Goetz case stirs crime debate

Scan page 3

When Bernhard Goetz discharged his gun on a New York subway last December, he triggered more than the shooting of four Black teenagers who he claimed were threatening him, demanding money. The incident has sparked renewed debate over the issue of "street crime."

The Goetz story has given the mainstream media a golden opportunity to whip up racist hysteria and promote increased right-wing "vigilantism."

The big-business, law-and-order campaign has also fueled demands for more cops, greater police powers, and less legal protection for defendants.

As for Goetz, his remark that he regrets not blowing out the brains of one of his victims has somewhat tarnished his "folk-hero" status. But regardless of Goetz's temporary notoriety, the furor generated by this case does reveal that crime is an issue of genuine concern to working people-mostly to Blacks and poor people, who are the most frequent victims of crime.

Consider this simple statistic: 100,622 people were murdered in the United States between 1979 and 1983. Consider too that homicide is the leading cause of death among Black males aged 15 to 24. A Gallup survey in the late 1970s, in fact, found that the United States had the highest crime rate of "all major Western industrial nations."

Moreover, according to a recent study by the Eisenhower Foundation, the United States imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than any other Western industrial nation. Still, the advocates of a "get-tough" policy clamor for more prisons, more executions, and fewer civil rights. And they are getting their way.

Prisons: a growth industry In 1978 there were 7.2 court commitments to prison for every 10,000 adults. In 1983 that figure jumped to 10.1. The incarceration rate has, in fact, doubled in the last 10 years as a result of the law-and-order campaign supported by both major parties.

The result? Today over 644,000 people are locked up in prisons and jails in the United States—a rather ironic statistic for an administration that claims to want to "get government off our backs."

Prisons are definitely a growth industry. From 1980 to 1982, state spending on prison construction and expansion jumped from $133 million to $800 million. The National Moratorium on Prison Construction estimates that more than 800 jails and prisons are being or will be built at a cost of $6 billion. And in the true spirit of free enterprise, privately run "prisons for profit" are becoming increasingly common.

Attorney General Edwin Meese cites statistics showing that a large proportion of those entering prison are repeat offenders, often committing new crimes while on probation. Meese's solution is quite simple-lock them up even longer. And if annoying civil rights laws interfere with that task, then too bad for civil rights.

But the facts Meese cites actually say a lot more about the brutalizing and inhumane conditions inmates suffer in prison, where human beings are ground down and spit out in worse shape than before, and where the cycle that initially led to prison begins again.

That, of course, is of little concern to Meese and the law-and-order crowd, whose brutish policies will continue to place growing numbers of people in the direct custody of the state.

An old argument The Reagan administration likes to believe that the legal system unduly favors criminal defendants. Ronald Reagan is not known for his original mind, and here too, he simply echoes a theme repeated ad nauseum over the years by the advocates of greater police authority.

During the 1920s, for example, police could routinely hold suspects incommunicado, often extracting confessions through use of various methods of torture. When a state court excluded in one case a defendant's confession because it had been obtained through use of the third degree, a Chicago police official complained that the ruling would invalidate 95 percent of his department's work.

President William Howard Taft argued in 1909 that a criminal trial is like a game of chance, with "all the chances in favor of the criminal."

Herbert Hoover's 1928 presidential campaign denounced legal procedures that "unduly favor the criminal."

President Gerald Ford whined in 1975 that "for too long, law has centered its attention more on the rights of the criminal defendant than on the victim of crime."

But it is not for lack of imagination that our erstwhile leaders give the same speech year after year. They all share a similar motivation. The complaint that we are losing the "war against crime" actually reflects a more fundamental kind of war—one between the tradition of democratic rights that finds its lifeblood in social protest, and the inherent tendency of the state, representing the interests of the ruling rich, to expand police powers at the expense of constitutional liberties.

The source of crime Andrea Gonzalez, writing in the Jan. 25 issue of The Militant newspaper, states, "One view of what causes crime which is often presented as Marxist is the idea that capitalism causes poverty and poverty causes crime."

Gonzalez argues that this view portrays the working class, rather than the ruling class, as the source of crime. Moreover, 'The view that poverty per se is the cause of crime leads to supporting the call for more jails, more cops, and more restrictions on the rights of the working class today-since poverty does exist."

Poverty per se is not the cause of crime. The degree of "white-collar" crime testifies to that. And there are certainly nations poorer than the United States with lower crime rates.

Yes, the ruling rich, who preside over a system based on the exploitation and oppression of the working-class majority, are the source of crime.

But can anyone believe that discrimination, hunger, and despair, which so often define poverty conditions, have nothing to do with the degree of crime in this country? Why should such a view lead one to demand more cops and jails rather than the elimination of the social system that promotes poverty and social inequality?

The social programs designed to ameliorate the more extreme aspects of poverty have never offered more than bare-bones survival in the United States. Couldn't this also have something to do with the extraordinary frequency of petty acts of crime and violence?

Criminality at the top The problem of "street crime" of course, has to be kept in perspective. How do we judge a social system that sentences William Rummel, a Texas man who passed three bad checks in 10 years, to life in prison as an habitual offender, while another habitual offender, Richard Nixon (Korea, Vietnam, Watergate), has never spent a day in jail? Mr. Nixon, we might add, also lives at state expense, but in a much grander style, rest assured, than Mr. Rummel.

How do we judge a system that licenses government-by-death-squad in El Salvador, but sentences Wallace Richard Stewart of Louisville to 10 years in prison for stealing a pizza? Will any executives of the Manville Corp. spend even a day in prison for exposing thousands of unknowing workers to cancer-causing asbestos?

Crime is endemic to a class-divided society, but a class-divided society is not endemic to human nature. As Mark Twain once said, "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."

It is the capitalist system, which Congress represents, that is profoundly criminal in nature. But unlike many of those rotting in prison, the capitalist class is incorrigible.

Working people will eventually pass sentence on a system that breeds desperate acts of petty crime at the bottom rung of the social ladder and acts of calculated criminality at the top. The jury may be out but the verdict is certain—the antiquated social relations and fundamental inequality that define American capitalism will have to give way to a society where working people govern in their own interest.

SOCIALIST AÇTION APRIL 1985

Scan page 4

Affirmative action under attack: I made $12 an hour at the steel mill until I was laid off.

So, I took computer classes and now I earn $6 an hour.

Soon a more sophisticated computer will eliminate my job. 've achieved ate-of-the-art unemployment!

Carolt Simpson 01989 by unions and management, have a dismal record in meeting affirmative action goals. In 1983, out of 455 JACs, only 62 met their goals for women apprentices.

California's dismal record

The Division of Apprenticeship Standards found that 231 JACs had not even made a good faith effort to meet these goals. These include, among others, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, plasterers, and workers in the sheet metal, sprinkler filter, steel erector, and tile trades.

In 1984, representatives of JACs proposed a plan allowing lowering of affirmative action goals. At a conference on apprenticeship held last spring in San Francisco, this proposal was approved with only three dissenting votes.

A loud andlorganized outcry against this proposal, largely led by Tradeswomen, Inc., resulted in the California Apprenticeship Council tabling the proposal. However, new efforts are now underway to reduce goals for women in apprenticeship.

Th e participation of many unions, particularly in