Confronting Crime <i> An American Challenge by Elliott Currie (Pantheon: $19.95; 326 pp.) </i>

America the beautiful is also America the violent. Violent crime has become such a pervasive problem that debates about its causes recently have extended beyond the criminal justice system, as evidenced by a recent workshop convened by the U.S. surgeon general to explore how health professionals could address the epidemic.

Elliott Currie’s contribution to the debate about crime and its control is valuable and timely, with the decline in reported crime over the last few years now at a turnaround. The book will not only assist the reader in understanding the nature of crime in America; it offers thoughtful ideas on what can be done to address this source of national embarrassment.

A sociologist and criminologist, Currie has conducted an exhaustive review of the research on crime and has made some sense out of what it means for public policy. He has done a skillful job of interpreting research findings in a manner that supports his ideas about crime control and that is accessible to the public. If crime is to be controlled in this country, Currie believes, there must be substantive changes not only in the criminal justice system, but in virtually all of our social institutions.

The author’s basic premise is that crime can be effectively addressed. But to do so will require a re-evaluation and reordering of many of the traditional assumptions that have guided public policy in the past.

In recent years, the field of criminology has been dominated by conservative criminologists. James Q. Wilson, a professor of government at Harvard, is the guru of conservative criminology if for no other reason than that he is its most prolific writer.

Wilson’s most recent book, “Crime and Human Nature,” co-authored with Richard J. Herrnstein, advances the notion that certain genetic traits cause people to commit crimes. Wilson’s work is reminiscent of the “born criminal” theory promulgated by Cesare Lombroso during the 19th Century. Lombroso’s beliefs have long been discarded by most thoughtful social scientists.

The conservative criminologists, while otherwise rejecting social causes of crime, do find causal force in the permissiveness of our social and cultural institutions and leniency in the courts and correctional systems. The most important cause in their view, however, is an “invariant human nature.” Seen in this light, the answer to America’s crime problem is greater use of imprisonment.

Currie, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, systematically lines up these conservative arguments about crime and unmercifully shoots them down. “The conservative emphasis on culture, values and tradition,” he concludes, “degenerates . . . into wistful nostalgia or, worse, into self-righteous, punitive brutality that finds expression in the resurgent demands for more corporal punishment, harsher discipline in the family and the schools, and the indiscriminate use of prisons as the holding pens for an urban underclass we have decided ‘to give up on.’ ”

The author also calculates the cost of imprisonment to be prohibitive. For example, he estimates the cost of building a maximum-security facility at approximately $75,000 per cell and the annual cost per inmate at $15,000 to $20,000. Thus, he points out, to reduce the serious crime by 20%-25% through imprisonment would require tripling the federal and state prison population at a cost of $70 billion for construction and $14 billion for annual operating costs.

If imprisonment reduces crime, Currie asks, then why was there no reduction, why were there in some cases increases in serious crimes, between 1970 and 1984, a time when state and federal prison populations increased by 132%.

The conservatives’ call for greater imprisonment as a crime control strategy has other important social implications. “Every fifth black man in America will spend some time in a state or federal prison,” Currie points out; a national policy to use incarceration as a primary method of controlling crime would mean “writing off a substantial part of entire generations of minority men.”

One of the main purposes of imprisonment is rehabilitation. Examining the research findings on this subject, Currie concludes that rehabilitation can work. For it to work, however, it must first be “implemented intensively, seriously and for a reasonable period of time closely linked with other community resources--schools, employers, social-service agencies, networks of relatives and neighborhood organizations.”

Currie endorses the long-standing belief that swift and sure punishment, and not severity, is an effective deterrent to crime. But deterrence of any sort is not enough. The author feels that America, by virtue of social and economic policies that focus almost exclusively on deterrence, has unwittingly adopted a pro-crime policy. Unlike many other countries, he argues, America does not protect the individual from the callous marketplace. No public official is an advocate of crime, but the country as a whole does not have a crime-control strategy. It relies, instead, almost exclusively on the after-the-fact criminal justice system. This, the author forcefully argues, reflects a gross misunderstanding of the nature of the crime problem.

Currie claims that “relationships between unemployment and crime are real; we won’t be able to even begin an attack on crime that is both humane and effective if we do not confront them.” Thus, the author’s central message is that if we are to address crime in this country meaningfully, we must begin by providing meaningful employment opportunities.

The closest we have ever come to a national strategy, Currie says, was the Omnibus Crime control Act of 1967 that created the now defunct Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Even that effort, he would argue, badly missed the mark because it only attempted to address the crime problem by providing funds to state and local agencies designed to improve the criminal justice system.

The plain truth of the matter is that the police and other agents of the criminal justice system will never, by themselves, do much significantly to reduce crime in America.

To achieve the difficult goal of social change, the author calls, in part, for improved family planning services and supports for teen-age parents, paid work leave and more accessible child care for parents with young children, to ease the conflicts between child rearing and work and intensive job training designed to prepare the young and the displaced for stable careers.

Wisely, Currie does not promise that his proposals will eradicate criminal violence. They do, however, offer practical measures that (he would claim) represent greater hope for addressing crime than anything heretofore proposed. His proposals are expensive, and he acknowledges that. But in the long run, if implemented, they should prove to be cost-effective and in the best interest of a nation that is being threatened from within by its serious crime problem.