crimes in the sense that no tangible injury to persons (other than the defendant himself) or property is caused by the commission of the crime charged, such as drunkenness, loitering, vagrancy, prostitution or illegal gambling (p. 23). Others, while involving acts of violence, often are directed at persons known to the assailant, as in the case of family or neighborhood disputes, or involve spontaneous fights, different in scale and effects from what the public usually regards as street crime or organized crime. People of all ages and sexes are involved and first time offenders are mixed with habitual offenders, "a great many of whom" Feeley said were addicted to alcohol or drugs which were implicated in their alleged offenses (p. 4).
The largest single common denominator was that the defendants were "failures, both in life and in crime" (Feeley, p. 4). Wice (1985) said "the criminal courts have always been a dumping ground for society's misfits and losers" (p. 163). A composite profile of Feeley's defendants revealed that most of them were poor, unemployed, poorly educated and from minority backgrounds (p. 4). Wice said that 75 percent of all criminal defendants were indigents from minority backgrounds (p. 25). A significant number of persons in such cases suffer from mental illness. According to Curie (1996), about 3,000 of 20,000 inmates in the jails of Los Angeles County jails receive psychiatric services (p. 34).
c. Accounting for the differences. The basic reason for the differences cited above is the variety of offenses which are brought before the lower criminal courts which encompass a cross-section of the antisocial activities of the large numbers of persons in American society who remain outside its mainstream prosperity and values.
a-b. The role of judges in addressing these cases v. legal definition. Judges in lower level criminal courts play an important role in the disposition of cases before them, but a much ...