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35 Fordham L. Rev. 1 (1966-1967)
Arrests for Public Intoxication

handle is hein.journals/flr35 and id is 19 raw text is: ARRESTS FOR PUBLIC INTOXICATION JOHN M. MURTAGH* D AY in, and day out, the police pick up drunks on the street-filthy, battered, sick, unutterably pathetic-and lock them up in the drunk tank. They are then released or sentenced to a short term in jail, only to be picked up again soon after their release. At any one time, more than half of the inmates of county jails are persons committed for public in- toxication.1 It has been urged that we abandon the indiscriminate arrest of drunken derelicts.2 Is this desirable? Is it enough? Would we be solving a problem -or would we be ignoring one? I. ARRESTS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES Wholesale arrests of any kind have a destructive effect on the ad- ministration of justice. This is what Dean Edward L. Barrett, Jr., of the University of California Law School at Davis had in mind when he in- quired whether or not the quality of justice can be maintained in view of mass-production enforcement of the criminal law.3 Mass-production enforcement is nowhere more evident than in ar- rests for public intoxication. Annually, in the United States, some two million, or fully one-third of all arrests, are for drunkenness.5 The re- sulting crowding in courts and prisons affects the efficiency of the entire criminal process.6 And, aside from a few notable exceptions, the 'revolv- ing door jails' to which most alcoholic offenders are sent in the United States are a national disgrace. Many of the arrests are made on skid row-the blocks of misery where society's derelicts collect in cities across the nation-on Mission Street * Administrative Judge, N.Y.C. Criminal Court. 1. McCormick, Correctional View on Alcohol, Alcoholism and Crime, 9 Crime & Delin- quency 1, 19-20 (1963). 2. Pittman & Gordon, Revolving Door; A Study of the Chronic Police Case Inebriate 1, 42, 51-52, 139-41 (1958) ; Address by Presiding Justice Botein, Conference on the Handling of Offenders in the City of New York, January 26, 1965; Address by Judge Murtagh, Annual Conference of the National Committee on Alcoholism, March 29, 1956; Rubington, The Chronic Drunkenness Offender, 315 Annals 65, 66-67 (1958). 3. American Assembly, Columbia University, The Courts, the Public and the Law Ex- plosion 85 (1965). 4. Id. at 103. 5. Hearings on S. 1792 and S. 1825 Before an Ad Hoc Subcommittee of the Senate Com- mittee on the judiciary, 89th Cong., 1st Ses. 9 (1965) (statement of Attorney General Katzenbach); Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Annual Crime Reports 120 (1965). 6. Hearings on S. 1792 and S. 1825, supra note 5. 7. McCormick, supra note 1, at 15.