Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [1]
The Woman Victim: Violence and Rape
The Law of Rape
Chapter 19 - CRIMES OF THE SELF: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LEGAL CULTURE
The Self and Its Limits
Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
Chapter 20 - A NATION BESIEGED
The Question of Violence
Criminal Justice and Crime
A Concluding Word
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
NOTES
INDEX
Copyright Page
For Leah, jane, Amy, Paul, and Sarah
PREFACE
THE BOOK THAT FOLLOWS IS A GENERAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE, from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to the present time. This is a vast subject, one that, frankly, has to be approached with a certain amount of fear and trembling. There is more to know about crime and punishment in this society than any human being can possibly know. The research on the subject, up to now, has been both thick and thin: so thick in some parts of the subject that no one can cope with it, certainly not I; in others so thin and wan that the intrepid storyteller is reduced to guesswork, weaving great swatches of narrative from little rags of data. Moreover, there is no way to tell it all, no way to make the story complete. The author is forced to make choices, to throw the spotlight on some parts of the subject while others are left in the shadows. In this day and age, this is bound to leave some readers frustrated or disappointed.
For many of the people who read this book, in a library or in the comfort of their homes, the world of crime and punishment may be something of a foreign country, one with strange customs, language, and manners; they stumble about like tourists clutching a phrase book. It is hard for the comfortable, the respectable, the solid middle class to imagine themselves in the shoes of the people on either side of the equation—those accused of crime, on the one hand; and the police, judges, wardens, and prosecutors, who do the accusing and the judging and the punishing, on the other.
I cannot pretend to be much better off myself, at least as far as the present is concerned. When I write about the past, I can make an honest attempt to bridge the chasm between what happened, and the reader’s own experience; I can try to bring to life the dead and buried dramas that I find, pinned like dead butterflies, in the texts of old records. The beginnings of this story took place more than three centuries ago. The end of it—if it has an end—is only yesterday. This last is the delicate, dangerous part. As we get closer to our own times, the material swells obscenely in bulk. And the bodies are not all dead and buried. There are human witnesses, people who have been through it, or are going through it, people who experience the system in a way I can only guess at.
I have no real idea, no authentic gut feeling, about life in blasted, weed-choked vacant lots between crack houses, or in dark streets desecrated with graffiti; or what it is like to be behind the wheel of a patrol car, slowly penetrating “hostile territory,” eyes groping to interpret shapes in an unfriendly darkness; or what it is like to sit on death row, or spend the night in a county jail, in a misery of moaning and vomit; or, for that matter, what it is like to be on trial as an inside trader or embezzler, or as a dumper of toxic wastes. Nor do I know the feelings that go through the mind of a public defender staggering under a stack of files, or a criminal lawyer picking a jury, or a judge in police court, or a juror trapped in a four-month murder case. Some of these experiences I can only guess at—and hope I guess right. Other parts of the story I am forced to omit, or leave for somebody else to do.
At times, working on this book, I found myself somewhat discouraged. The subject is fascinating—but also baffling and immense; fragmented into a thousand pieces; unwieldy, stubborn; hidden in dark places and inaccessible comers. It was easy to feel out of my depth.
But the sheer importance of crime and punishment, and their lurid attraction, won out at the end. Crime, in our decade, is a major .political issue. Of course, people have always been concerned