James J. Kilpatrick

What crimes are crimes?

WASHINGTON The National Crime Commission has firmly recommended that drunkenness, vagrancy and minor traffic offenses be "decriminalized." In more guarded language, the commission suggested that certain laws as to sexual behavior be "reevaluated."

Let us ponder to-

gether.

These recommen-

dations, I submit, are generally

sound

sound as a matter of law, and sound also as a

KILPATRICK

matter of political theory. But some of the proposals seriously strain the consistency of our philosophy, and their public acceptance will demand an almost superhuman suspension of prejudice and distaste.

Take the easiest one first. The crime commission → more accurately known as the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals recommended that all minor traffic offenses "be made infractions subject to administrative disposition.'

""

SURELY THERE can be little quarrel with this proposal. Such offenses now clog our courts. So long as a right of appeal is preserved, the courts should be relieved of their original jurisdiction in these cases.

The commission also recommended that drunkenness "in and of itself should not continue to be treated as a crime." Every official body that has studied crime and the courts in recent years has reached the same conclusion: It costs a fortune to arrest drunks, try them and jail them and the criminal process accomplishes virtually nothing. A more enlightened policy would make medical care available to the alcoholic, and thus free the courts of much of the burden caused by 1.4 million arrests for drunkenness each year.

Yet one pauses. If public drunks were simply quiet, unoffending drunks, the recommendation could be accepted without reservation. Experience tells us otherwise. The public drunk ordinarily is disorderly — the familiar charge is "D & D" and the machinery of law enforcement is not geared for fine distinctions. Drunks should be treated, but disorder should be punished; it's not easy to deal with one without the other.

The commission tiptoed uncertainly around such issues as "pornography, prostitution and sexual acts between consenting adults in private." It did not necessarily recommend that these offenses be decriminalized, but it urged that states re-evaluate their laws in these fields.

HERE THE PROBLEMS are far more difficult. The conservative philosophy holds that the state ought not to interfere with private conduct, so long as that conduct does no harm to society; but the conservative tends to agree that society has the right to preserve a quality of community life that reflects what we vaguely term "public morals."

The two precepts cannot always be resolved consistently. For example: It seems to me absurd to keep laws on the books that prohibit the performance in private of certain sexual acts between man and woman.

These laws I would abolish. In theory, the same tolerant attitude should apply to laws that prohibit homosexual acts, but if I were a legislator, these laws I would retain. Why? I cannot explain why. Some standards of normalcy, it seems to me, should be maintained by law, even if this means the impairment of personal freedom.

One grapples in vain with these issues. Gambling may be an evilso the public morality teaches us but criminal sanctions against gambling make a travesty of the law. Vagrancy statutes are grossly abused and capriciously enforced, but they serve a useful public purpose all the same. The commission's report solves none of these questions, but it does compel us to reflect upon "crime." What makes an act "criminal"? And why?

✪ Washington Star-News Syndicate, Inc.