Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [280]
Social and technological changes, snowballing for a century, stronger and faster and bigger all the time, have undoubtedly imprinted themselves on American culture and personality. Warren Susman argues that the “modal type” of personality has been transformed over time: from a culture of “character,” which emphasized order and discipline, to a culture of “personality,” which emphasizes the idiosyncratic self.8 Daniel Bell draws a distinction between the “techno-economic order,” the world of “efficiency and functional rationality,” and those elements of modem culture where the “self is taken as the touchstone of cultural judgment.” In this newer domain, old “bourgeois values” get thrown out the window—values such as “self-discipline, delayed gratification, and restraint.”9 The world of the self is a world of the Ponzi scheme, of quick, glamorous money—the world of the cheat and the sucker alike.
Perhaps, then, it is “crimes of the self” that in some way distinguish this century from the one that went before. Mobility, the motor force in transforming criminality and criminal justice in the nineteenth century, was, in a way, a structural factor. It opened new opportunities for crime, and provided the soil in which certain kinds of crime (and certain criminal personalities) were especially apt to grow. Crimes of mobility—swindling, confidence games, market frauds, crimes that rest on simulated identities—are still very much with us; they have not been superseded. Moreover, most people were not and are not criminals. There are still millions of hardworking, disciplined, traditional human beings, millions who are “modern” without narcissism or fundamentalism. We are talking about changes at the margin. At the margin, shifts in personality and culture do affect the kind of crimes people commit, and their reasons for committing them.
Sensational crimes and banal crimes both show the impact of the culture of the self. The whole country was shocked, in 1924, when Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murdered Bobbie Franks in Chicago; that was “the crime of the century” (see chapter 17).10 What was appalling about this crime was that Leopold and Loeb had no real motive, in the classic sense. They were college students, extremely bright, members of rich Jewish families; Bobbie Franks was a neighbor, a mere boy, also from a rich Jewish family. Loeb and Leopold kidnapped Franks and left a ransom note. But money was hardly their aim; they had plenty of money themselves. The two friends were worlds away from the conventional image of the criminal—feebleminded and lower class. Leopold, in particular, was a brilliant scholar. Sex did not appear to be a motive, either. Why, then, did they kill? No one knows for sure; apparently for the thrill of it, the high, the expressive, orgiastic rush that came from the sensation of crime.
Some sixty-seven years later, on November 16, 1991, Patricia Lexie was riding with her husband along the eastern edge of Washington, D.C., on the interstate highway. A car drew alongside. A man leaned out of the window and fired a shot, hitting Patricia in the head. She died almost immediately. She was twenty-nine years old, recently married. A few days later, the police arrested a high school dropout, nineteen years old, and charged him with the crime. He had a long record of criminal violence. But what was his motive? Patricia was a stranger; there was no robbery, no rape. Before the shooting, he had told some friends, “I feel like killing someone.”11 Essentially, this was a replay of the killing of Bobbie Franks, only more impulsive—and, by 1991, much more banal.
Crime certainly feeds on poverty; but for many young men, as Mercer L. Sullivan of the Vera Institute has argued, it has meaning “beyond its monetary returns.” In the neighborhoods Sullivan studied, the young men who do crime call success in crime “getting paid” and “getting over,” terms that “convey a sense of triumph and of irony.” These young