CRIME IN THE U.S.A.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sia,—The most detestable crime in living memory will not have been in vain if it rouses the ordinary decent citizen in America to a realization of his own responsibility for the establishment of good government and law and order.
At present many of the best sections of the American people regard politics as a " dirty game," and instead of trying to purify it they ignore it. Much has been recently written about the inefficiency and corruption among the police and even the judiciary in the United States. Fundamentally this is to be attributed to a widespread lack of true public service and to the fact that posts in connexion with the administration of justice in America do not attract men of the standard of our own civil service. When I was last in the United States, in- vestigating the crime situation there, a prominent member of the Harvard Law School told me that he could not recall a single law student during the last ten years whose ambition it had been to go on the Bench.
Faced with a challenge such as that of the recent kidnap. ping, the American public has been momentarily aroused from its apathy and has begun to advocate increased penalties as the remedy. But increased penalties will not solve the crime situation. Penalties in America are already several times as great as in this country. When Mr. Justice Finlay desired to inflict exemplary penalties upon the worst of the Dartmoor rioters he imposed sentences of eight, ten or twelve years. Such penalties are every-day occurrences in the U.S.A. There are hundreds of men in the prisons of America serving ten and fifteen years for simple burglary, and sentences of thirty or forty years are not uncommon. But the one thing necessary in crime prevention—viz., certainty—is lacking in America, and largely because the ordinary decent citizen has allowed the administration of justice to get into the wrong hands.
There are many factors in American social life which un- doubtedly aggravate the crime situation—race, colour and those difficulties which are bound to confront a relatively new civilization. In the degree to which these factors are absent from our British social life, we should congratulate ourselves not so much upon our virtue as our good fortune. They are problems which only time can solve. But this lack of a spirit of public service is something which cannot be thus explained away. And every ordinary decent citizen who has failed to take his right place in American public and political life cannot avoid a share of responsibility for the terrible crime in New
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