Crime has become a major focus of public attention in the United States. Not white collar crime like embezzlement or tax fraud, nor crimes of passion, nor even the organized crime of professional gangsters. The public is gripped by newspaper accounts of crimes which endanger the physical safety of the population: robbery, housebreaking, assault, rape, and murder. Preoccupation with crime pervades every level of discussion; indeed, when Senator Goldwater made “crime in the streets” a major issue in his ill-fated campaign for the Presidency in 1964, he touched upon a nerve that is very raw in many Americans. Today, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a remarkable account of an apparently senseless robbery and murder, is storming the best-seller lists in our book stores.

After my sixteen years on the bench, it seems to me that it is usually not difficult to identify the class from which perpetrators of urban crimes of violence come. Almost all of the persons accused of this category of crime come from the bottom of society's barrel. They are the ignorant, the ill-educated, the unemployed, and often the unemployable. In a society which prides itself on opportunity and wealth, they have been brought up in terrible poverty. Few of them have had the advantage of what we call a moral upbringing. Because they lack education and skills, they are virtually excluded from the advantages of our economic and cultural life. Many of them are subjected to the grinding humiliation of racial discrimination. In the big cities, they no longer share the roots and traditions which may make rural poverty bearable. On every side, society holds out promises which, for them, are never kept; symbols of success which, for them, cannot be obtained.