I plan to participate in the research process for questions two and three with my students. While developing this unit, my own research has focused on question five. My findings and conclusions, based on David Jones’
Crime Without Punishment
have surprised me somewhat. As the title of Jones’ book implies, the author believes that the criminal justice system is failing to convict most criminals. Jones is critical of plea-bargaining as it now exists. But as an empirically oriented social scientist, Jones secured data which, I believe, leads to some surprising conclusions. Let’s begin by examining a table from the Uniform Crime Reports (see Table 1).
Before presenting this table, Jones tells us that “less than one third of all crimes against the person in 1975 were reported to the police.” Roughly 40% of household crimes and of commercial crimes were reported (Jones, p. 27). Combining this with the data in Table 1 we see that only about 15% of all violent crimes and about l0% of property crimes are even cleared by arrest. Think about that for a minute. These statistics are staggering. They tell us that there is a dire need to improve crime reporting and crime solving procedures. Yet critics of the administration of criminal justice focus much of their attention on plea-bargaining. Look, then, at the Uniform Crime Reports on disposition of persons formally charged by the police (see Table 2).
Plea-bargaining, that is, pleading guilty to a reduced
charge
, is relatively rare. It accounts for the result in only about 1% of all violent crimes and about 0.5% of all crimes. Admittedly, many cases may result in
sentence
bargaining, but a careful analysis of the two tables leads to an inescapable conclusion:.
For every criminal who gets a light sentence due to pleabargaining, there are at least fifty crimes which aren’t reported and at least thirty reported crimes which are not solved.
(figure available in printed form)
(figure available in printed form)
But the skeptics respond, look at Table 2 again. Note that plea-bargaining is most likely to occur in homicides. True, but every crime study has showed that the person committing a so-called crime of passion is actually the person
most
likely to be rehabilitated (Ohlin et al.). Perhaps critics of plea-bargaining, both conservative and radical, should direct their efforts toward defects in criminal justice administration other than plea-bargaining. This may or may not be the conclusion reached by my students as they study plea-bargaining. I simply want to note that my research led me to express reservations about the knee-jerk conservative-liberal position that plea-bargaining is the biggest problem in the criminal justice system.
