Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [150]
On the male side in Massachusetts, there were two prisons: a penitentiary and a reformatory. The women’s institution, as its name suggests, combined both features. Most of the women, not surprisingly, had committed reformatory-type crimes, not prison-type crimes. In 1895, when there were 336 women in the Female Prison and Reformatory, only 39 of them had been sentenced for crimes against persons and property (larceny accounted for 26 of these). Eighty-three had committed crimes “against Chastity,” which included 13 women sentenced for adultery, 34 “common night-walkers,” 6 convicted of fornication, and 23 sent up for “lewd cohabitation” or just plain “lewdness.” The bulk of the women inmates had committed offenses against “public order”: drunkenness (144), and being “idle and disorderly” (47).101 Twelve women were imprisoned for “stubbornness.”bb
As the roster of prisoners indicates, the double standard was in full flower. Far fewer men were imprisoned for crimes against chastity—in 1895, there were only three men sentenced to the reformatory for adultery, two for incest, one for indecent exposure, one for lewd cohabitation, and one for an “unnatural act.”104 Also, under the law, women could serve longer terms than men for certain petty offenses. The excuse was that they would do time in a more benign institution. As Isabel Barrows put it, in 1900, although it might seem a “hardship” to send a woman drunkard to the reformatory for two years, the imprisonment was “for reformation”; and two years was not “too long a time to be under wise and strict guardianship.” In fact, she regretted that “judges did not at first take advantage of this law”; as a consequence, “women were sentenced for such short terms that the best results could not be secured.”105
Whether the reformatory was actually so benign remains a question. But there was one aspect, certainly, in which it was strikingly different from the men’s institution. In the year ending September 30, 1895, convicted women entered the prison with eleven infants, and seventeen more were born within prison walls.106
11
THE EVOLUTION OF CRIMINAL PROCESS: TRIALS AND ERRORS
The Criminal Trial in the Republic
In American history, dramatic changes in criminal justice took place in the nineteenth-century. Dramatic changes took place in society, too: from the America of John Adams to the America of William McKinley is a quantum leap indeed.
Yet in many ways, the basic shape of the criminal trial stayed the same throughout the century. There were changes, of course, some subtle, some fairly obvious. One constant was the sheer diversity of criminal process. There was not, and never had been, one single system. A full-blown murder trial and the “trial” of a drunk or a vagrant never had more than a vague family resemblance, if that.
In real life, the criminal justice system was composed of levels, or strata, arranged, as it were, like the layers of a cake. At the bottom was a summary layer, the layer of the petty courts, called police courts or justice courts or municipal courts, depending on time and place. On top of this was the layer of ordinary but serious crimes: felonies mostly, thousands of cases of burglary, larceny, assault with a deadly weapon, arson, embezzlement, and the like. At the very top of the cake was a crown of sensational cases, a handful of big, celebrated cases, cases that filled the courtroom with spectators, that aroused the public to fever