Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [3]
And yet another vignette: in September 1900, George W. Howard married Helen Hawkes, age seventeen, daughter of a “rich Democratic politician of Brooklyn.” The couple had first met at a dance. George was a civil engineer who hailed from Boston. After the marriage, George began to behave in a peculiar way. He kept returning to Boston on this or that excuse; so often, in fact, that Helen’s brother became suspicious and hired a private detective to find out what was what. The truth was devastating. George was leading a double life. He had another wife in Boston—Anna Kay, the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman—and a nine-year-old son to boot. George was put under arrest and charged with bigamy. In court, the prosecution piled on the evidence: twenty-eight witnesses and numerous exhibits, including a “piece of the wedding cake” from the Boston marriage. George was convicted of the crime.3
These four somewhat exotic or notorious or outrageous examples of criminal behavior are by no means unique. They were drawn from the past and (near) present. In every period of our national experience, thousands upon thousands of other crimes have been committed; countless numbers of crimes. A fair number have been lurid, gripping, unusual, emblematic. Most of them have not. Most have been ordinary crimes, dull crimes, crimes of deadly familiarity: shoplifting, wife-beatings, assaults, barroom brawls, drug offenses, forged checks, drunk driving, vagrancy, petty theft.
There are recurrent patterns. Among serious crimes, the overwhelming majority can be classified as one or more of the many forms of stealing —larceny, theft, burglary, embezzlement, and on and on. For much of our history, drunkenness was the single most frequently punished crime—the plankton of the criminal sea. Thousands of arrests and court appearances came out of the fighting and biting that drunkenness produces. In the colonial period, in some colonies, fornication, adultery, idleness, and lewd behavior filled the courtroom with sinners. However we measure and count, the historical record yields a rich, and somewhat depressing, harvest of crime.
This book is about the American experience of crime; more accurately, it is about the social reaction to crime. It is an attempt to sketch out the history of the criminal justice system in the United States, from its colonial beginnings right up to the present day. In this introduction, I put forward a few basic concepts and introduce some themes, which we will follow as they zig and zag through the centuries.
We begin, however, with a few attempts at definition. We have talked about crime and about criminal justice. But what do we mean by these terms? ’
CRIME
There is no real answer to the question, What is crime? There are popular ideas about crime: crime is bad behavior, antisocial behavior, blameworthy acts, and the like. But in a very basic sense, crime is a legal concept: what makes some conduct criminal, and other conduct not, is the fact that some, but not others, are “against the law.”4
Crimes, then, are forbidden acts. But they are forbidden in a special way. We are not supposed to break contracts, drive carelessly, slander people, or infringe copyrights; but these are not (usually) criminal acts. The distinction between a civil and a criminal case is fundamental in our legal system. A civil case has a life cycle entirely different from that of a criminal case. If I slander somebody, I might be dragged into court, and I might have to open my checkbook and pay damages; but I cannot be put in prison or executed, and if I lose the case, I do not get a criminal “record.” Also, in a slander case (or a negligence case, or a copyright-infringement case), the injured party pays for, runs, and