The New Republic

“ When an American committee starts to investigate some one of the many creaks in the national machine, it usually agrees in the beginning not to be too thorough and disagreeable and not to risk the success and popularity of its report by raising too many or too bitterly controversial questions. They shrink from exposing more of the truth than is in their opinion politically available and desirable. The directors of the Cleveland Survey have fortunately worked on a different assumption. ”

“ This industrialism hampers society in dealing satisfactorily with crime, because it has concentrated the attention of the more intelligent of its citizens upon “material prosperity” and blinded them to the obligations of citizenship. If the inquiry substantiates these statements, it will obviously prove to be as illuminating and as indispensable to a public-spirited resident of Worcester, Grand Rapids, San Francisco or New York as it is to a resident of Cleveland. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is a psychiatrist and he will consider criminal justice as it is now practiced in the light of the knowledge which has recently been acquired about both the normal and abnormal behavior of the human soul. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They have assumed, just as a psychoanalyst would assume in treating a case of mental pathology, that unless they can dig up an approximation to the whole truth, their analytic method is of doubtful value. ”

“ When it is forced upon them their stomachs may be too weak to retain it, but in that case they must not expect to bring knowledge to their aid in repairing their social failures. Knowledge is a hard taskmaster. ”

“ The cure depends primarily on the ability of the doctor to discover the psychological origin of the aberration and the willingness of the patient candidly and fearlessly to recognize and act on the discovery. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”