-want $10 billion grant on the states.

Knowledge, including history, is irrelevant to these folks. I hereby sentence House GOP leaders to reading the thousands of pages that have been written about the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Born under Johnson and buried under Reagan, the LEAA channeled billions to the states but did virtually nothing to combat crime. Block grants on crime are recipes for leaky-bucket inter-governmental administration, cost overruns, and outright corruption. I also hereby sentence House GOP leaders to a course in remedial logic; the same Republicans who clamor for block grants in the name of our third "new federalism" since 1970 (please!) have attached tight strings to the $10.5 billion earmarked for prison construction.

But I would offer suspended sentences to anyone who agreed to undergo treatment by reading It's All the Rage. In addition to her cogent assessment of federal crime policy, Kaminer devotes entire chapters to victims' rights, the death penalty, and the prosecutor's perspective on crime and punishment. With no pretense to detailed expertise on any of these subjects (the research for this book consisted mainly of selective secondary reading plus interviews, many of them with liberal crime analysts), Kaminer shows admirable frankness about where she's coming from. (She confesses, for example, that she's never been a fan of the death penalty and isn't going to start now.) She thinks out loud, writes with a refreshing, show-me attitude, and offers several keen insights.

Immanuel Kant couldn't quite square the circle of free-will-versus-determinism in relation to "justice," so no one should fault Wendy Kaminer for failing to do so, or for occasionally sounding sophomoric in addressing our "existential confusion" about who is "guilty" of what. Instead, credit her with the intellectual intuition to understand that our crime debate is irrational not merely because of the sensational mass media. Rather, our crimecrazed culture springs from the lack of any consistent criteria for deciding who ought to be punished, for what crime, how, by whom, and under which conditions.

Kaminer writes that she "felt challenged and sometimes intimidated by the wealth of research and commentary by people who've spent years studying the death penalty and litigating capital cases." I'm glad that she overcame these feelings long enough to write the book. I wish more top-flight journalists would make such stabs. But on the death penalty and other complicated issues, I also wish she had been more careful and balanced.