1 Thomas E. Cronin, Tania Z. Cronin, & Michael E. Milakovich, U.S. v. Crime in the Streets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). While there is no magic about this precise period, 1964 was the year that Barry Goldwater chose to make crime an issue in the presidential campaign. It was also at about this time that the official crime rate began a steep climb and that the “politics of protest” began to spread from civil rights to other policy areas. By 1980 the conservative forces identified with the politics of law and order had scored impressive political victories, the crime rate had leveled off, and street crime seemed to be on the wane as a significant political issue.Google Scholar

2 We are grateful to David Nelken who helped us to understand this element of accountability.Google Scholar

3 Lucian W. Pye, Political Culture, in David Sills, ed., 12 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 218 (New York: Macmillan, 1968).Google Scholar

4 Herbert L. Packer, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction 149–73 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968) (“Packer, Limits”).Google Scholar

5 Id. at 173.Google Scholar

6 Id. at 154.Google Scholar

7 Id. at 154–58.Google Scholar

8 Id, at 155.Google Scholar

9 Id. at 155–56.Google Scholar

10 Franz Leopold Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State 28 (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957). See also Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Law in Modem Society 52–54 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

11 Alexander Bickel, The Morality of Consent 5 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

12 Packer, Limits at 156 (cited in note 4).Google Scholar

13 Neumann, at 31.Google Scholar

14 Packer, Limits at 159 & 163 (cited in note 4).Google Scholar

15 Id. at 154–55.Google Scholar

16 Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Law and Order: Street Crime and Public Policy 65–66 (New York: Longman, 1984) (“Scheingold”).Google Scholar

17 Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics 67 (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1967).Google Scholar

18 James Eisenstein & Herbert Jacob, Felony Justice: An Organizational Analysis of Criminal Courts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977) (“Eisenstein & Jacob, Felony Justice”).Google Scholar

19 Cf. Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1967); Isaac Balbus, The Dialectics of Legal Repression: Black Rebels Before the American Criminal Court (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1977); Richard Quinney, The Social Reality of Crime (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).Google Scholar

20 Collecting data on filing practices presented some problems. The figures on criminal charges filed in the county court system are for cases where a charge is filed and the case is disposed of in the same calendar year. Thus we have omitted cases where a charge may have been filed in one year but the case was not resolved until a subsequent year. All data on filings and on sentencing come from the Annual Reports of the Prosecuting Attorney of Park County. Over the time period of this study, as a result of new programs and procedures and a shift to computerized recordkeeping, there were several changes in reporting practices of the prosecutor's office. The changes that most directly affected our data collection resulted from the enactment of a new state criminal code on July 1, 1976, which altered the classification of several types of crimes. The annual report for 1976 separates charges filed under the old criminal code from those filed under the new code. As much as possible, we have attempted to group the data into types of crimes according to their original classifications (e.g., first-degree murder, manslaughter, negligent homicide). We did, however, merge crimes from new and old criminal code classifications—e.g., “aggravated first-degree murder” charges (new code) were counted in the first-degree murder charges (new and old codes). Every effort was made to preserve consistency across crime categories for our quantitative analysis.Google Scholar

21 The study is of the years 1964–80, but the quantitative data were available only through 1977.Google Scholar

22 James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime 3–5 (rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1985). This theme is more prominent in the first edition of Thinking About Crime 72–83 (New York: Vintage, 1977).Google Scholar

23 Scheingold at 54–56 (cited in note 16).Google Scholar

24 Eisenstein & Jacob, Felony Justice (cited in note 18); Abraham Blumberg, Criminal Justice: Issues and Ironies (2d ed. New York: New Directions, 1979).Google Scholar

25 National crime rates come from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, and local crime rates from figures collected by the Cedar City police department. Their published annual reports tally all Part I offenses reported to the police. To calculate the city crime rate (per one hundred thousand), we divided the reported Part I crimes by the city population of that year. We employed media attention to crime as a surrogate for public concern. Because public opinion surveys were not available and because we believe that the media tend to influence and reflect public attitudes, this seemed to be a reasonable, if problematic, strategy. The index employed here is based on the yearly total of newspaper articles related to criminal justice policy that appeared in the local newspaper with the largest circulation. Policy articles, as opposed to straight crime reporting, seemed the better indicator of politically relevant public concern. For details, see Lynne A. Gressett & Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Law and Order: Politicizing Amorphous Public Concerns (paper prepared for presentation at 1984 Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.).Google Scholar

26 Scheingold at 7677 (cited in note 16).Google Scholar

27 Id. at 38–49.Google Scholar

28 Had we tested for the effects of jail and prison capacity, it seems likely that further weight would lave been added to the importance of organizational explanations.Google Scholar

29 Sentencing is, of course, not the sole responsibility of prosecutors. The judges' contribution will be considered in the next section. Because of changes in recording practices our data do not include Steele's last year (1978) or 1979 and 1980, when a new prosecutor, Griffin, was elected. There is, however, reason to believe that no significant policy changes were undertaken during those three years. Griffin has been one of Steele's two top lieutenants, and the other one, Dofler, remained chief criminal deputy.Google Scholar

30 Scheingold at 3849 (cited in note 16).Google Scholar

31 Park County Office of the Prosecuting Attorney, Annual Report, 1978, at 5.Google Scholar

32 Even during the 1970 general election, Steele resisted the considerable temptation to embrace he politics of law and order. Steele's opponent was a liberal Democrat who won his primary against a prominent black attorney by stressing the connection between law enforcement and social justice—promising an office “that attempts to bring about change in our society to accomplish social justice for 11 the people rather than … resists change” (as reported in a local news story). In the background was Phillips's failure to prosecute a police officer who had killed a young black man—this despite a two to one decision by a coroner's jury that the police officer had used “criminal means.” The case was a lightning rod for community sentiment, since the young black was shot running away from a post office where he allegedly had planted a bomb. Thus racial tension and law-and-order concerns were inextrically linked. In any case, there was obviously an opportunity in the general election for Steele to stake out some aw-and-order turf had he wished to do so. There was also an incentive to do so, because it was a close and hard-fought campaign, with Steele's final margin of victory so close that there was a recount. Finally, there was not much to be gained by continuing to hammer away at the corruption issue against an opponent who had not been tarred by the payoff brush. Nonetheless the campaign was relatively moderate, with the two candidates so closely aligned that the more conservative of the city's two newspapers called it a “campaign of subleties.” There is a somewhat paradoxical lesson to be drawn from this campaign. Although the campaign was misleading in important ways, the electorate did get what it was promised.Google Scholar

33 David Sudnow, Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the Penal Code in a Public Defender's Office, 12 Soc. Probs. 255 (1965); Douglas W. Maynard, Defendant Attributes in Plea Bargaining: Notes on the Modeling of Sentencing Decisions, 29 Soc. Probs. 347 (1982); W. Boyd Littrell, Bureaucratic Justice: Police, Prosecutors, and Plea Bargaining 153 (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1979).Google Scholar

34 For what it's worth, retained defense counsel with whom we spoke warned against taking announced policy changes at face value. They were inclined to believe that they could ordinarily adapt to new policies without disadvantaging their clients. The public defender, in contrast, acknowledged that their bargaining position tended to wax and wane with changes in the policy climate. Given the favorable resource differential of retained counsel, it is reasonable to believe that they would be better insulated from the adverse impact of policy change than public defenders.Google Scholar

35 Our interviews suggest that data on motions to suppress evidence would probably be the most sensitive indicator of politicization, but such data are not available. It might also be true that sentencing following trials might be more independently derived, and such data are available for some of the years included in our study. At this writing, we are still trying to determine whether trial sentencing will yield different results.Google Scholar

36 Herbert Jacob, The Frustration of Policy: Responses to Crime by American Cities (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984).Google Scholar

37 Id, at 165.Google Scholar

38 Id. at 18–24.Google Scholar

39 Scheingold, at 4 (cited in note 16)).Google Scholar