Crime and Politics: Big Government's Erratic Campaign for Law and Order.

• Author: Benson, Bruce L.
• Position: Book Reviews

* Crime and Politics: Big Government's Erratic Campaign for Law and Order By Ted Gest New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 256. $24.95 cloth.

In Crime and Politics, Ted Gest chronicles the rapidly expanding but largely ineffective crime-control activities of the U.S. government over the last thirty to forty years. The details he reports regarding the personalities and objectives of many of the key decision makers in Congress and the executive branch demonstrate that he has been a careful observer of the political process for some time. He knows how the system works--or perhaps it would be better to say, how the system does not work, because he clearly documents expensive failure after expensive failure. Gest has no ideological axe to grind. He freely criticizes Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, as well as interest groups of all persuasions.

Gest's basic purpose is to show that, at least in the area of crime-control policy, the federal political and bureaucratic process does not work well, and the results are predictably expensive but generally inefficient, largely ineffective (indeed, programs that might prove to be effective tend to get dropped), and loaded with pork. After his introductory chapter, he carries out this purpose by providing a series of case studies, beginning with chapter 2, on the rise and fall of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, an inept aid-dispensing agency created during Lyndon Johnson's administration and killed under Jimmy Carter's. Next, he examines the "get-tough" trends, such as increasing mandatory sentences, particularly for drug offenses, during the 1980s. This chapter also touches on some other political events of the 1980s, such as the important 1984 crime bill and the creation of the office of "drug czar." Gest makes the interesting but now long-forgotten point that the prime mover behind the creation of the drug czar was Democratic senator Joseph Biden and that the Reagan administration resisted Biden's efforts. William Bennett, the first drug czar, so effEctively captured the public's attention that many people now suppose that the office was created by conservative Republicans. This case illustrates a repeated theme of the book. Often the intentions of those in Congress or in the interest groups that manipulate Congress are not achieved because they fail to recognize (or perhaps do not really care about) the actual consequences of what they are doing or because the political appointees or the bureaucracies involved in implementation have their own agendas that overwhelm anything Congress might do by passing laws. Indeed, in the area of crime control, Congress appears to do little more than push on a very expensive string. In this regard, chapter 4 deals with the rapid federalization of criminal law. The...