Introduction
"The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty," said George Bernard Shaw in the preface to Major Barbara, published in 1907. And even earlier, the French critic Paul Valery wrote, in his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895), "All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects."
Both Shaw and Valery, in different ways, recognized something that many writers and speakers on crime even in our supposedly enlightened times do not. Crime is a relative thing. Sometimes it is a flagrant outrage against something every moral and ethical sense we possess tells us is right. Sometimes it is an act that has been arbitrarily created by the law itself.
Perhaps the most obvious example in the memories of many people still alive in the United States is Prohibition. Under this amendment to the Constitution, it became against the law to drink alcoholic beverages. Seldom has a law been so useless as well as so misguided. Prohibition did not end drink; Repeal did not increase the amount of alcohol consumed. Before, during and after Prohibition, people who wanted to drink went on doing so; others did not. Only the zealots ever considered it a real crime, and history has proven how wrong and silly they were.
The human race as a whole is supposed to profit by such mistakes, but there is considerable evidence to indicate that it does not. This was pointed out recently by Alexander B. Smith, professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, and Harriet Polack, assistant professor of government at the same university. Their argument on the relativity of criminality is worth thinking about. Among other things, they said:
"We are in a similar position today. Our gambling and drug laws particularly have created a situation in which an enormous organized crime industry thrives on satisfying a consumer demand that cannot be met legitimately. Worse yet, the efforts to cope with the crime wave resulting from our unenforceable drug and gambling laws is destroying our criminal justice system and rendering it incapable of dealing with criminals who violate laws that might, under better circumstances, be reasonably enforceable ...
"Not only are moral laws frequently counterproductive in terms of their causing more crime than they prevent, but their enforcement is particularly dangerous to civil liberties since crimes resulting from their violation have no victims. The prostitute's client has not been forcibly seduced; the housewife who bets a quarter on the numbers has not been robbed; the dope user has harmed only himself. Because there are no victims available to testify for the state, the burden of producing enough evidence for the prosecution rests entirely on the police. It is this need for evidence to make morals offense violations 'stick' that traditionally has produced the greatest number of civil liberties violations by the police ..."
This is not a statement of an anti-police position; it is inherently sympathetic to the law enforcement officers and their problems. As the recent bestselling book and hit movie, The French Connection, showed clearly, the policeman who acts most effectively against offenders in this area is frequently "rewarded" by demotion to an area in which he can no longer use his effectiveness. The present novel, The Sex Connection by Richard B. Long, shows another aspect of the same problem.
In this fast-paced and thoroughly gripping story, we meet two criminals, the appositely named Moon and Sky, without being given any indication originally of what their crime has been. We get to know them and begin to understand them only gradually as we see them through the eyes of Linda Maddison, a young and innocent secretary to a bank official. The crimes they commit against Linda are certainly real and reprehensible enoughbut the thoughtful reader will want to know what forces drove them to this desperate fugitive state, and may also ask himself if they are really any more evil than Paul Cook, the eminently respectable bank security officer who "merely" wants to cheat on his wife and enjoy the delights of Linda's blossoming body without the formality of marrying her.
Certainly Linda undergoes torment, humiliation and shame. She loses her original innocencebut finds it replaced by experience and wisdom that perhaps is considerably more worthwhile. In the end, her ideas about the law, and its underlying moral and ethical foundation, have changed entirely, but she is a new and better person thereby: at one and the same time more sensual and more sensible. She has, through her undeniably shocking and degrading experiences, acquired a sounder and healthier perspective on her own life and the world around her.
We hope and expect that the reader of The Sex Connection will acquire a new perspective, too. We have no doubt that in the final analysis it will be rated a much more profound work than it may appear at the first superficial glance.
The Publishers