19

One of the big troubles today is that the citizen doesn’t know the cost of crime. And since he doesn’t have any idea of the cost, he can’t tell what he can profitably spend to curb crime and still make a good business investment.

Let us look briefly at certain factors which enter into the cost of crime.

A jewelry store carries burglary insurance. An item in the cost of that burglary insurance is the amount the insurance companies are called upon to pay out in the aggregate for crimes in the aggregate. The cost of the burglary insurance goes on the jeweler’s books and becomes a part of the cost price of the merchandise.

Similarly anyone who thinks his own automobile insurance rate is not affected by the number of crimes involving automobiles, the number of drunk drivers who habitually use the roads, the number of gangs who make a business of hijacking new spare tires or stealing the entire automobile, is simply being naïve.

We read of a payroll stick-up during which twenty-thousand dollars was lifted, of a bank being held up for fifteen-thousand dollars.—Who pays for all this?

In one form or another these losses are passed on to you, the citizen.

There are other costs that enter into this crime picture, and they are not the obvious costs of how much it takes of the taxpayer’s money to support the prisoners in the city jail, the prisoners in the county jail, the inhabitants of the various state penitentiaries, but they are nevertheless costs that should be taken into consideration.

I was called on at one time to assist in the investigation of a rape killing.

This girl had just finished high school and had moved away from home to start attending college. To say that she had been a good girl would be a masterpiece of understatement. She was one of those children who develop a sense of responsibility, who have a goal and an ambition in life. She was a strong, husky, wholesome country girl. Her ideas of sex were clean, normal and wholesome. She was very much attached to her parents, and they to her.

This girl’s dead body with the clothes stripped off was found in the bottom of a snow-covered stream bed. She had been callously dumped from the place where the automobile road crossed a bridge above the stream, during the height of a blizzard. She had put up a terrific fight. Her hands had been scratched on the frozen ground during her struggles where her assailant tried to pin her hands beneath her body until skin and flesh had been scraped from her fingers. She had been clubbed unmercifully about the head. She had been choked. She had lost so much blood that she was almost exsanguinated. Evidently she had been struggling for a long time. Her struggles had been in vain. Her courageous fight terminated in death.

That represents one item, and only one item, of the cost of crime.

There is yet another entry on the debit side of the crime ledger that should be taken into consideration.

I can well remember the harsh, inarticulate sobs of a big, grown man echoing through a solemn courtroom as the judge sentenced his son to a term in state prison.

That boy was not a particularly bad boy in the ordinary sense of the word. He was a normal, attractive young man who didn’t have quite enough responsibilities, who had a “drive” for excitement, for experiencing new thrills.

What normal boy hasn’t?

His father was a leader in the community, a man who had saved a small amount of money by hard work and careful planning. The main asset which he had was his reputation in the small city where he lived. He was looked up to, a solid, substantial citizen, people respected him, sought his advice.

The boy naturally went out with other boys. Some of these boys had automobiles. They had an eager curiosity about life. They wanted to live. They wanted variety. They wanted excitement.

They had heard about marijuana. Someone introduced a marijuana cigarette. The boy took a few puffs just to see what it was like.

One thing led to another. Then came the night when two of the wilder members of the gang suddenly decided on impulse to “stick up” a service station.

This boy “went along.” He didn’t participate in the stick-up but he did remain in the car and made no protest. Something went wrong with the stick-up and there the boy was, jointly accused of felony with the others.

The other boys didn’t have quite as good backgrounds. They had been in a little juvenile trouble. No one had known just how to straighten them out.

And so the judge sentenced all the boys to the penitentiary, and the father, who had sat dry-eyed and tight-lipped through the court proceedings, trying to control his emotions, suddenly found that he was facing something too big for him.

The clerk of the court called on his son to stand up, his only son, the pride of his life. The boy who was to have carried an honored and respected name on through life. The judge pronounced the words that made this boy a felon, branded him for life.

The father’s head suddenly sank down on his arms and he began to sob, harsh sobs that filled the courtroom, sobs that threatened to tear this big man’s heart in two.

That is part of the cost of crime.

Of course the boy was to blame. Of course he should have known better. Of course he’d betrayed the training, the sacrifices his parents had made and the love they’d given him. But how much was he really to blame? He was to blame for some of it, but not all of it.

Somewhere along the line there was someone among his associates who introduced him to marijuana, someone who introduced him to a rapid, heady whirl of life which took more money than was presently available. There was a craving for excitement that overcame his training and his basic principles.

Where did that come from? Who furnished the marijuana? Never mind trying to fix an individual blame. Let’s simply remember that it was someone and that this is a part of the cost of crime.

The father had done the best he could. He hadn’t known where his boy was every minute of the time, but he didn’t want to seem to be tying the boy to his parents’ apron strings. The father had worked and sacrified. His good name in the community was his big asset.

Now he was no longer John Doe, the substantial businessman, the solid citizen whose words were listened to with friendly respect. He was John Doe, the father of a stick-up man who was serving a term in state prison.

That’s a cost of crime.

And don’t think that these cases we read about every day in the newspaper can’t happen to us.

Judges and police tell me that it is surprising the number of parents who really don’t know just what their kids are doing.

There comes a time when boys and girls have to be turned loose on their own, when they have to learn to stand on their own two feet. Hardly a one of them but what makes mistakes somewhere along the line. Sometimes those mistakes don’t catch up with them. Sometimes they are minor mistakes.

Sometimes a hideous combination of circumstances puts the youngster behind the eight-ball.

Officers have told me a lot about the looks of utter, incredulous dismay on the faces of parents when the news is brought to them that their son is in jail. Perhaps it’s drunken driving. Perhaps it’s manslaughter as the result of reckless driving. Perhaps it’s being picked up on a wild party with marijuana cigarettes. But for the first time a parent who has been smugly certain that crime can never touch him, finds that it has.

Nowadays we are learning a great deal more about how to handle juveniles. It is hoped that some of the constructive procedures can be put into operation before it is too late. One of the alarming things that face us today is the graph showing the lowering age of the vicious criminal.

A generation ago it was only after a mature man had been exposed to viciousness for a good many years that he became the tough, hardened, killing type of criminal.

Nowadays the average age of vicious depravity has dropped alarmingly.

A friend of mine who has made quite a study of juvenile delinquency, and who has attracted a good deal of national attention because of the manner in which some of his more or less revolutionary ideas have been working out, made it a point to lecture before clubs and various civic organizations, telling about the work he was doing and what he was finding out.

He was invited to speak before one of the exclusive women’s clubs, and to their surprise, chose as the subject of his talk a phase of juvenile delinquency and parental responsibility, which at least some of the members thought was definitely out of place.

One of the women came to him after his talk and voiced a protest. Why in the world would he take up their time by commenting about such things? His remarks didn’t apply to them and didn’t apply to their children.

Within seven days of the time she made her public denunciation, her own son had become involved in exactly the situation that the lecturer had been discussing and she found herself as one of the parents tearfully occupying a chair in the juvenile courtroom, trying to adjust herself to a brand new concept of life.

All of these things represent the cost of crime. The broken hearts, the blighted lives, the kids who have been sucked into a vortex before they have fully realized the grim possibilities of the situation.

It is only human nature for youngsters to have lots of drive, to crave action and excitement. They want to find out about life for themselves. They want to break away from parental habits and traditions.—That’s the way we make progress. The most defective reasoning on earth is that which begins, “If it was good enough for your father, it’s good enough for you.…”

But nowadays a vicious something has been added.

A couple of generations ago children were raised against a background of discipline. Parental control was taken for granted. It never occurred to children to doubt the rights of parents to administer discipline.

For some time now psychoanalysts have been warning against disciplining children. Children should be permitted to grow up in their own way.

That’s all very fine as far as it goes, but there must always be discipline. If we remove outside discipline we must emphasize the necessity of self-discipline.

The trouble is our educational system doesn’t do that.

So the younger generation suddenly finds itself in a position to question parental discipline, with no attempt made to emphasize the importance of self-discipline. The result is that too many kids grow up without any discipline whatever. They have no reason to fear outside discipline, and they haven’t developed the habit of judging consequences, of looking at an act from all angles, and, above all, they haven’t learned that civilized life consists of subordinating primitive desires to an over-all ethical concept.

Add to this the presence of dope.

Whether we like the picture or not, a good many teen-age kids start playing around with marijuana and some of them get “hooked” with heroin.

How many? No one knows the exact figures. The percentage, we hope, is small, but there are too many.

This gets back to the fact that everything we do along the line of legislative tinkering seems to have a habit of backfiring. For some reason man is incapable of thinking legislative action through to its logical conclusion. He starts out with the grim determination to “put teeth in the law,” to bring about this reform and that reform. He passes the necessary statutes. Then he dusts off his hands, smiles a contented smile which comes with the knowledge of having done a good deed, and starts thinking about something else.

I heard an old druggist talking about dope a few weeks ago. He made quite an impression on me because I can remember exactly the conditions that he described.

In those days people could buy narcotics. A druggist could give them away if he wanted. He could sell them. He had lots of narcotics. Because there were no restrictions worthy of note, opium and morphine were dirt cheap.

Many people acquired the dope habit. There were quite a few of these unfortunates, perhaps more than now, but some say a whole lot less. But those addicts were for the most part the derelicts of skid row. And when they were hopheads, that was all there was to it. They weren’t criminals, they were hopheads. They’d get the shakes at night and wait at the door of a drugstore for it to open up. The sympathetic druggist would look them over and give them a shot, just enough to get by. It was part of the druggist’s daily routine.

That was a terrible situation.

So they began to pass narcotics laws, and they began to make them stiffer and stiffer.

What was the result?

Are there any less persons addicted to narcotics?

That’s a question that is debatable. Some say yes. Some answer it with a loud and emphatic no.

But this much has happened. The law which prohibits narcotics has been enforced to such an extent that the retail price of narcotics has gone up, up, up and up.

Nowadays you read about some person being arrested, and the officers find “in his possession” uncut heroin worth fifty-thousand dollars on the retail market.

Fifty years ago, fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of dope would have required a team of horses to drag it around.

Fifty years ago, when a person became a dope addict, it was an unfortunate experience. He was a dope addict and that was that. But that was about all he was.

Nowadays when a person becomes a dope addict the price of dope is such that he can’t hope to engage in any legitimate occupation that will bring him in enough money to buy the dope his system craves, so he starts embezzling, burglarizing houses, and committing stick-ups. When something goes wrong with a stick-up he is jittery, nervous and desperate. He tries to smoke his way out. So nowadays the young dope addict is almost automatically a young desperate criminal.

All the time we are spending more and more money trying to enforce the narcotics law which drives the retail price of narcotics on the black market higher and higher, which makes the trade more and more profitable, which attracts more and more people to it, which, in turn, requires they have more and more outlets, which, in turn, means that they start peddling dope to kids in high school and college, and that these kids, driven to desperation, start holding up more and more service stations and liquor stores.

Of course, that’s an oversimplification, but it points up something that we must take into consideration. WE CAN’T LET THE CRIMINAL DETERMINE THE EXTENT OF OUR LAW ENFORCEMENT.

The trouble is that society always lags behind the criminal. It lets the criminal set the pace. As narcotics become more prevalent we reluctantly appropriate more money for more police, which, in turn, boosts the price of black market narcotics so that the trade becomes more profitable, etc., etc., etc.

That is all a part of the cost of crime. People won’t wake up. They won’t face the issues honestly and fairly. The reason is that they like to feel crime doesn’t concern them and can’t affect them.

It concerns every one of us, and directly and indirectly it affects every one of us.

If we pass a law we should see that it is enforced. If we don’t intend to enforce it we shouldn’t pass it. If we pass it we should see that it is enforced before the forces of opposition get a head start.

If there is a forest fire the fire fighters concentrate on trying to put the fire out while it is small. If they started putting in a small force to fight a small fire, and then, as the fire got bigger, gradually adding to the force, always keeping one jump behind the fire and letting the size of the fire determine the number of fire fighters in the interests of “economy,” it wouldn’t be long before our forests would all be gone.

That’s the way with crime.

Citizens don’t want to give the police the facilities they need until it can be determined they are “necessary.”

By that time the fire has become altogether too big.

But even then we don’t make a survey of what is required to cut it down, but only what is needed to “cope with it.”

Our whole reasoning on the problem of crime and criminals, of law enforcement, of police and even of penitentiaries, is completely cockeyed.

We can discuss the matter in terms of dollars and cents, but primarily crime isn’t an economic problem. It’s a problem that strikes at the character of the nation. The more we permit crime the more we are letting character become corrupted, the more we are encouraging dangerous thinking, and the more we are sacrificing potential future good citizens to the forces of contamination and degradation which turn them from potential assets into moral and economic liabilities.

It is time we woke up.