Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [10]
Revolution broke the ties to England, and gave the country political freedom. But the Revolution itself—the actual war—was in many ways not as important as the social revolution that began before the shooting and continued after the guns fell silent. By this I refer to the erosion of what was left of colonial autocracy. This happened not because Americans spent their time reading political philosophy, but because this was a big, open, mobile, expansive place, with land to bum, where the knots and constraints of the Old World-or of the Puritan divines—crumbled into dust. In the nineteenth century, society was reconstituted in terms of a culture of mobility.
Mobility has a social and a spatial meaning. This was a country of immigrants, a country of rolling stones; it was also a country in which it was possible to rise in society—and also to fall. The facts and the image of mobility drastically reshaped criminal justice. It made certain crimes possible—the confidence game, for one—and it made its influence felt in every comer of the system. The police and the penitentiary, for exam-pie, were new social inventions; they arose out of a painful awareness that the pathologies of a mobile society demanded new techniques of control. The chapters of part II will illustrate this thesis in detail.
The nineteenth century had broken open old cages of class, space, and place. But a good deal of traditional morality survived. The culture insisted (officially, at least) on self-discipline, control, moderation. Freedom did not mean shaping your own way of life. Mobility was economic and political; it was not a freedom to contrive a lifestyle; the body and mind still proceeded within narrow but invisible ruts.
It is important to recognize this limitation on that liberty that the nineteenth century so loved to boast about. And another limitation: in 1800, millions of Americans (including all the women) were voteless; most black Americans were slaves, without rights or a voice in the system. In 1900, women still lacked the vote, and the criminal justice system was insensitive to women’s issues, their views on rape, and domestic violence. Blacks were virtual serfs in much of the South. Lynch mobs enforced a brutal code of white supremacy, killing with almost total impunity. Big city police forces were corrupt and brutal. Fornication, adultery, and sodomy were crimes almost everywhere; the way of the social deviant was hard.
Slowly, gradually, the twentieth century broke with the past. It became the century of the self, the century of expressive individualism. The old century thought it knew a thing or two about political and economic freedom. The new century redefined the terms, and added freedom to shape one’s own life, expressive freedom, freedom of personality, freedom to spend a lifetime caressing and nurturing a unique, individual self. At least this was the ideal, the great concept that motivated millions of people. It was certainly not the social reality; but it was a powerful impetus to action.
This new concept of the self lies behind the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution. It has worked its will, once more, on crime and punishment. Old rules and arrangements fell like tenpins. The culture of individualism, paradoxically, worked a revolution in the law of groups, races, and classes. People were to be judged for themselves. Women and men had the same rights to be judge or jury. Native tribes had the right to run their own courts, defying majority culture. All this is probably for the good. There is a dark side to the era of the self. A great deal of twentieth-century crime can be explained, if at all, in terms of the exaltation of the self, a twentieth-century