Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [111]
In part, violence is a matter of definition, or at least of perspective. Even the definition of murder shifts over time: consider euthanasia, or abortion. Not many people today are willing to come out in favor of wife beating; battering a wife counts as violent (and illegal) behavior. But this was not always the case. (See chapter 10.) In many societies, vengeance and blood feuds are considered normal, possibly even a good thing.
Every society defines a sphere of legitimate private violence—spanking a child, for example. Of course, the boundary between lawful and unlawful spanking, between discipline and child abuse, is blurred; and it fluctuates. There were fathers in the past who were proud that they beat their children mercilessly—for the children’s sake, of course; today these same fathers might be in danger of going to jail. A teacher who caned a third-grader would quickly lose her job.
Nonetheless, there is broad consensus about what is and what is not murder, so that we know how to label most violent deaths; and the same is true for robbery and assault. The small colonial settlements were not violent places, on the whole; there was rankling and quarreling, and some crime, but not very much of it was violent. The system, of course, used violence itself. Whipping was an ordinary weapon of government. These were authoritarian societies, and “correction” was an important part of the social structure. Slaveholders beat their slaves. Slavery was, in a sense, violence made into an institution; it rested, ultimately, on force. But then, so do all societies—to a degree.
The cities and towns of the nineteenth century had more raw violence than colonial settlements. The invention of the police was, in part, a response to the violence of cities—especially to urban rioting. Violence and brutality, as we have seen, were epidemic on southern plantations; after the Civil War, violence against blacks continued in another form. We will discuss this violence later in this chapter. In this country, apparently, there was also a good deal of random, sporadic violence, private violence, violence that was unorganized, individual, idiosyncratic.
What brought this violence about? Every human being is a private and unique story; every crime is one of a kind. But there are patterns and aggregates. In the aggregate sense, American violence must come from somewhere deep in the American personality. And the American personality—that is, the distinctive patterns of personality one finds in this country—cannot be accidental; nor can it be genetic. The specific facts of American life make it what it is. In this sense, crime has been perhaps part of the price of liberty; of a society that had loosened some of the strings, taken off the suffocating gag. When this happened, a small but important number of people ran wild. Put in another way, as autocracy loosened, as mobility increased, as rural life gave way to urban life, as community disintegrated, there were more and more unattached, normless men, men who were out of control. Loss of control, the failure of collective discipline, was the great social fear of the century. This fear explains many of the developments in the criminal justice system, as we have already seen. It cuts like a knife through the tangle of legal detail.
As we have noted, one of the great master-trends in the history of criminal justice is the shift from private to public; and from lay to professional. Pauline Maier, writing about riots and mobs in the colonial period, refers to the mob as the “extralegal arm of the community’s interest.” She points out that the line between public