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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VI. Justice - 26. Courts, Sentences and Prisons - 4. Trends and Outlook
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Chapter 26. Courts, Sentences and Prisons SS7
problems of crime prevention, and of punishment and prison reform^ into
the awareness of the general public.
It is astonishing to observe how far to the background these problems
are pushed in America, and how deep the common ignorance of them is
even in the higher classes. Most people discuss crime as if it had nothing
to do with social conditions and was simply an inevitable outcome of
personal badness. Southern whites tend to exaggerate the extent of Negro
crime and tend to under-estimate the extent of white crime: one of the
results is that they consider crime and prison reform part of the Negro
problem and therefore not to be discussed. Rape and sexual crimes play a
great role in Southern thinking on the problem, but the idea that such
crimes, when they occur, have to be suspected as symptoms of psychic
abnormality seems to be entirely absent. I understand that even the great
number of murder cases in the South are tried without a sanity hearing.
Capital punishment is not a problem to the general American public; that
it stimulates violence does not occur to the average American. In the South,
even educated people, when they think of punishment for crime, have their
minds fixed on vengeance and on the isolation or eradication of the crim-
inal. Seldom do they discuss punishment as a means of general crime
prevention. Other techniques of individual prevention
—^by rebuilding the
criminal himself—are usually entirely ignored. Under these circumstances
the problems of court and prison reform are considered only by a small
minority of the highly cultured.
It is not difficult to understand the psychological mechanism behind
this astonishing blind spot in the regional culture. These problems are
unpopular because their discussion is bound to result in the rational demon-
stration that // is in the interest of society to care for the Negro—and even
for the criminal Negro.
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