Justice without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society. by Jerome H. SkolnickReview by: Harry V. BallSocial Forces, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Mar., 1968), pp. 429-430Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2574920 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 429

tive statistical statements, but these are not forth- coming in the book. We could surely expect that the case material should be classified along con- tinua which are, if not meaningful, at least con- sistent. Yet the authors do not offer us any such classification. Two chapters seem to be organized chronologically; others are organized in terms of methods of execution; some material presents in- formation on particular aspects of hangings (ropes, scaffolds, etc.); four chapters are about hangings for particular kinds of crimes; some chapters are frankly "potpourri" of cases. Perhaps as a result of the lack of an overall framework for the presentation, the criteria for the selection of case materials are highly variable and, at times, ex- ceedingly flimsy. The chief criterion of selection seems to be that the case is "interesting," i.e., unusual in some way. The authors claim that the book is "social history," so we really should not condemn them for failing to present significant so- ciological generalizations. It appears that the principal contribution to history is that the book draws together in one volume a quantity of his- torical information about an action of our society which is now largely tucked away in jails and prisons and appears to be slowly disappearing from our repertory of tools of social control.

WILLIAM R. ARNOLD

Untiversity of Texas

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. Edited by Thorsten Sellin. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. 290 pp. $3.50. Paper.

Capital Punishmzent distills the thinking of man regarding the death penalty. The debates be- tween Caesar and Cato in ancient Rome, in France in 1791, in England in 1956, and in the Canadian Parliament in 1966 summarize the es- sence of the political movements. That capital punishment has endured as long as it has results from the insignificant value held for human life and the tribal vengeance idea promulgated through the seventeenth century, together with natural support of an all-powerful state with di- vine right.

Capital punishment has never been successfully argued on utilitarian or legitimate bases. It is useless as a deterrent of others, however effective it might be for the individual involved, and its legitimacy has been rejected by Canon Law, by the ancient Chinese Book of Five Punishmients, and by Islamic Law. Beccaria, founder of classical crim- inology, rejected it in his famous Essays on Crimes and Punishments in 1764. Enrico Ferri, founder of criminal sociology, pointed out that it has been "'worn out from the intellectual point of view" and must be based in emotion and in a personal value system.

The future of capital punishment is viewed as at its inevitable end in the United States. From 1935 when 199 persons were executed in America, the number has steadily declined to seven in 1965 and

one in 1966. Capital punishment is nonutilitarian, illegitimate in most ethical systems, selectively used, rarely imposed so that it could be considered to be "cruel and unusual punishment" in most cases where it is used, and is falling into disuse. Thor- sten Sellin's Capital Puno ishn'tent is an excellent little book that condenses all the pertinent argu- ments for and against capital punishment from the Roman Empire to the present time.

VERNON Fox Florida State University

JUSTICE WITHOUT TRIAL: LAW ENFORCEMENT IN

DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY. By Jerome H. Skolnick. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966. 279 pp. $7.95.

Skolilick's orienting hypothesis and conclusion is that any democratic society (one in which the "highest stated commitment" is to the ideal of "legality" or "accountability") will contain an irresolvable, ever-changing tension between the "substance of order and the procedures for its ac- complishment," and that this dilemma between "or- der" and "rule of law" is most clearly manifested in law enforcement organizations. Thus, Skolnick has not merely produced the best existing sociolog- ical analysis of some important elements of the police-prosecutor segment of the criminal justice system of an American city. He has, moreover, formulated his analysis so that it is a contribution to the sociology of law, the study of comparative social structures, the sociology of work, adult so- cialization, and complex organizations, as well as a valuable work for scholars and others inter- ested in the current controversies over the rela- tion between individual rights and the protection of society, in the general improvement of the ad- ministration of criminal justice and in police ad- ministration. Finally, given the heat of some of these current controversies, it is noteworthy that Skolnick carefully maintains the stance of a scholar seeking to provide greater understanding of com- plex social phenomena, while making clear his own personal commitment to the "rule of law" and its postulated restraints upon official conduct.

Skolnick's sympathetic treatment of the police is clearly encouraged by the facts that his major research tool was participant observation and that most of his participation was with one of the more "professional" departments in the United States. As a matter of fact, since every reader is likely to recognize "Westville" immediately, it is un- fortunate that the Police Department involved was not openly designated so that it could receive the full measure of the credit it deserves for making this book possible.

All the above praise does not mean that the book does not have some limitations. Since so much of the work is based upon the idea that "work assignment" is a maj or determinant of police conduct and much of the conduct examined is po- lice and prosecutor "discretion," one wonders why

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430 SOCIAL FORCES

the Westville juvenile police and the other of- ficials of the juvenile justice system were omitted from the study. Quite possibly the author did not (could not?) anticipate the extent to which ap- pellate courts would begin to turn their attention to the juvenile justice systems in the United States shortly after this study took to the field. One might suggest, however, that in the juvenile jus- tice system Skolnick might have found at least a partial elaboration of his contra-model of "the law as teacher" without having to rely on the literature on the Soviet Union. If so, the com- plexity he already demonstrates would have been compounded, for his policemen would have been seen as living in both worlds.

HARRY V. BALL Un,iversity of Hawazii

TOWARD A THEORY OF MINORITY-GROUP RELA-

TIONS. By Hubert M. Blalock, Jr. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967. 227 pp. $6.95.

As was true of many of us, Blalock was im- pressed with the hundred propositions collected by Robin Williams for his 1947 publication, The Reduction of Intergroup Tensions. Blalock re- sponded during the intervening years by develop- ing an additional 97 propositions regarding inter- group discrimination and conflict-presented in several publications-and now modified and brought together into a book. The propositions are based on wide but unsystematic reading and semi-deduc- tive reasoning (these are often truisms, but the author does not seem to realize this) and per- sonal experience. The propositions are reasonable ones, in my opinion, and, except for some of the general ones and the truisms, are capable of being tested by empirical investigation, which is not undertaken here.

The propositions are organized into four gen- eral categories: those dealing with "socioeconomic factors" (mainly status consciousness), those deal- ing with competition, those dealing with power, and those dealing with the percentage the mi- nority constitutes in the general population. This brings me to my first criticism: although there may be no direct logical contradiction between any two of the propositions within each set, there is a fundamental contradiction among theories based on status consciousness (personal and self-oriented), competition (impersonal), and power (other-ori- ented), and, to put it bluntly, a "theory" based on the percentage of Negroes in the general popula- tion is just not on the same level of generality as these three. It is quite justified, in view of gaps in present knowledge, to keep an open mind as to the relative value of these three theories, but the author owes it to his readers to point out that, either there are inherent contradictions among the three theories, or they apply to different orders of events. Although the author is unusually so- phisticated methodologically, he does not set ex- amples of contradictory propositions side by side

and suggest how empirical research to test their relative validity or their different applicability- could be done. This is one of the inherent diffi- culties in the approach to "theory" in terms of the collection of reasonable propositions. Also, the author neglects the fact that some of his proposi- tions are truisms (and hence do not need em- pirical proof), while. others are historical (and- hence probably never will be proved or disprovect because the data are irretrievably lost).

My second major criticism of the author is that, although he claims to have undertaken "a rather- extensive survey of the literature in the field of race and ethnic relations," he has missed whole developed theories of prejudice and discrimination, of both a sociological and socio-psychological char- acter. He even misses what I consider to be the most plausible and most empirically substantiated theory to explain Negro-white relations in the Southern states-symbolic racism. If he had read a single one of my works in the field-from the chapter on theory in my 1947 survey of the litera- ture, Studies in the Reduction of Prejudice (re- printed in America Divided, 1948) to the discus- sion of theories of intergroup conflict in my 1954 Theory and Method in; the Social Sciences or to my textbook summary chapter in the volume edited by Merton and Nisbet, Contemfporary Social Problemns (1961 and 1966 editions)-at least his attention would have been drawn to the existence of this rich and pertinent literature beyond his scope.

There are points of strength and weakness in specific sections of the book. For example, I think the author does a good job on "Negroes and professional sports" (pp. 92-97; reprinted from a 1961 article in Social Problems), but a poor job in dealing with North-South cultural differences (pp. 174-76). Blalock is an obviously intelligent person, but he is fumbling in water way over his head when he approaches this vast, highly de- veloped field of intergroup relations, without doing all the things one should do in writing a book on theory.

ARNOLD M. RosE University of Minnesota

RACE AND RACISM: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. By Pierre L. van den Berghe. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967. 169 pp. $4.95.

The main emphasis of this book is a dualistic typology based on the author's premise that "so- cial structure exerts a considerable degree of de- terminism on the prevailing type of race rela- tions" (p. 26). To demonstrate this proposition, "variables" of race relations are subsumed under two systems: the paternalistic and the competitive. The paternalistic system is most typically exempli- fied by slavery; hence under this heading the au- thor lists characteristics of a slave society from "economy" to "value conflict." The competitive system is identified with "large-scale industrial capitalism." "The scheme," says van den Berghe,

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