ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 11 No. 10 (October 2001) pp. 487-489.

CRIME AND POLITICS: BIG GOVERNMENT'S ERRATIC CAMPAIGN FOR LAW AND ORDER by Ted Gest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 296 pp. Cloth $30. ISBN: 0-19-510343-2.

Reviewed by David O. Friedrichs, Department of Sociology/Criminal Justice, University of Scranton.

Crime has been consistently high on the list of concerns of American citizens-especially those who live in big cities-for several decades now. Accordingly, it has also been a major issue in American politics. For much of our history, however, crime as a public issue was viewed primarily as a matter of concern for local politics. In the more recent era it became an important issue in the realm of national politics as well.

Ted Gest, the author of CRIME AND POLITICS, is an award-winning journalist who presently directs the program on crime policy and the news media at the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. In this book he provides an account of the political response to the problem of crime in the United States, from the mid-1960s to the end of the twentieth century, with the federal response as the primary focus. The basic outlines of the story are generally familiar to those who have a professional interest in crime and criminal justice. However, Gest does a superb job of taking us behind the scenes of the legislative responses to the crime problem, and he reveals many specific details of the development of crime control policies that are not so well-known. Altogether, he has produced an immensely informative and important account of a major strand of political and legislative activity during the final decades of the twentieth century. Gest uses to great effect his skills as a seasoned journalist to maintain the narrative flow of his story. But he also demonstrates an impressive command of some of the noteworthy criminological scholarship produced during the period in question. He draws upon interviews with some of the key political figures, government agency personnel, and criminologists. Also, he makes good selective use of the immense journalistic literature reporting on crime and its control.

Many books have now been published about the rising crime wave, beginning in the 1960s, and the governmental response to this crime wave. Quite a few of these books have surely been scholarly, insightful, and provocative, although they are often driven by a particular thesis, with the book organized to marshal support for the thesis. Much of Gest's book has a somewhat different emphasis, with the journalist's commitment to telling a story. Although Gest certainly expresses some views on the political developments he describes, and provides a concluding analysis that could be classified as liberal, he also succeeds in being quite even-handed and avoids polemics.

The very first sentence of the first chapter of this book attributes the dramatic increase of attention to crime by politicians operating in the national arena to Barry Goldwater, in his his 1964 presidential

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campaign. Although Lyndon B. Johnson trounced Goldwater, his rhetoric about the threat of crime to the American way of life made an impression on Johnson
and other political leaders. Johnson put together a President's Commission, which delivered an influential report, THE CHALLENGE OF CRIME IN A FREE
SOCIETY (1967). Although the report reflected a generally liberal interpretation of the crime problem, its many recommendations were only selectively adopted. Its call for a more effective war on crime was at least partially derailed by the immense expenditure of resources and attention to another war, that in Vietnam.

Some of the more fundamental reforms called for by the President's Commission were disregarded by the Congressional leadership. Instead, they established a new agency, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). This agency was intended to provide some fundamental forms of aid and assistance to state and local agencies in their efforts to combat crime. Perhaps inevitably, all manner of bureaucratic turf wars surfaced. Through much of its existence in the 1970s LEAA funding was disproportionately allocated to enable police departments to purchase expensive hardware equipment, such as anti-riot tanks. It was far from clear that such expenditures made a measurable impact on conventional forms of crime, which continued to rise during this period. The LEAA was phased out in 1980.

The 1980s were a period of resurgent conservatism, and a "get tough on crime" approach dominated. Gest provides us here with a detailed account of the various anti-crime initiatives undertaken during the Reagan era. The adoption of sentencing guidelines, on the federal level and by many states, was among the most consequential of these initiatives. Although sentencing guidelines were promoted in some part as a means of achieving greater fairness in the criminal justice system, longer average prison sentences typically resulted from their implementation.

This book documents the many ways in which the movement to federalize the prosecution of crime was politically driven, and had little demonstrable impact on the primary focus of concern about crime: street crime. As Gest notes, ". Congress is fond of passing statutes first and getting the facts later." (p. 69) But if these initiatives failed to have an effect on crime they did have some significant budgetary consequences, and inevitably led to deflecting criminal justice resources in a direction influenced more by political considerations than by credible research findings.

Several chapters take on specific anti-crime initiatives, and in each case Gest finds little evidence that stated goals for these initiatives were accomplished. No proof exists that government measures have contributed to a decline in juvenile crime, and the persistence of high levels of substance abuse among juveniles tends to militate against any such claims. The broader "war on drugs" itself can by many standards be declared lost, despite the immense expenditure of government resources. A disproportionately large percent of these resources has focused on the ultimately futile interdiction effort. The gun control issue became a lightning rod political issue during the period addressed in this book, but the gun control measures adopted failed to eradicate gun-related crime.

The celebrated "broken windows" model of policing promoted by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, calling

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for police to focus significant attention on "quality of life" low-level misdemeanors that supposedly demoralize inner city neighborhoods and foster a criminogenic environment, have been quite widely credited with the decline of crime in many big cities. However, Gest finds that other factors, including imposing of more accountability on police commanders and more sophisticated use of statistical data on crime, seem to have been more significant in this decline.

The adoption of "Three Strikes and You're Out" legislation in the 1990s, with mandatory life sentences for those convicted of a felony for the third time, was among the high profile anti-crime measures during this period. An especially heinous crime involving the rape and murder of 12 year old Polly Klaas by a recently released felon recidivist became a rallying cry for this legislation, although Gest notes that her own family did not support the legislation. Although President Clinton embraced this popular initiative in 1994 it actually affected a very small number of federal cases, and cannot be shown to have contributed to its stated goal of protecting the public from demonstrably dangerous individuals. Nor did the dramatic build-up of prisons (especially in states such as Texas), and the move to eliminate parole, make a real difference in the fight against crime. Much evidence suggests that such initiatives disproportionately impact on non-violent drug offenders and
other such law-breakers, who do not represent a major threat to the public.

In a concluding chapter Ted Gest reiterates his basic theme that there is relatively little that the federal government can do about crime. He does identify a series of proposals-such as the promotion of more cohesive communities, targeted drug treatment, and early prevention-that suggest a smarter response to crime. He also calls for better media reporting on the crime issue.

Altogether, this book has much to offer students of law and politics. It provides us with an interesting and informative account of how crime control legislation and policy has been formulated within the federal arena. A disheartening but arguably unsurprising theme runs through the book: in the adoption of specific crime control policies, political considerations often trumped credible evidence of their effectiveness or ineffectiveness.

A postscript: This review was written shortly after the momentous events of September 11, 2001. The newly declared "War on Terrorism" has intersected to an especially high degree with crime control issues, and criminal justice agencies are going to be more involved in this war than would be true of more conventional wars. A massive terrorist attack has an immense political impact, at least in the short term, and can foster the development of a new political environment, with new priorities. In this environment we have the potential for adopting some significant legal reforms, which may impact in various ways on the response to conventional
crime as well. At some future point, after the dust settles, we will have to sort out what happened politically during this period, and its impact on the enduring political challenge in a modern, democratic nation of finding the right balance between effective crime control and respect for due process and individual privacy rights. Ted Gest would seem to be especially well-qualified to tell this story.

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Copyright 2001 by the author, David O. Friedrichs.