ABSTRACT
The legal system provides the mechanism for the forceful and violent control of the rest of the population. In the course of battle, the agents of the law serve as the military force for the protection of domestic order. Ruling class interests are secured by preventing any challenge to the moral and economic structure. The President's Crime Commission provided the official rationale and recommendations for a war on crime that continues to affect the nature of American criminal justice to this day. The Riot Commission of 1967 was specially created in response to the "racial violence" that had occurred in the ghettos of several large cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967. Violence may be dangerous to domestic order, but the recommendations of the Violence Commission did nothing to suggest an alteration in the existing social, political, and economic order. The Omnibus Crime Control bill was the legislators' attempt to control any behavior that would threaten the existing order.
