JFK Passage & A Few Comments on Joel Best's Article

As promised, below is the passage from a paper I wrote and presented with a colleague at a conference in Washington, D.C. in August 1995. The title of the paper is " The JFK Assassination and the Failure of Institutions: The Sociological Significance of a Major Historical Event." The Conclusion began:

"In a seminal essay written many years ago at the height of a period of critical self-examination in American sociology, Alexander Liazos called upon his colleagues specializing in the study of criminal and deviant behavior to look beyond the individuals who are typically studied -- in his words, the "nuts, sluts, and preverts" -- and focus more on the less visible, but deeper, institutional problems. He focused not on individual deviants and their behavior, but rather on what he called "covert institutional violence." This covert institutional violence represents the unrecognized institutional actions which had destructive consequences for society and can properly be regarded as major instances of deviant and/or criminal behavior."

"A more subtle form of "covert institutional violence" might be called, after Liazos, "covert institutional fraud." Throughout our discussion of the failure of various institutions to deal properly and honestly with the assassination of President Kennedy, we have documented numerous instances of such "covert institutional fraud." From the Warren Commission, to law enforcement, to the legal profession and judiciary, and finally to the media and science, an account of the assassination has been foisted on the American people which is a knowing fraud. Although countless books and articles have been written on the Kennedy assassination, this fraud has been little exposed, hence covert. Only in the works of a handful of responsible critics, critics who have been virtually ignored by the media all these years, has this story been told. This "covert institutional fraud" not only reveals serious flaws in major institutions, but on the whole continues to erode the foundation of trust and confidence on which our government and other major institutions depend."

Remember, I quoted the above passage in the context of illustrating the significance of Liazos' 1972 essay, "The Poverty of the Sociology of Deviance: Nuts, Sluts, and Preverts," which, in turn, is relevant to the point the author of your text makes about what he points out are the limitations of the so-called "purist legal view of crime." (p. 11) In this respect, I agree with the author of the text that: " A sociological view of crime does not (and should not) restrict its concept of criminality to those convicted of crime in a legal sense."
"...obviously we must not loosely throw around the label criminal, but neither should we ignore dangerous acts that do great harm, simply because the criminal justice system chooses to ignore them." (p. 13)

Let me add about Joel Best's article, "Telling the Truth About Damned Lies and Statistics," that, as he says on p. 64: "The solution to the problem of bad statistics is not to ignore all statistics, or to assume that every number is false. Some statistics are bad, but others are pretty good, and we need statistics -- good statistics -- to talk sensibly about social problems. The solution, then, is not to give up on statistics, but to become better judges of the numbers we encounter. We need to think critically about statistics -- at least critically enough to suspect that the number of children gunned down hasn't been doubling each year since 1950." And that is where that list of questions (p. 65) comes in which I began quoting as class was winding down.

Please be sure to incorporate the above comments in your notes. We'll see you next Tuesday, AND DON'T FORGET TO POST YOUR COMMENT ON THE BLOG IN REFERENCE TO THE FIRST INDIVIDUAL EXERCISE.