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Kevin N. Wright, The Great American Crime Myth (London: Greenwood Press, 1986, £29.95 cloth). Pp. 227. ISBN 0 313 24792 7.

Crime "waves" are endemic to the United States, one of whose most notable journalists, Lincoln Steffens, claims in his Autobiography to have started one. Since sociologists discovered them they have become "moral panics," even ideology, and it is now often argued that fear of crime is more damaging to the social fabric than crime itself. The proportion of Americans afraid to walk alone at night in their own neighbourhoods exceeded 50 percent in the early 1980s, and as Newsweek has reported, "In the public mind, violent crime has come to have a special meaning: not the murders erupting from domestic fights, not the violence of a ghetto Saturday night, not white-collar nor even organized crime, but the spectre of random assault or robbery by vicious strangers." The Great American Crime Myth is a succinct and readable overview of the morbidity and treatment of crime in the United States. Thus Chapters 2 and 3 make sense of the statistics, appraise their reliability, and assess what can, and cannot, be learned from them, while Chapters 7 and 9 describe the trend towards incarceration for the sake not of deterrence or reformation but simply incapacitation. The result of incarceration becoming an end in itself is that between 1979 and 1981 the prison population grew by 30 percent. Nothing better exemplifies the prevailing agnosticism than the view that " there is only one thing government can surely do about criminals. It can lock them up and then be secure in the knowledge that while in jail they are not out committing more crimes" (New York Magazine). There is no single myth to be demythologized but eleven, some of which might be popular myths (that, for example, crime "is becoming quantitively and qualititively worse") but others of which are only myths in that they are components of a conventional wisdom rendered suspect by further inquiry (that, for example, the application of additional resources to crime control is bound to have a beneficial impact). This dismal catalogue of misapprehension is indicative of the extent to which criminology is now apt to attend not so much to the "causes" of crime as to the irrationalities in the popular response to crime, and the public policies which are a product of those irrationalities. This is a worthwhile undertaking, scientific as well as therapeutic, but it is also, in its own way, a kind of agnosticism (or "minimalism") which expects very little of the criminal justice system. Crime is the major dysfunction of American society, a cost both of individualism and ethnic pluralism, in that both militate against that social solidarity which in comparative perspective (most notably in comparison with Japan) would seem to be the necessary precondition of a low crime rate, with improved policing and penal policy little better than palliatives. (As the eminent American criminologist, Edwin H. Sutherland, once put it, "When the mores are adequate, laws are unnecessary; when the mores are inadequate, the laws are ineffective.") Kevin N. Wright summarizes the facts and values of American criminal justice in the 1980s in a way which confirms the agnosticism implicit in the view that "The system is doing as well as it can" (p. 216).