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The traits we have discussed obviously increased in the course of the nineteenth century. Did crime itself increase? It is hard to tell. The statistical data is poor, and such as it is, it points in two directions at once. There is, on the one hand, some evidence for “crime waves,” bulges in the curve, in this period. One notable wave occurred, apparently, a few years after the Civil War.56 It would be no surprise if the war produced a crop of criminals. War could make soldiers callous about blood and guts, even comfortable with violence and death. War puts guns in the hands of young men. The war jerked men and boys out of their homes, disrupted social systems, and raped familiar landscapes. At the end of the war, military discipline was relaxed. The same young males were discharged, their inner selves disrupted and loose, rattling about inside a broken box of norms. The war, in other words, accelerated and exaggerated a state of mobile normlessness for the most crime-prone elements of the American population.

But this was a short-term trend. The long-term trend is exactly the opposite: crime almost certainly declined in the late nineteenth century, serious crime most notably. Most studies of arrest data and most guesses about crime rates show a decline in the late nineteenth century: arrests appear to go down, and as far as one can tell, so does serious crime. What was true for violence and “serious” crime was not necessarily true of “crime” in general. Still, homicide, the most easily measured crime, reached some sort of trough by about 1890, after which it began to rise again.57 Most of the studies of crime rates, for all their flaws, do point in the same direction, as we have seen: a falling crime rate in the latter part of the century.

It is certainly not easy to explain what was happening. Why had the country become more civil, or indeed more civilized (for want of a better word)? Policing was not as haphazard as it had been before the organization of police forces; perhaps this accounts for some of the change. But on the whole, it is a puzzle. And an even greater puzzle lies ahead, in the twentieth century. After the middle of the century—after 1950, say—the trend reversed itself with a vengeance. The dam went smash in the night and dark waters of crime flooded the country. When we discuss the late twentieth century, this question will be in the front of our minds: What was it that let down the barriers? What, in short, brought about a collapse of civility, and sent the curve of violent crime through the roof?

10

WOMEN AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE TO THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

IN THE DRAMA OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, MOST LEADING PLAYERS HAVE BEEN MEN; heroes, villains, stagehands, hangers-on. Throughout most of our history, women have been shut out of key roles in criminal justice. There were no women lawyers before the 1870s, no judges or jurors to speak of until the twentieth century. Policewomen and women detectives came late to the scene, and remained uncommon. Women, of course, took the witness stand; and they contributed their share to the great roster of suffering victims. Women in large numbers were robbed, murdered, beaten (often by their husbands), seduced, cheated, and raped.

Women criminals were always in short supply. There were, of course, exceptions, some quite notable. “Mother Mandelbaum,” the “queen of fences,” handled stolen goods on an enormous scale. Her specialty was silk, but she dealt in every kind of stolen property. She had a good reputation as a businesswoman “whose honesty in criminal matters was absolute.” When the police closed in on her, she fled to Canada.1 “Madame Restell”—her actual name was Ann Lohman—was a notorious abortionist who began her work in the 1830s. She was arrested numerous times, and founded branches of her New York business in Boston and Philadelphia.2 Her career lasted until the 1870s; facing prosecution and disgrace, she slit her own throat with an ebony-handled carving knife in the bathtub