ABOUT a year ago certain good citizens of Cleveland, Ohio, were revolted by the palpable and flagrant abuses in the administration of criminal justice in their city. Among other things a municipal magistrate was accused of murder and when he was tried on the indictment the court was rendered helpless and prostrate by obvious perjury. At the same time the “crime wave” called the attention of the community to the large proportion of probable criminals who in one way or another were escaping punishment. These good citizens decided that the reputation of Cleveland and the safety of property and person in that city demanded an attempt at reform, and in order to find out what the scope and the nature of the remedy should be they initiated an investigation into the existing administration of criminal justice in Cleveland. This investigation they placed in the hands of Professors Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School. The Cleveland Foundation sponsored and financed it and its results are now being published in a series of reports. They include a section on the Criminal Courts by Reginald Heber Smith and Herbert B. Ehrmann, on Prosecution by Alfred Bettman, on the Police by Raymond Fosdick, on the Treatment of the Convicted by Burdette G. Lewis, on Medical Science and Criminal Justice by Dr. Herman M. Adler, on Newspaper and Criminal Justice by M. K. Wisehart, and on Legal Education of the Criminal Bar by Albert M. Kales. The final section will consist of a summary and interpretation of the results of the inquiry by Roscoe Pound.
Two of these sections are already off the press and are purchasable from the Cleveland Foundation at 1202 Swetland Building, Cleveland. About November they will be all available in one volume. A final estimate of the value of the inquiry will have to wait until all the separate sections are published and collected, but the sections which are already available enable us to place a preliminary estimate upon the value of the investigation. They provide a sufficient excuse for calling attention to its publication and for venturing some general remarks upon its method and scope.
Americans have small reason to feel proud of the administration of criminal justice in the United States. Its inadequacy is notorious. The volume of crime is greater than that of any other civilized country, and an enormously large proportion of the criminals escape the penalties provided by American law. Spasmodic protests are occasionally raised against some peculiarly intolerable consequence or illustration of failure, but they are convulsive and superficial. They usually exhaust themselves with a few days emotional expression in newspaper headlines or at best with the attempt to throw out of office some corrupt police official, some incompetent prosecuting attorney or some offensive judge. They do not take account of the seriousness of the failure. There is no chance of repairing it as long as the doctors assume it to be personal and fugitive in its origin. Practically all over the country the administration of criminal justice is at best uncertain and tardy and at worst privileged, slip-shod or downright corrupt. There is a vast discrepancy between what the American nation seeks to accomplish with its statutes, police departments and courts in the way of protecting the communities against crime and either punishing or reforming the convicted criminal, and what it actually does accomplish. This discrepancy constitutes the point of departure for any thoroughgoing and illuminating investigation. It is vain to consider remedies unless the doctors are agreed upon a diagnosis of the failure which is adequate to explain its nature and scope.
This is what the Cleveland Foundation inquiry proposes to make. On the first page of the first report the authors warn their readers against ascribing “the Cleveland failure to individuals alone, although there has been exploitation by those whose elimination would have a salutary effect. . . . The conditions which make exploitation possible must be removed before permanent improvements can be effected. These conditions are, first, the persistence of a system of criminal justice become obsolete and wholly inadequate through the rapid growth of urban population and modern industrial life, and second, the unorganized, uninformed and socially indifferent attitude of the more intelligent portion of the citizenship, brought about by the concentration on material prosperity to the exclusion of civic life.” The investigation becomes, consequently, an analysis of crime, and the detection, the conviction, the punishment and the reform of criminals in relation to the economic behavior and moral standards of the community.