Selective Incapacitation and the Serious Offender

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one ofthy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. Matthew 5. 30 The great War on Pover,ty of the 1960s focused on the root causes of crime, unemployment, lack of education, and discrimination. It was eventually agreed that the War on Poverty failed as a crime control program, and the focus of policy shifted toward more proximate causes of crime. Infact, it seems safe to say that since the 1960s, the United States has looked primarily to the criminal justice system to solve its crime problem. With the 1990s upon us, what can we say about the success of crime control policies that rely on the criminal justice system? The picture, taken one approach or program at a time, is not good. It is now generally agreed that the criminal justice system fails to rehabilitate offenders, to make them less likely to commit criminal acts as a result of treatment or training; that the system fails to deter potential offenders, to make them less likely to commit criminal acts out of fear of penal sanctions; and that such programs as increased police patrols, reinstatement of the death penalty, and modification of the exclusionary rule are unlikely to have much effect on crime, at least within the limits imposed on them by reasonable assessments of their costs.