How to Heal a Violent Society

The city will be composed of highrise, high-security apartment houses and prospering commercial areas, surrounded by squalor. In the suburbs, behind window grilles and electronic surveillance equipment, the nervous homeowner will always keep his gun handy.

AFTER more than a year of study, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence saw that grim picture of future life in urban America. The vision gave added urgency to the work of the commission's 13 members, who delved into every aspect of their subject from violence on television to gun control and assassinations. Last week, in their final statement, the commissioners called for a drastic change in the nation's priorities.

"We solemnly declare," they said, "that this nation is entering a period in which our people need to be as concerned by internal dangers to our free society as by any probable combination of external threats." The report cites a number of grave social ills, from racial discrimination to "the dislocation of human identity" caused by an affluent society. To combat a rising tide of violence, the commission called on the Government to reduce military spending as soon as the Viet Nam War is over and to increase money for general welfare programs by $20 billion a year.

The commission was unanimous in all but one of its nine reports. It was publicly and sharply split on the issue of civil disobedience--a strategy for achieving social justice that has divided other Americans since the birth of the Republic. A majority of seven members declared that they could not endorse a principle that may encourage anarchy. They suggested that a law should be obeyed, even if it may be unconstitutional, until a few citizens test the issue in the courts. Among the six commissioners who disagreed was Patricia Roberts Harris,* former U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg. Mrs. Harris, a Negro, pointed out that blacks would have made little progress if they had relied on lawful tactics alone. "A nation whose history enshrines the civil disobedience of the Boston Tea Party," she said, "cannot fail to recognize at least the symbolic merit of demonstrated hostility to unjust laws."

Personal Greed. If a majority could not bring itself to support deliberate lawbreaking, the entire group was nonetheless united against those who advocate repression to solve U.S. violence. Appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 after the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, the commission was born amid fears about surging urban crime. The incoming Republican Administration vowed to make use of wiretap legislation, pledged a new war against organized crime and proposed a bill for the nation's capital that would allow preventive detention of potentially dangerous defendants awaiting trial. But the commissioners, headed by Milton S. Eisenhower, adhered to the position that injustice is one of the most important causes of violence. They argued that both individual and group violence--for example, the rampage in Manhattan last week to protest President Nixon's visit--could ultimately be cured only by improvements in the quality of society. Describing the attitudes that weaken respect for U.S. institutions, the commission spoke of a pervasive suspicion among the poor that "personal greed and corruption are prevalent among even the highest public officials."

Eisenhower and his colleagues noted that the nation's prisons, far from reforming convicts, only aggravate their criminal outlook. Above all, they urged the importance of meeting the expectations of the poor for a better life. Failure to do so, they warned, "continues to be a prescription for violence."

Their research also debunked a number of myths about race. In a survey of 17 cities, they found inaccurate the widespread notion that "most violent crime is committed by black offenders against white victims." In two-thirds of homicides and aggravated assaults, and in three-fifths of rapes, the victim is black. A commission task force pointed out that many moderate Negroes support the Black Panthers' view that white America is an imperialist nation that holds blacks in bondage. Whenever black militants are harassed, said the task force, "the anticolonial ideology gains new adherents."

Rapid Change. The commission did not ignore the need for better law enforcement in the U.S. Indeed, it proposed a doubling of public outlays for law enforcement to a total of no less than $5 billion a year. Among other reforms, it recommended a vitally needed merger of police, courts and correction agencies into a single, efficient crime bureau in metropolitan areas.

But the commissioners urged reforms aimed at restoring respect for law among aggrieved groups--for example, by lowering the voting age to 18 and expanding legal services to the poor. They also proposed a law that would empower federal judges to grant injunctions to prevent "the threatened or actual interference" with an individual's right of free speech by other persons.

Although it was well aware of the "bewildering rapidity" of change in the U.S., the commission refused to compromise with those who are frightened by the trend. In its report on group violence, it noted that both the French and Russian revolutions reached "extraordinary peaks of violence because absolutist governments concentrated on efforts to restore order and refused to redress grievances or transfer a sufficient share of power to the emerging lower classes."

*The others: Chairman Milton S. Eisenhower, Terence Cardinal Cooke of New York City, Senator Philip Hart, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham and Psychiatrist Walter Menninger. The majority included Senator Roman Hruska, Congressmen Hale Boggs and William M. McCulloch, Author Eric Hoffer, Attorneys Leon Jaworski and Albert Jenner Jr. and Judge Ernest W. McFarland.

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