 What your country can do. Two, one, zero. The United States entered the 1960s quietly. Hamburger sold for 52 cents a pound. Eight out of ten American households had television sets. There were a few ripples in the quiet. Gary Powers U2 was shot down over Russia. Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe at the United Nations. The United States had several hundred military advisors in South Vietnam. But crime was not a national concern, and Gallup didn't even bother to poll people on the issue. There was an occasional headline. Carol Chessman was finally executed at San Quentin in 1960, and newspapers carrying the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report showed crime rates steadily climbing. But the American people weren't worried. The Supreme Court of the United States under Chief Justice Earl Warren decided the 1961 case of MAP vs. Ohio, the first in a series of landmark decisions which extended the Bill of Rights protections at state and local levels of the criminal justice process. At about the same time, the American Bar Association began a 10-year program to develop standards for criminal justice, an effort that Chief Justice Warren Berger would later call the single most comprehensive undertaking in the field of criminal justice attempted by the American legal profession in our national history. But for the most part, the American people and their leaders were concerned with other issues, freedom and equality. The realities, however, did not keep pace with the rhetoric. In June of 1963, President Kennedy stood near a wall in Berlin and said, Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, who are free? In August, Martin Luther King stood at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said, I have a dream. Then suddenly, violence erupted. President Kennedy was assassinated. For the first time in American history, it became a federal offense to kill a president of the United States. Civil rights demonstrators confronted Selma police and their dogs. Widespread burning and looting was triggered when a white policeman arrested a young black for speeding and drinking in Watts. Atlanta, Newark, Detroit, Washington. Within two years, nearly 150 American cities were involved. Then student demonstrations boiled over. It had been a tumultuous eight years, handgun sales increased fourfold. The FBI reported that from 1960 to 1968, serious crime doubled. By 1968, crime had become the number one domestic worry. But in a series of Supreme Court opinions, a number of state court convictions were overturned. Griffin versus Illinois. Gideon versus Wainwright. Escobedo versus Illinois. United States versus Wade. And finally, the case that made the front pages, Miranda versus Arizona. The Miranda case questioning the constitutionality of police interrogation practices applied the right against self-incrimination. Then a call for a sweeping reform came from the President's National Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. It urged reforms not only in police courts and corrections, but also in housing, education, and employment. Officials of the criminal justice system, it said, must be honest about the system's shortcomings with the public and with themselves. They must be bold. That same year, 1968, Congress passed the Safe Streets Act, stating, Congress finds that the high incidence of crime threatens the peace, security, and general welfare of the nation and its citizens. Congress finds further that crime is essentially a local problem that must be dealt with by state and local governments. This second finding had roots in the nation's earliest beginnings. It all began without a plan 200 years ago, 13 colonies of less than 3 million people. Together they declared, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They rebelled, they fought, they won. They hammered out a constitution. Amendments were added to safeguard those inalienable rights. The right to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. The right not to be a witness against one's own self. And the right to due process of law. The right to a speedy and public trial and impartial jury and the assistance of counsel. Excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted. The administration of justice and control of crime was local, not a national responsibility. There was no American criminal justice system. The serious crime of those times was the British government's violation of individual rights. There was an American mood in reaction to the oppression under which they had lived against too many laws and too harsh penalties. At a time when England had 350 offenses carrying a death penalty, Pennsylvania criminal law reduced the number of capital offenses to one, first-degree murder. But laws varied from state to state. The judicial decision-making process also varied from state to state and from town to town. The legislature itself might hear cases, specially appointed assistants, magistrates, or justices of the peace often heard and adjudicated both civil and criminal cases. Policing took many forms. The night watch and the rattle watch were civilians appointed by town government to patrol the streets at night, carrying bells or rattles to arouse the citizenry in the event of fire or other disorder. In other areas, law enforcement was provided by the military. If a military fort was nearby, in the backwoods, there was no organized law enforcement except for the kind volunteered by Charles Lynch, a Virginia farmer who gave American justice a new word, lynching. Growing pains plagued the 1800s. By the end of that century, there were 45 states, 14 times as many people, not all were white nor Anglo-Saxon. A significant Supreme Court decision early in this century, Marbury v. Madison, declared the Supreme Court's authority to avoid an act of Congress if in the court's opinion the act is inconsistent with the Constitution. Only four amendments were added to the Constitution during this 100 years. One abolished slavery. The 14th amendment declared that no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens, nor shall any state deprive any persons of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor denied to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. At the beginning of the 1800s, jails were used for vagrants and beggars and to whole persons awaiting trial, but generally not for punishment. However, when Pennsylvania reduced the number of offenses with a death penalty to one, it prescribed imprisonment for other serious offenses. A cell block in Pennsylvania's Walnut Street Jail became the first penitentiary for the Commonwealth. The penitentiary concept was an American contribution to the criminal justice process. It was invented as a more humane alternative to capital and corporal punishment and as a means of providing the criminal an opportunity to reform his ways. European penologists came to America to study our new prisons and to copy them. In the beginning, these prisons were the pride of the community as their architecture reflected. Meanwhile, developments in the field of criminal law and procedure were sporadic. A pioneering and rapidly expanding nation had little time for precise procedures. Those skilled in the law already had their hands full with land disputes and with constitutional issues like slavery and secession or with special interest issues like the railroads. In the middle of the century, an attorney, David Dudley Field, drafted a code of penal law later adopted by 17 states. During this century, the growing nation in thrall with Jacksonian democratic ideals began to elect its judges. New courts were created haphazardly as the need arose. Their location often depended as much on how far a circuit judge could go by horseback in a single day. Policing took some new twists, not all for the better. The larger eastern cities expanded their watch systems. Mid-century urban riots created new problems and a new role for the police watch. The Wild West produced lawmen who were folk heroes like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. If not in the West, then in the East where their heroics were recounted. A new image emerged of what a policeman ought to be. A big, tough, no-nonsense, courageous man who knew how to use a gun. When the military was not around, vigilance committees filled the vacuum in the West. Not bothering with jurisdictional boundaries or legal niceties, the newly formed Private Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago quickly gained a national reputation for effectiveness, filling the need that local police could not. Corruption plagued big city policing in the latter 1800s. It was a time of city political bosses. Policemen often found an either or choice. Either cooperate with the grafting politicians and ignore obvious violations of the law or look for another job. The Pendleton Act of 1883, creating a civil service system, began to undercut more flagrant abuses in the spoil system. Slowly, merit systems began to filter down to state and local government. Civil service did not eliminate corruption. It did, however, provide a framework in which public service, as a career or profession, could survive. In criminal justice fields, professional organizations began to sprout up. In 1871, St. Louis hosted a national meeting for heads of city police agencies to adopt a common code of rules. The American Correctional Association was founded in 1870. The American Bar Association in 1878. In the last ten years of the century, some 1200 persons were executed, nine out of ten by county governments, not the states. There were more lynchings than official execution. Seven out of ten of those lynched were blacks. The federal government became increasingly involved in law enforcement. J. Edgar Hoover was named ahead the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1924. Other federal agencies developed or increased enforcement divisions, Internal Revenue and the Treasury Department. Seven amendments to the Constitution were added. Two involved alcohol. The 18th Amendment prohibited the making, selling, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. The 21st Amendment, an admission of defeat, 14 years later repeal the Prohibition Amendment. Prohibition laws were enforced unevenly. Corruption thrived. Circumventing prohibition became big business and organized crime arose. Disobeying the law also became a national pastime. In the 20s, professional gangs organized and at times fought their own internal wars. Arm robberies multiplied, aided as much by the automobile as by automatic weapons. Local and state police hampered by jurisdictional boundaries and varying laws were unable to cope with the organized lawlessness of the 20s. Following the Lindbergh kidnapping, that offense became a federal crime as did other gangland-type crimes given the FBI intensive new enforcement powers. The FBI went after its public enemy number one. Big-name criminals began to fall. John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Babyface Nelson, a national commission on law observance and enforcement under George Wickersham concluded that prohibition was not being enforced because basically it was unenforceable. That conclusion made it a controversial report. Many other recommendations as a result went unheralded and unimplemented. The national problem of juvenile delinquency, corrosive effects of corruption on politics and local police, better use of probation and parole, rehabilitation program, trained full-time prosecutors and a state-based unified judicial organization. For the first time, a national report of major significance looked at the conglomeration of criminal justice processes and practices as a system. Scattered improvements in this so-called criminal justice system began to appear. A new quality of local policing emerged in several cities. New Jersey's Judge Arthur Vanderbilt called for court reform. States began revising outdated criminal procedures and codifying their criminal laws. Several states unified their court systems and introduced new ways of selecting judges. The nation's crime problem did not disappear with the enactment of the Safe Streets legislation in 1968, neither did the problem of its criminal justice system. The NAP Commission revealed in 1972 that a sizable majority of New York's policemen were themselves involved in wrongdoing. The trial of the so-called Chicago 7, of those accused of instigating the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention, caused concern in many circles and provoked the ABA to issue standards on a judge's role in dealing with trial disruptions. The Watergate burglary exposed corruption in the office of the President and in the highest places in the federal law enforcement structure. In eight years under the Safe Streets Act, neither $4 billion in federal anti-crime funds have been pumped into police, court, and correctional agencies. But there is controversy as to whether the money was spent, and ultimately, whether money alone can solve the tangled problems of criminal justice. The rights of criminal defendants are safeguarded today as never before by a system of strong legal protections for defendants' rights and by new programs to provide free defense counsel for the poor. But despite improvements within the criminal justice system, serious problems remain. Chief Justice Berger voiced the feeling of many who said recently, our justice is not speedy and our communities are not safe. Statistics bear him out. For every 100 serious index crimes being committed today, only 50 are being reported. Police are making just 10 arrests for those 100 serious crimes. Four out of five convictions in serious crimes are obtained by plea bargaining, not by the established jury trial system. The flow of offenders in and out of the correctional process remains steady, but two out of every three who come out will commit more serious crimes. The third century of criminal justice is beginning under a cloud of a growing discontent. More and more people in the system and outside are asking, can our criminal justice system, as we know it, really do anything to control crime? Can it protect those enable rights guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution? Can it do both at the same time?