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Of course, all this might change; race relations in the United States, for example, are hardly smooth, and the anger in black communities, together with the backlash in white communities, seems toughly resistant to change. Terrorism might well flare up, with some turn in the wheel of international politics. It certainly affects the texture of society. Security at airports, in public places, courtrooms, government offices, becomes a kind of tax of millions of dollars imposed on the public. But on the whole, political violence is not a major factor in American society.

Street crime is another matter altogether. Some people will always jump at the thought of ghosts and shadows; but in this case, there is something real to be afraid of. The crime rate itself skyrocketed after 1950. Crime and its consequences became a terrible blight on the landscape. There is some dispute about crime statistics, about the significance of a peak here or a trough there. Occasionally in the 1980s, a federal, state, or city government would announce with fanfare a leveling off, or even some slight reduction, but the ordinary citizen was probably not impressed. Crime remained high, streets were dangerous; no statistics could do much about the loathing and the fear.

There is also little doubt that there was and is a great deal to loathe and to fear. The period after the Second World War has been an age of crime; every category of serious crime has risen drastically from a base that was already high.4 In 1990, 2.3 million Americans were victims of “violent crime,” according to figures compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. These numbers came from surveys in which people were asked about their own experiences as victims. It did not include victims of the 23,000 homicides, whose mouths had been permanently and violently shut. The total number of crimes, including thefts, was something on the order of 34.8 million.5 In 1987, according to research done at the National Center for Health Statistics, 4,223 American men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four died a violent death. This was a rate of 21.9 per 100,000, in that age group. The rate for black men in that same age group was 85.6 per 100,000. These were appalling statistics. The homicide rate for the United States was more than seven times as great as Finland or Canada, more than twenty times as great as Germany, more than forty times as great as Japan.6

The President’s Commission had said in its report that crime was ruining the texture of urban life. Some people reacted to danger with a fortress mentality. They avoided dangerous situations, they kept out of parks and other shadowy places at night, and avoided suspicious places except in the blaze of daylight; sometimes they took cabs to avoid walking on questionable streets. They also bought guns by the hundreds of thousands; they locked and bolted and barred their houses and stores; they made burglar alarms big business. In 1977, an obsessed mother and daughter in the Philadelphia area barricaded themselves in their bedroom, a room with three locks on the door, and demanded a full time policeman.7 This was a gross caricature of the “normal” reaction to crime; but fear of violence bent the lives of millions, and distorted their normalcy, day in and day out. The fear has not abated over time. On February 18, 1993, the New York Times reported that sales of Mace in December, 1992, were ten times higher than one year before; that burglar-alarm companies were flourishing; that self-defense seminars were springing up like weeds; and that thousands of people were buying car phones so they could dial 911 in case of sudden predation.8

Because people were not satisfied with the protection of the state and its law, they privatized protection and created a private regime of law. Private police and the security industry grew dramatically—another reaction to the surge in crime. This trend seems likely to continue. The crime state is also the bodyguard state, the locked-door state, the tight-security