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24 Crime & Delinquency 1 (1978)

handle is hein.journals/cadq24 and id is 1 raw text is: Reexamining the President's Crime Commission The Challenge of Crime n a Free Society after Ten Years Samuel Walker In the ten years following the initial publication of the report of the Presi- dent's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, we have seen significant changes in criminal justice. Though widely con- sulted today, the report has become out of date. As a reference work, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (1967) remains valuable, but it no longer reflects the dominant issues in American criminal justice. The single most important change over the past decade has been the decline in faith in the idea of rehabilitation. The report of the President's Crime Commission reflected the belief that alternative correctional programs could effectively attack the causes of crime; now, however, rehabilitation has become an unpopular goal. The debate today over deterrence and the growing interest in determinate sentencing are phenomena unforeseen by the commission's report. These changes in criminal justice are, in part, a result of the growing public frustration over the continued rise in the rate of violent crime. Another significant change-for which the President's Crime Commission is partially responsible-is the increased awareness of the criminal justice system as a system. The development of a federal justice agency and the emergence of a new academic discipline of criminal justice represent the new strategy of approaching criminal justice as a un- ified system. In 1967 the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Ad- ninistration of Justice issued its report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free ociety. This was the first comprehensive survey of the state of criminal ustice since the publication of the Wickersham Commission reports in 1931. The President's Crime Commission, as it was popularly known, had labored or two years to produce not only The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, SAMUEL WALKER is Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, University f Nebraska at Omaha. The author would like to acknowledge Gordon and C. Shelia Misner for their comments and riticism of an earlier draft of this article. Research for this article was supported in part by LEAA ;rants No. 72-CD-99-0002 and No. 73-CD-99-0002. CRIME & DELINQUENCY, January 1978 1