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A review by daniell
Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James
4.0
A few of the reviews on here already describe James' work quite well: "barroom blowhard," "inept suggestions for legal reform," and "best read in fits and starts."
Popular Crime is a hodgepodge of crime stories with loose organization and a strong editorial voice, though not so strong as to drown out details. The phenomenon of popular crime has long fascinated James, and this book represents the fruit of his lifelong reading and thinking on the subject.
James' voice is clearly present on every page, openly disparaging the kind of prose that hides what it really wants to say beneath a dry, academic form. This is not to say that dispassionate writing is always bad, but rather to say that it's predominantly boring, and certainly not suited for the subject matter presented here, he opines.
And that understanding goes a long way to explain the inconsistent form of this book. James didn't write an even book. Sometimes he'll go on about a crime for 20 pages, sometimes only two pages, sometimes he'll lace a complex theory of how a crime was committed along with the history, other times he'll present the historical facts with little analysis, and sometimes he'll talk about crimes in relation to each other or as part of a larger trend. I actually grew to trust his analysis more as a result of his various treatments: because of his volubility in one place, I could trust his silence in another to indicate that the case required no comment. His analyses are almost uniformly sharp and well-reasoned, and he keeps the subject matter light, or, as light as death, gore, and mayhem can be.
Some of the sections are so distinctly James that I had to give a chuckle, here are a few examples:
1. Reforming the prison system toward smaller prisons. The idea he gives is that 3000-person prisons have to be as secure as their most dangerous inmates, and that prison culture is determined by the five most violent people who decide to form a gang, where standards fall to the lowest common denominator. His suggestion is to have lots of smaller prisons with no more than three guards and 24 inmates, with a kind of 1-10 incarceration rating between solitary confinement and halfway house. With good behavior a prisoner could move up the scale to a nicer facility with more privileges, and face demotion with bad behavior.
He suggests the mass-prison phenomenon in our country is the result of two major factors: The not-in-my-backyard resistance of cities to build prisons, and the requirement that prisons have expensive legal libraries. This is the least-weird of some of his suggestions, but the complete-overhaul nature of what he proposes is such to vitiate the suggestion entirely, and smacks of a kind of armchair idealism.
2. Reforming the way juries weigh evidence to include a 0-100 point scale. He's less serious in proposing this is a feasible reform, but uses the idea more to convey that sometimes certain evidence carries much more significance to a jury than it ought.
3. Using a system to classify crimes on the basis of their prominent elements (celebrity, money, kidnapping, tabloid, Dreyfus case, etc.), and then a 1-10 rating of their popularity. He doesn't do this uniformly through the book, and it makes me think that he used this organization for all the cases he considered including, but left them out to avoid weight.
4. Proposing six-level system of the factors necessary to identify a suspect, also including the odds of a person belonging to any level. This section works to convey how specific an identification must be before it can be called significant.
It's the systematization aspect of all these suggestions that makes them quintessential James, and certainly a challenge to status quo approaches to the problems presented by crime.
Most of the book, however, is the history and analysis of non-organized crime in America, a kind of greatest hits reel for atrocity. Though the fact of crime is atrocious, James weighs the value of it well and uses it as a way of talking about human nature and American culture.
4/5. Bene!
Popular Crime is a hodgepodge of crime stories with loose organization and a strong editorial voice, though not so strong as to drown out details. The phenomenon of popular crime has long fascinated James, and this book represents the fruit of his lifelong reading and thinking on the subject.
James' voice is clearly present on every page, openly disparaging the kind of prose that hides what it really wants to say beneath a dry, academic form. This is not to say that dispassionate writing is always bad, but rather to say that it's predominantly boring, and certainly not suited for the subject matter presented here, he opines.
And that understanding goes a long way to explain the inconsistent form of this book. James didn't write an even book. Sometimes he'll go on about a crime for 20 pages, sometimes only two pages, sometimes he'll lace a complex theory of how a crime was committed along with the history, other times he'll present the historical facts with little analysis, and sometimes he'll talk about crimes in relation to each other or as part of a larger trend. I actually grew to trust his analysis more as a result of his various treatments: because of his volubility in one place, I could trust his silence in another to indicate that the case required no comment. His analyses are almost uniformly sharp and well-reasoned, and he keeps the subject matter light, or, as light as death, gore, and mayhem can be.
Some of the sections are so distinctly James that I had to give a chuckle, here are a few examples:
1. Reforming the prison system toward smaller prisons. The idea he gives is that 3000-person prisons have to be as secure as their most dangerous inmates, and that prison culture is determined by the five most violent people who decide to form a gang, where standards fall to the lowest common denominator. His suggestion is to have lots of smaller prisons with no more than three guards and 24 inmates, with a kind of 1-10 incarceration rating between solitary confinement and halfway house. With good behavior a prisoner could move up the scale to a nicer facility with more privileges, and face demotion with bad behavior.
He suggests the mass-prison phenomenon in our country is the result of two major factors: The not-in-my-backyard resistance of cities to build prisons, and the requirement that prisons have expensive legal libraries. This is the least-weird of some of his suggestions, but the complete-overhaul nature of what he proposes is such to vitiate the suggestion entirely, and smacks of a kind of armchair idealism.
2. Reforming the way juries weigh evidence to include a 0-100 point scale. He's less serious in proposing this is a feasible reform, but uses the idea more to convey that sometimes certain evidence carries much more significance to a jury than it ought.
3. Using a system to classify crimes on the basis of their prominent elements (celebrity, money, kidnapping, tabloid, Dreyfus case, etc.), and then a 1-10 rating of their popularity. He doesn't do this uniformly through the book, and it makes me think that he used this organization for all the cases he considered including, but left them out to avoid weight.
4. Proposing six-level system of the factors necessary to identify a suspect, also including the odds of a person belonging to any level. This section works to convey how specific an identification must be before it can be called significant.
It's the systematization aspect of all these suggestions that makes them quintessential James, and certainly a challenge to status quo approaches to the problems presented by crime.
Most of the book, however, is the history and analysis of non-organized crime in America, a kind of greatest hits reel for atrocity. Though the fact of crime is atrocious, James weighs the value of it well and uses it as a way of talking about human nature and American culture.
4/5. Bene!