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By Root 1785 0

certainly, in the home, or the neighborhood environment. There has been, in contemporary society, a dramatic shift in the nature of authority.15 Authority was once vertical; it was above you and beyond you; it was what you looked up to. Authority gave you orders and rules. It worked slowly and carefully, within the family, the neighborhood, the village, the whole local ambience. It was the adult voice of the community. Authority was organized in the shape of a pyramid; the higher up one went in society, the greater the authority. But the base of the pyramid—your family, your teachers, the adults in your life—probably had the most powerful impact on your own personality and culture.

Authority is still a pyramid; but, relatively speaking, it has somewhat flattened out; it is no longer so sharp and so steep, certainly not in the United States. Today, one might speak of authority as rather more horizontal. There are criminal families, but most families do not teach children crime. The vertical authority of families and other adult groups is not what it used to be. What has grown stronger in the twentieth century is the horizontal power of the peer group, and the power of a culture that disdains authority and glorifies the individual self. The mass media—radio, movies, and above all, television—have to shoulder a good deal of the blame. The modern personality, practically from day one of life, is exposed to powerful influences that compete with family authority. The outside world, with all its power, its incredible wealth of images and colors, its infinitude of models and suggestions, breaks in electronically from distant places to overwhelm the child—and its parents.

It is a cliché to talk about the crumbling of the family. The family is crumbling, in all sorts of senses. Traditionalists worry about the decay of the nuclear family. But probably the form of the family is not so important; it probably does not really matter whether a child has one mother and no father, or two fathers and no mother, or three mothers and no father, or lives in a commune, or is raised by wolves. It is the authority of the family, the values, the love, and the discipline, that matters. Disintegration of family authority, if that is what is happening, is much more serious than disintegration of forms. It is hard to tell whether horizontal authority and the media are causes of this disintegration, or whether their powers are effects. Maybe both.

The Self and Its Limits

The novelty and impact of modern individualism on crime and criminal justice should not, of course, be exaggerated. The American system of criminal justice has always professed a deep concern for the self, for individual responsibility. The system makes the claim that every person accused of crime is a unique individual, uniquely treated; guilt, innocence, and desert are cut to the order of the individual. A criminal trial is by and large tailored to this end. The ideology of individual justice is quite old; so is the yawning chasm between ideal and reality. Every chapter of this book has tried to show, one way or another, how this ideal is violated, disregarded, compromised.

But changes in the twentieth century, particularly in the late twentieth century, show a consistent pattern. To take one example, the nineteenth-century penitentiary was highly regimented and disciplined; the twentieth-century prison is much more anarchic; indeed, by some accounts, groups of inmates run the prison; internally, the prison has become much more “horizontal.”

Horizontal, yes, but individualistic? The prisoners are organized, after all, into cliques, gangs, race groups, ethnic groups. Outside, in the crime world, too, peer groups are everywhere. In many ways, this, too, is not new. Nineteenth-century writers complained about gangs, especially the tough gangs of the young who ruled the city streets. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck of Harvard Law School, studying delinquents in the late 1920s, remarked on the power of the group. A young crimecommitter was liable more than half the time to be “associated