Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [290]
This book is about criminal justice, not crime; but at many points we have had to deal with theories of criminal behavior, popular or otherwise. Few modem scholars believe in “born criminals” anymore. “Criminal anthropology” is dead as a doornail. Some part of the public probably still thinks “bad blood” is passed down from father to son. Some professionals are still looking for a biological key—a crooked chromosome, for example. Most experts, however, search for the answer in personality, family, and social context. A criminal is a “misraised, mistrained person, unsuccessfully socialized.”17 Even the social scientists James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, who flirt with body type as one co-cause of crime, put the basic blame on child-rearing practices. They feel that parents are no longer interested in “inculcating moral and religious principles.” Nowadays, if parents care about anything at all, it is personality development. The nineteenth-century stressed “impulse control,” discipline, in short; and this put a damper on crime. Contemporary society has forgotten about impulse control; the main theme of modern life, on the contrary, is “self-expression.”18
This sounds a bit nostalgic for a family life that perhaps never was—but let that pass. In the previous chapter, I argued along lines that are not too far from Wilson and Herrnstein’s theme. But I would not put the blame entirely on parents and child-rearing. The whole society, including TV and popular music, has turned its back on “inculcating.” Certainly, a good deal of crime flows out of indiscipline, anomie, normlessless, imperfect morality, inability to delay gratification. The culture certainly stresses the self, the individual; it does not invite people to submerge themselves in some higher cause or entity. It invites them, on the contrary, to be themselves; it is individualistic with a vengeance. We have referred to the result as “crimes of the self” (see chapter 19). We mentioned the impact of a celebrity culture—a culture that exalts people who succeed young, who succeed fast, and who careen through life in a dizzy aura of money and glamor. Mass culture, media culture, are success cultures; cultures of narcissism and consumerism, cultures of individualism run riot. None of this is particularly new in American society, but the traits are, I believe, more pronounced than in the past.
Some observers put the blame on soft, permissive parents. But in fact, violent, harsh families may be much more likely to breed criminals than soft, indulgent ones.19 In fact, loving parents may do a better job in our times precisely because they are more in tune with a permissive, indulgent culture. And the culture of individualism, the culture of self, the permissive culture, is not all bad—perhaps it is not even mostly bad. American crime rates may be the side effects of a culture that has accomplished a great deal in making people happy and rich. Or, if this seems too Pollyannish, call it a culture that is at least trying to redress tyrannies of the thoughtless past.20 After all, the era of the self has its positive side: more human freedom, less discrimination and intolerance, less racial and ethnic and sexual repression. Most people would not want to go back to the hierarchical, repressive, prudish, intolerant—and racist, and sexist—society of a century ago.
Moreover, the vast majority of our citizens—cradled in the same general culture, watching the same TV programs, bombarded by the