Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [297]
Still, there are very few general treatments of the history of American criminal justice. In fact, that is one reason why I undertook to write this very book. Samuel Walker’s Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (1980) comes the closest to filling the gap; this book, an excellent introduction to the subject in many ways, sets out some of the main lines of development clearly and concisely. Walker is particularly attentive to police history. Herbert A. Johnson’s book, History of Criminal Justice (1988), was written to be used as a classroom text; Johnson put it together, he says, “in response to an acute pedagogical need.” It too is brief, probably too brief, and many readers will find it a bit sketchy. David R. Johnson’s book, American Law Enforcement: A History (1981), as the title suggests, concentrates on law enforcement, mostly on police forces and how they grew. Even shorter (and much less satisfactory all around) is William J. Bopp and Donald O. Schultz, A Short History of American Law Enforcement (1972), but I have found this book useful in spots.
Criminal justice gets covered, of course, in general histories of American law. There are not too many of these, to be sure. I have to cite my own book here, A History of American Law (2d ed., 1985), which has several chapters on criminal justice; there is also material on criminal justice in the other general account, Kermit L. Hall, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (1989). Melvin I. Urofsky’s book, A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States (1988), is richly detailed, and much broader than the title suggests; it deals, at times comprehensively, with many other aspects of the American legal system, not merely with aspects that would be narrowly defined as “constitutional.”
The literature on the colonial period is, in some ways, more voluminous than the literature on criminal justice in later periods. General accounts of the period often devote considerable space to crime and punishment. Mention must be made of the classic study by George Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts: A Study in Tradition and Design (1960), and David T. Konig’s fine book, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629-1692 (1979). These two books, as their titles indicate, focus on Massachusetts; a recent, more general, and extremely lucid account is Peter C. Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America (1992).
Among the many works dealing specifically with criminal justice in the colonial period, I list the following: Arthur P. Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia (1930); Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691-1776 (1976); Donna J. Spindel, Crime and Society in North Carolina, 1663—1776 (1989); Julius Goebel, Jr., and T. Raymond Naughton, Law Enforcement in Colonial New York: A Study in Criminal Procedure (1944); Bradley Chapin, Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660 (1983); and Gwenda Morgan, The Hegemony of the Law: Richmond County, Virginia, 1692-1776 (1989). There is also a growing literature on more specialized topics; for example, N. E. H. Hull, Female Felons: Women and Serious Crime in Colonial Massachusetts (1987); Hugh F. Rankin, Criminal Trial Proceedings in the General Court of Colonial Virginia (1965); and, on infanticide, Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558-1803 (1981).
Some of the best work is not in book form at all, but in the form of essays and short pieces; these are scattered among legal and historical periodicals. Eric H. Monkkonen has done students a favor by collecting many of these essays and articles in Crime and Justice in American History: 1. The Colonies and Early Republic (1991), a two-volume set. Scholars