Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [206]
This does not mean, of course, that there cannot be, or will not be, another turn of the wheel. The judiciary of 1993 is, on the whole, more conservative than before, and a kind of collective patience is running out. (The Clinton administration, to be sure, may slow or reverse the trend.) The federal courts, as we have seen, have gone some way toward washing their hands of the whole matter. The pace of executions is rising. State after state is losing its virginity; the death penalty is no longer a monopoly of the deep South. California broke the ice in spring of 1992. Delaware put a man to death. Arizona followed soon in its footsteps.117 The long wait on death row seems to be getting shorter.
15
LAW, MORALS, AND VICTIMLESS CRIME
IN CHAPTER 6, WE LOOKED AT HOW THE SYSTEM TREATED VICE, SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, and “victimless crime”—how the current of lawmaking and law enforcement ebbed and flowed. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, there was, as we saw, an upsurge of energy, a born-again war against vice and sin. The Victorian compromise grew tattered and worn, and the fabric began to give way. In the first third of the twentieth century, the war raged, with more and more success. Then it came to a halt, and the counterattack began. In the last part of this century, victimless crimes were more and more decriminalized; the war against vice, with some egregious exceptions, seemed lost. How and why all this happened is the theme of this chapter.
Morality Enthroned
The first three decades of the twentieth century were the peak period, the climax, in the battle against vice and moral decay. It was a period of fresh legislation and spasms of zeal in enforcement.
This was, for example, notably true of gambling, though with rather meager results. Gambling entered the twentieth century an illegal vice, and stayed that way for decades. There were periodic crackdowns in city after city. Yet, despite an occasional burst of arrests, it is doubtful that police took the gambling laws very seriously. When they did, the courts treated gambling with a yawn.
Thus, in San Diego, California, in November 1908, thirteen men (twelve players and the proprietor) were arrested in “the wee hours” as they played draw poker in the rear of the “Eureka cigar store.” Unknown to them, a detective, disguised as a farmer, had had the place under surveillance. The men were hauled down to the police station, where they each put up ten dollars’ bail. The newspaper dryly recounted that none of the men appeared when their case was called; bail was forfeited, and that was the end of the affair. It was nothing worse than a parking ticket today.1
In Alameda County, the police made occasional gambling raids in the early years of the century. In 163 raids between 1906 and 1910, they arrested 4,159 people. In the town of Alameda, the local Civic League hired private detectives to ferret out gambling, bookie joints, and illegal liquor sellers. In Berkeley, Chief August Vollmer moved against the cigar stores that harbored illegal poker games.2
But the truth was, the public was indifferent, except for the occasional reverend and members of civil leagues; and the police, sad to say, were corrupt or uninterested. In Alameda, complained Reverend MacFarlane of the Civic League, men gambled openly and notoriously, and the police officer on the beat winked at it. Perhaps, said the reverend, sarcastically, the police thought this was “a prayer meeting,” and “the rattle of the chips was the taking up of a collection for the poor, the blind, and the deaf.”3 Alameda was, alas, no doubt typical. Generally speaking, a dual system persisted throughout the early decades of the century. Gambling was illegal, and commonly tolerated. The crusaders never reached the Holy Land.
The Mann Act
The crusade against sexual