A Citizen Looks at Crime

Abstract

The urban revolution, the social effects of the population explosion, concentration in huge cities, and the mobility of modern society all tend to make people regard themselves as insignificant and helpless. You have to understand many such things in order to think logically about social disorganization and its ugliest manifestation—crime. I wonder about the four-martini expense account lunch, the lost weekend in suburbia, the divorce rate, and the indications of immorality I see in widespread cheating of the tax system. What does all this mean to crime? Crime can be successfully combated only through a joining of forces by all the leadership elements who are interested in adjusting the nation to its new growth. This will involve an expansion of both public and private services. It will demand a new approach, one calling for total social planning and far more coordination than has so far been attempted. It may also require new social units within the urban mass— small communities of some sort that can retain human individ uality and personal responsibility.