Volume 9, Number 6 · October 12, 1967
Copping Out
By Herbert L. Packer
The Challenge of Crime in A Free Society: A Report by the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice
US Government Printing Office, 340 pp., $2.25
Reading about our crime problem induces many reflections, all of them melancholy. There is little being done; we fiddle while Detroit burns. Our miserable adventure in Vietnam, that monstrous self-inflicted wound, diverts and divides us at the precise moment when we are about to be overwhelmed by catastrophes within, of which the problem of crime is a mere symptom. If we escape what has become the fire this time, there is a question that in a less frenzied moment someone might pursue: What is it in our national character that forces us to load the dice against ourselves? Why is it that, confronted with a problem that is complicated enough as it stands, we insist on methodically thwarting our own efforts to deal with it, and then expend so much energy and resourcefulness in erasing the complications of our complications? Illustrations abound, but the one at hand will serve.
Review, 2999 words
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