Problems in American Democracy

by Thames Williamson

Looking at crime from an economic point of view, it is obvious that poverty often accompanies crime. In many cases, it is claimed, such crimes as larceny, forgery, and robbery are directly traceable to poverty. Similarly, it is said that unemployment and industrial accidents may incite individuals to crime. Many authorities claim, however, that while bad economic conditions accompany and often encourage crime, such conditions alone are not a direct cause of crime. According to this latter view, poverty, for example, will not cause a person to commit a crime unless he is feeble-minded, depraved in morals, or otherwise defective in character.

While there is a good deal of dispute as to whether or not poverty is a direct cause of crime, it is quite generally agreed that a bad economic situation gives rise to social conditions which can be definitely connected with criminality. The strain and artificiality of urban life, together with the difficulty of obtaining inexpensive and wholesome recreation in the poorer sections of large cities, has a close connection with crime. The overcrowding so common in tenement districts renders difficult or impossible the maintenance of high moral standards. Where mother or children are habitually employed outside the home, the young are often denied proper home training. Divorce, desertion, or the death of the bread-winner may break up the family and indirectly give rise to illiteracy, vice, and crime.

Often indistinguishable from the social causes are the personal causes of crime. Where alcoholism or vicious habits are given as the cause of crime, it may be impossible to say whether social or personal defect is primarily to blame. Illiteracy, superficially a personal cause of crime, may often be traced to a bad social environment. Thus an individual may be illiterate because his parents were unwilling or unable to send him to school, or because evil companions discouraged him from study. Such personal causes as mental defect are extremely important, indeed, many students maintain that bad economic and social conditions are negligible causes of crime, unless found in connection with low mentality and a depraved moral sense.

Last among the causes of crime we may consider defects in government. The laws of a community may be so numerous, or so unwisely worded, that even responsible individuals violate them without understanding the nature of their act. After children have committed petty offenses through carelessness or a sense of mischief, the harshness of the police may so embitter or antagonize the culprits that their criminal tendencies are intensified. An important cause of crime is the custom, still common in many states, of imprisoning young and first offenders in county jails, where they are allowed to mingle with, and learn about crime from, hardened and depraved criminals.

230. THE REMEDIES FOR CRIME.—The causes of crime suggest the nature of its remedies. Wherever bad economic conditions either directly or indirectly encourage crime, the remedy is, of course, the relief or abolition of poverty. This problem has already been discussed.

Since bad social conditions are often the result of poverty, any measures which will lessen poverty will also remove many of the so- called social causes of crime. Education, the safeguarding of the home, constructive charity, and similar measures will also help to remove the social causes of crime. These questions are discussed elsewhere in this text, and need not be gone into here.

The improvement of economic and social conditions will ultimately help to eliminate bad heredity, vice, and other of the personal causes of crime.

With the understanding, then, that the eradication of the economic, social and personal causes of crime is discussed elsewhere, we may here confine ourselves to the question of preventing crime by remedying the defects of government.

231. JUSTICE AS AN IDEAL.—Justice has constituted one of the basic ideals of the English-speaking peoples since the days of Magna Charta. "To no one will we sell, and to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice," declared that great document. This conception was later glorified into an ideal which, after having persisted for four centuries in England, was brought to the New World by the English colonists. The first ten amendments to the Federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights contained in the constitutions of the several states have been called by Lord Bryce "the legitimate children of Magna Charta." Since the beginning of our history, thus, a great cornerstone of American democracy has been the concept of sound and equitable law, impartially and effectively administered.

232. THE DENIAL OF JUSTICE.—Within the last decade we have come to realize that in many of the criminal courts of this country justice is an ideal rather than a fact. "The administration of criminal law in all the states of this Union," said Chief Justice Taft a few years ago, "is a disgrace to civilization."