It's all the rage : crime and culture /

Kaminer--a social critic uniquely gifted for pointing out flawed ideas on all sides of controversies--here considers one of the great divides between liberals and conservatives, what to do about violent crime. She spends two thirds of the book on capital punishment, the rest on federal crime-fighting and the national debate over values. She immediately announces her opposition to the death penalty but critiques it on procedural and psychological rather than moral grounds: it's expensive, time-consuming, and liable to all manner of errors; and the passion for it is often hypocritical, for those who brook no mitigating circumstances in the cases of capital offenders very often, she says, want their own noncriminal trespasses not just forgiven but--as witness the success of the recovery and self-esteem movement--not even considered trespasses. Fear has made us mean-spirited with a vengeance, Kaminer implies, as evidenced also by "three strikes and you're out" and mandatory sentencing laws. No one concerned about crime policy should miss Kaminer's trenchant analysis, even though it ignores religious objections to capital punishment. --Ray Olson

Kaminer segues from I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional to assess with insight and irony contradictions in our criminal justice system. ``[W]e tend to alternate between judging too harshly... and not judging at all,'' she concludes, finding that ``virtue talk'' on character reform is applied mainly to issues like crime and welfare but not to other policy areas. We have trouble punishing ``guilty victims'' like Lorena Bobbitt, who in 1994 was exonerated for mutilating her abusive husband, and Kaminer wisely suggests that sympathy be left for sentencing. She finds a telling contradiction in our ``popular obsession with child abuse'' and our endorsement of the caning administered by Singapore in 1994 to an American teenager convicted of vandalism. She argues that ``victims' rights'' can overwhelm public justice. A large chunk of the book concerns the death penalty; Kaminer traces the evolution of the reasons people support the death penalty from deterrence to retribution; she scores the judicial system's acceptance of unfair prosecutions; and she suggests that, until more people have direct experience with capital trials, the system will stand. This book, however, is hardly comprehensive: Kaminer could have better explored such issues as the battered-wife defense, as well as international arguments about crime and culture. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In examining the current American obsession with crime and punishment, Kaminer (I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, 1992, etc.) achieves a difficult feat. While mentioning the Menendez brothers, Lorena Bobbitt, the L.A. riots, and O.J., she actually manages to be thoughtful. Kaminer argues that, whether in the courtroom or the talk-show studio, the way we talk about guilt and responsibility has strayed far from common sense. ``Our notions of accountability are confused in part because we have immodest expectations of justice. We want it to be clear and final and true. We want people to be either victims or victimizers, without recognizing that many of us are both.'' She also makes a strong case that those willing to excuse acts of violence on the grounds of prior victimization have more in common than they would like to think with those who want to lock 'em all up and throw away the key. ``We may deplore these cases when they frighten us, but we revel in them when they make us feel avenged.''