Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [169]
In 1934, Congress passed a flock of new penal laws. One of these made it a crime to rob a national bank; another criminalized “extortion by means of telephone, telegraph, radio”; another, the National Stolen Property Act, made it a crime to transport “any goods, wares, or merchandise, securities or money” worth $5,000 or more across state lines, or to receive this kind of stolen property, knowing it to be stolen.20 Still another act made it a crime to flee from one state to another to avoid prosecution for murder, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, mayhem, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, or extortion accompanied by threats of violence, or to flee across state lines to avoid giving testimony in criminal proceedings.21 That same year, Congress passed a National Firearms Act, which taxed and regulated the sale of guns, including machine guns. Violations of the act were, of course, federal offenses.22
The Federal Courts
These laws, and later criminal statutes passed by Congress, had a cumulative effect on the federal courts. At the beginning of the century, as we have seen, the federal courts handled few criminal cases. The number rose with the number of federal crimes. For example, for the year 1915, the U.S. attorney general reported that 135 people were convicted of violating federal meat inspection laws; and there were even three convictions (with fines) for violating a migratory bird law.23 In the Prohibition years, vast numbers of liquor cases poured into the federal courts. In the fiscal year 1924, in addition, no less than 590 cases were “disposed of by the imposition of fines” under the migratory bird law. There were also 264 food-and-drug cases in that year, and 183 of these resulted in fines.24
In the fiscal year ending June 30, 1940, there were 48,856 criminal cases in the federal district courts of the forty-eight states. Prohibition was over, but even so, almost half of these (23,448) were liquor cases, mostly for violations of liquor tax laws. There were 3,504 immigration act violations; the Motor Vehicle Theft Act contributed 2,309 cases; narcotics laws, 3,572; postal law violations (including postal frauds), 3,195. The Mann Act contributed a healthy 663 cases; and there were 2,587 cases of counterfeiting and forgery. The rest was a miscellaneous, and somewhat surprising lot—890 violations, for example, of the Migratory Bird Act, which is quite a flock of birds.25
Criminal caseloads in federal courts do not show constant, linear growth. In 1961, the number of cases had declined to 28,460. Liquor cases had largely disappeared from the dockets. Auto theft, with 5,098 cases, was the largest single category, and there were 1,524 narcotics cases. By fiscal year 1973, the federal criminal docket had climbed back up to 40,367. Auto theft cases were down to a mere 1,960, but there had been a huge jump in narcotics cases (to 8,817), and there was a significant number of cases under other federal statutes, including 136 criminal cases involving civil rights.bs
The federal criminal docket continued to grow in the 1980s. In 1985, 53,060 men and women were tried in federal court on criminal charges¡27 in 1990, the total was 65,359. Of these, 23,193 were drug defendants. The next largest category was fraud, with 9,685 defendants. There were 8,662 cases of drunk driving, which seems surprising; but these were drunks who drove in national parks and other federal enclaves. The old liquor tax offenses had shriveled to a mere 13 defendants, and auto thefts were down to 363.28
What is most noteworthy about this catalogue of cases is its somewhat erratic quality. State dockets fluctuate, too, but there is a fairly steady and predictable diet of assault, burglary, theft of various forms, and the like. The federal docket is all fits