Curing the American Disease - The Violent Predator on the Unsafe Streets (From Criminology Review Yearbook, Volume 2, P 339-365, 1980, by Egon Bittner and Sheldon L Messinger - See NCJ 70397)

• NCJ Number: 70407
• Author(s): J P Conrad
• Date Published: 1980
• Length: 27 pages
• Sale Source: Sage Publications, Inc
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article asserts that empirical research has made very little headway in creating a new basis for preventing and controlling the violence that brought LEAA into being.

Abstract

Despite praiseworthy and otherwise beneficial legislation, such as the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act, and the creation of violent street crime has not been reduced or even affected. A renewed interest in criminological research has contributed to better knowledge of crime patterns, and to improved techniques in police and court management, but the violent crime fluctuates independently of any of these influences. Some known facts about criminal violence include the existence of a subculture of violence in the working class and the underclass; the overrepresentation of blacks among both violent offenders and their victims; and the disproportionate number of violent crimes committed by repeat offenders. In addition, prediction of a violent offense is insufficiently effective to improve on mere chance; a policy of incapacitation of offenders to reduce the incidence of violent crime cannot succeed without enormous economic and human costs; there is no empirical evidence to support any violent crime deterrence theories; and violent criminal careers tend to be extinguished at age 35-40. Further, there is insufficient evidence for a significant correlation of biological or genetic influences with violent crime, there are no predictable effective treatments for violent offenders, and there is no evidence of the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Despite the seeming hopelessness of all correctional measures to impact on criminal violence, some minor successes achieved by therapeutic treatment of emotional disturbances leading to violence argue for their continuance. Further criminological research, although it may be useful in articulating our present knowledge more clearly, cannot help reduce criminal violence, because it points to the necessity for economic and social changes of such magnitude that few of us would be willing to pay the price. Fifty endnotes, some with bibliographic references, are appended.