Beyond Peace (33 page)

Government itself is to blame for recent signals that it is considering throwing in the towel in the fight against drugs. Late last year Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders sparked a firestorm by suggesting the possibility that drugs should be legalized. Her statement, and the administration's failure to flatly repudiate it, set back the efforts of five successive administrations over two decades to combat the sale and use of illegal drugs. An administration that includes a number of officials who have records of casual drug use cannot credibly be the one that promotes the fight against drugs—particularly because the permissiveness toward drugs of the 1960s generation has left an ugly residue on the urban underclass, a class that did not enjoy the same possibilities for extricating itself from the poison of drug dependency.

Joe Califano, Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary in the Johnson administration, observed recently, “Putting the
stamp of legality on snorting cocaine and smoking crack would increase the number of addicts severalfold. Exercising their right to free speech, Madison Avenue hucksters would make it as attractive to do a few lines as to down a few beers.” As a former cigarette smoker, Califano understands the cycle of addiction intimately. Legalization would not be a noble act of enlightened policy. It would be surrender.

In the long run we will not control crime until criminals stop being lionized by their peers. They will not stop being lionized by their peers until their own communities put their feet down and make civilized behavior the community standard.

Our first priority in fighting crime is to beef up the criminal justice system: police, prisons, and courts. In most cities across America, the once-familiar policeman on the beat has become almost invisible. What used to be a conspicuous and reassuring presence has become an ominous absence. Some cities are experimenting with what they now call community policing—actually returning patrolmen to the beat, where they can see and be seen, get to know the people, win the confidence of the law-abiding, and deter the predators. It works.

For decades social reformers viewed prisons primarily as places to save souls, raise up the downtrodden, and transform inmates' lives for the better. This conception, embodied in the euphemism “houses of correction,” has not worked. Rehabilitation, for the most part, has been a failure. As long ago as 1975 one landmark study of more than two hundred attempts to measure the effects of rehabilitation programs concluded that these efforts had “no appreciable effect on recidivism.” According to U.C.L.A. professor James Q. Wilson, “It did not seem to matter what form of treatment in the correctional system was attempted. Indeed, some forms of treatment . . . actually produced an increase in the rate of recidivism.”

Some of the huge amounts spent in an unsuccessful effort to keep drugs out of the country should instead be spent to support nongovernment drug rehabilitation centers. There are some exciting
examples. In 1988 I visited Daytop Village, a privately operated drug treatment center in Swan Lake, New York. It was heartwarming to see what Monsignor O'Brien and his colleagues were accomplishing in introducing young former addicts to a new drug-free life. The rate of recidivism was only ten percent. Phoenix House, another highly successful private program, puts addicts through a tough two-year boot camp. Thousands have emerged as productive citizens.

Even with a visible police presence and enough prison space to hold the criminal convicts, the system will not work unless judges let it work. Yet for thirty years the courts have been the institutions most directly responsible for undermining police protection for law-abiding citizens. The best way to change the character of the courts is to pick judges who are as dedicated to restraining the guilty as they are to protecting the innocent.

On a subway platform in New York in the summer of 1984, two muggers knocked a seventy-one-year-old man down to the floor, beat him viciously, and choked him as they rifled his pockets. The victim's screams attracted two transit police officers, who rushed to help. The muggers ran, ignoring orders to stop. When the officers fired, one mugger, a career criminal, was left crippled—and he sued the Transit Authority. The courts of the State of New York recently upheld a $4.3 million damage award to the injured mugger, ultimately to be paid, of course, by those subway riders he had not yet gotten around to mugging. The victim's claim for replacement of his shattered spectacles was rejected. If this points up the absurdity of the law's current approach to crime and criminals, it also points up the grotesque inversion of civilized values that now characterizes life in our great cities.

We cannot successfully address the fearful increase in violent crime without restoring punishment rather than rehabilitation as the central premise of our criminal justice system. In the name of compassion, liberal judges and lawyers have reduced sentences, absolved criminals of responsibility by blaming their
actions on society, and granted parole even to violent criminals. They have helped undermine the system of law and order essential to a free society. Blaming society rather than the criminal is a 1960s philosophy still in vogue today.

The shocking reaction of many in the media to Vietnam protestor Katherine Power's case is an example of going overboard in expressing as much sympathy for the criminal as for the victim of the crime. There was honest disagreement about whether the United States should have been involved in Vietnam. But our understanding of those who demonstrated against the war should not lead us to excuse those who resorted to violence. In opposing war against an enemy abroad, these people waged war against innocent people at home. As syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer put it: “This was not a flower child caught up some wild afternoon in a robbery. She was found to have in her apartment three rifles, a carbine, a pistol, a shotgun and a huge store of ammunition. She is accused of having firebombed a National Guard Armory. She took part in a bank robbery in which a hero cop, father of nine, was shot dead. This is someone very hard who has now softened out of feelings of loss, principally for herself.”
Newsweek's
reaction was typical of the response of much of the liberal media: “After all these years, it is hard to know whom to feel the most sympathy for. The nine children who lost a father or the young woman who lost her way in the tumult of the sixties.” In the media, buckets of tears were shed because of the psychological trauma Power went through in coming forward after having avoided trial for twenty years under a new identity in Oregon. Very few tears were left over for the nine children who lost a father who was shot in the back trying to arrest a bank robber.

Contrary to the myths of the media, tough but fair judges and sentencing based on the principle of individual accountability are not racist but benefit poor minorities, who represent 80 percent of the victims of violent crime. The poor cannot extricate themselves from poverty unless they are secure from physical
violence and unless the incentive system in their community rewards good behavior and reliably punishes criminal behavior.

Politicians often complain that the money is simply not there for more police and prisons. Yet the entire criminal justice system—police, prisons, courts, prosecutors, and public defenders, local, state, and federal—accounts for less than 4 percent of government spending. That means that shifting just 2 percent of other government spending to public safety would increase the funds available for the criminal justice system by more than 50 percent. If we have the will, we do have the resources.

If we are to have an effective offensive against crime, we should adopt and enforce strict national gun-control laws, ones much tougher than the Brady law. There are over 200 million privately owned guns in the United States. Rather than hearing the political slogans of the past—“a chicken in every pot” and “two cars in every garage”—we shall soon hear from the gun lobby that there should be two guns in every home.

With the resources, with the will, and with a determination to restore public and private respect for the values of a humane civilization, we can turn the tide against crime. But it will take all three, not just through the next election but through the next generation.

Materialists of all stripes are wrong to slight the importance of the moral-cultural system that underpins any free society. Max Weber warned against the development of a “destructive, selfish materialism—the bureaucratization of the human spirit—an ‘iron cage' for the West” that would eventually erode its moral legitimacy.

Most of our most pressing problems—the woeful decline of American education, the breakdown of the family, rising crime,
urban poverty and decay, the growing sense of entitlement—are at their core moral, not material, problems. We cannot even begin to solve them unless we return to the principles that made this country great. It is not enough to be both strong and rich; America must also be good. The founders envisaged not only a new nation but a new order for the ages. We must make freedom work by our exertions at home and enable freedom to win abroad by our example.

Those who call for a new “politics of meaning” are rightly distressed about the intensifying illiteracy, amorality, and rootlessness of much of American life. They are right, too, in their sense that exclusively materialist philosophies, which neglect the spiritual dimension of man, are part of the problem. But the solutions they tend to propose—more government involvement, more entitlement, less individual accountability—are themselves root causes of our ills.

A policy does not necessarily have to be a program—there is a vital distinction between a national response and a government response. America's success depends not just on government but, far more important, on private institutions and all the many centers of activity that make up our free society. In most matters that directly touch people, those organizations operate more effectively than the federal government would. We should heed Max Weber's warning: “Bureaucracy appears as a primary cause of the enslavement of modern man. Each man becomes a little cog in the machine, and aware of this, his one preoccupation is whether he can become a bigger cog. The question is what can we do to oppose this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling out of the soul from the supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.” Einstein put it even more bluntly: “Bureaucracy is the death of any achievement.”

Well-meaning government intervention has undermined the virtues of self-reliance and individual accountability. As Justice Brandeis observed, “Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when government's purposes are benevolent.”
The utter failure of the Great Society is a glaring example. The more the federal government steps in and does things for people, the less they are going to do for themselves. The best spur to initiative in the private sector is to let people know that if they want something done, they had better just do it. The best role for the federal government is to create conditions conducive to doing it. Our growing reliance on government to fix every social ill has given us a shrinking conception of the concept of public service. Too often we equate it solely with being in government, even though those in private enterprise provide all the funds to pay for our public servants. The public benefits from the work of every good plumber, doctor, salesman, window washer, artist, teacher, and homemaker just as much as it does from those who are paid by the taxpayers. From now on, public service should simply mean whatever you do well.

The 1960s counterculture created a moral and spiritual vacuum that weakens the foundations of American society. The new elite of its adversary culture has disdained traditional morality—the stress on hard work, thrift, frugality, deferred gratification, the sanctity of marriage, fidelity, sexual self-control, and individual accountability. Those who still believe in these values are branded by the new elite as quaint, politically incorrect throwbacks who “just don't get it.”

The sexual revolution has wreaked havoc on the American family: increasing rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and single-parent families. The glorification of recreational drug use, from which the wealthy and middle class have only recently begun to recoil, has contributed to the emergence of a permanent urban underclass. The self-indulgent notions of no-fault living, the cult of victimization, the futility of work, and the inherent injustice of American society, which the counterculture promoted, have corroded the respect for merit and personal striving, which are the human virtues surest to help individuals grow, develop moral codes, and achieve success.

Most Americans—poor, middle-class, and wealthy—are
fundamentally decent, patriotic, and enterprising. Yet the liberal elite continues to exert enormous influence on public policy, largely because Americans are too deferential to their views and because those with other views have not offered a sufficiently articulate or compelling response. Good ideas have consequences. So do bad ones. A healthy nation cannot endure indefinitely such a sharp contrast between what the elite propagates and what the American people think. Individuals need to take responsibility for their actions. But no person is an island. Parents need the support of moral-cultural institutions to instill in their children the values necessary for a decent society worth emulating. They do not have it. The entertainment industry, the artistic community, and much of the educational establishment, which so profoundly influence American culture, relentlessly assault religion, promote promiscuity, encourage illegitimacy, and bash America. They contend that children, rather than their parents, know best. They glorify violence. They degrade the idea of heroism. We need to change this moral and cultural climate to reinforce rather than undermine the traditional importance of family and religion.