Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [263]
Minnesota’s experiment reverberated in other states. On the federal level, Congress did away with the U.S. Parole Commission in 1984 and set up a Sentencing Commission. This was an independent agency inside the judicial branch; its job was to draft sentencing guidelines for federal judges. The guidelines went into effect in 1987. Here too crimes were ranked on a scale. Murder got a top score of 43; blackmail got a 9. The judge could add and subtract from the basic score, according to formulas that gave values to this or that factor.
These guidelines, however, were not the last word. There have been amendments, and amendments of amendments; the whole process has become hideously complex. As of April 1992, there were 434 of these amendments, and the guidelines were well on their way to a level of convolution and intricacy hardly matched by any other laws—maybe the Internal Revenue Code.
The complexity was probably inevitable. To be fair, or even try to be fair, the guidelines would have to embrace all sorts of factors and make all sorts of fine distinctions. Robbery, for example, had a base score of 20; if you rob a bank, add two points; if you shoot a gun, add seven; but if you only “brandish” the gun, add a mere five.99 All this goes to create a patchwork of complexity.
No surprise, then, that by 1992, there were rumblings of discontent among federal judges. Naturally, they resented the straitjacket effect. But they also considered the guidelines much too harsh. From academia, Albert W. Alschuler suggested scrapping them altogether, relegating the guidelines “to a place near the Edsel in a museum of 20th-century bad ideas.”100 There were also signs of outright rebellion: some judges simply ignored what the guidelines told them to do. This was an old, familiar story in the criminal justice non-system: one head of the Hydra frustrating another, or actually biting it. The law-and-order backlash collided here with the culture and politics of judges; and this led, as so often, to stalemate and slippage. Whether the guideline system can redeem itself remains to be seen.
juvenile Justice
In the nineteenth century, a number of steps were taken to separate young offenders from grown-up criminals—before, during, and after trial (see chapter 7). At the very end of the century, the first juvenile court was established, in Cook County, Illinois. In the twentieth century, juvenile courts and a special brand of juvenile justice became the national norm. Colorado passed a juvenile court act in 1903. Like the Illinois law, it lumped together children who committed crimes, those who were simply “incorrigible,” and a miscellaneous lot of difficult or troubled young people: those who were “growing up in idleness or crime,” or who associated with “vicious or immoral persons,” or who wandered about the streets at night, or who “habitually” wandered about “railroad yards,” jumping or hooking on to “any moving train,” or who used bad language or were “guilty of immoral conduct in any public place or about any school house.”101 Colorado also had a dynamic juvenile court judge, Ben Lindsey, who ran a charismatic, highly personal court in Denver, ruling it as a kind of “benevolent judicial despot.”102 In any event, in a relatively short span of time, almost every state had juvenile courts of its own.
The juvenile court, and juvenile justice generally, grew out of a movement of “child savers.” Many leaders of this movement were women; in Illinois, one important group was centered around the famous reformer, Jane Addams, and Hull House, which she ran. There is some dispute about what moved these movers and what the juvenile courts actually accomplished. In a book that ruffled some academic feathers, Anthony Platt, a criminologist at Berkeley, took a fairly cynical (and leftist) view. These reformers, he argued, “invented” delinquency. Most casual observers (and practitioners) thought the