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Federal Government and Crime

The seriousness of the crime problem combined with the inability of local officials to cope with it led to increased involvement by the national government. President Herbert Hoover in 1929 created the Wickersham Commission (named after Attorney General George Wickersham, who chaired it) to conduct the first "comprehensive survey of American criminal justice at the national level." 21 Roscoe Pound was also a member of the commission, and he once again brought his sociological perspective to bear on the problem of crime. The commission was charged, among other tasks, with determining whether, given the level of gangland violence, repeal of Prohibition was in order. The commission failed to resolve the Prohibition issue and most of its fourteen volumes received little attention as the effects of the Great Depression rolled over the country.

The commission's findings were nonetheless important in two ways. First, by directing public and police attention to the use of "third-degree" interrogation tactics against criminal suspects, the commission lent the imprimatur of federal authority to more professional (and legal) police practices. Second, in the midst of skepticism heaped at the local level on the rehabilitative ideal, the commission endorsed a sociological perspective on criminal behavior that reaffirmed the importance of individualized correctional treatment. The commission condemned the existing prison system and urged probation and parole as the only rational and humane solution to the problems of crime. The Wickersham Commission's report marked the beginning of yet another cycle of correctional reform, one that peaked in the 1960s.

The penetration of the federal government into criminal justice matters occurred in other ways. For example, through the efforts of Sanford Bates, whom President Hoover in 1929 appointed to head the new U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the federal correctional system set the standard by which state programs were judged over the next half- century.

Growing populations in federal prisons resulted from expanded federal jurisdiction and enforcement. A mobile society made crime a national problem that local and state governments alone were helpless to solve. Progressives relied on an enhanced conception of the federal police power to permit Congress to criminalize the movement of lottery tickets and stolen automobiles in interstate commerce. During the 1930s, for example, it passed the "Lindbergh Law" ( 1932) making kidnapping a federal offense, the Fugitive Felon Law ( 1933) making it a federal crime to cross state lines to avoid prosecution, the Interstate Theft Act ( 1934) expanding federal control over the inter

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state transportation of stolen goods, and the Marijuana Tax Act ( 1937) establishing penalties for the sale and possession of the drug.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 689


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