Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [301]
In one sense, there is much less of a literature on criminal justice in the twentieth century than is true of the nineteenth. I am referring to strictly historical studies. A number of the studies already mentioned, such as Friedman and Percival, do straddle the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, the twentieth century is rich in studies and surveys that are not “historical” in themselves, but which have aged enough to count as documents of the past in their own right; for example, Hugh N. Fuller, Criminal Justice in Virginia (1931).
Particularly worthy of mention in this regard are the elaborate crime surveys of the 1920s and 1930s, notably Criminal Justice in Cleveland, (1922), directed and edited by Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter; the Missouri Crime Survey was published in 1926, and the Illinois Crime Survey in 1929. All of these crime surveys are full of facts and figures, and they are extremely useful as guides to contemporary attitudes and ideas. The various vice-commission reports are also of enormous interest—for example, the report of the Vice Commission of Chicago, published in 1911 under the title The Social Evil in Chicago. There are also the various governmental crime reports, notably those of the Wickersham Committee. Some of the reports were published separately; for example, Ernest J. Hopkins, Our Lawless Police (1931). In this century, too, there are more and more firsthand accounts of experience with criminal justice—autobiographies or accounts of thieves, or life stories of detectives, policemen, or criminal lawyers. These were much rarer in the nineteenth century.
Some of the distinctive twentieth-century courts have their own literature, very notably, the juvenile court. Anthony Platt’s The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (1969) raised a lot of hackles and put forward some interesting and some dubious ideas. On juvenile justice in general, see Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825-1940 (1973); see also John R. Sutton, Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States, 1640-1981 (1988); Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice, 1825-1910 (1977). The juvenile court is one of the topics considered in David Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (1980). Paul W. Tappan’s book, Delinquent Girls in Court: A Study of the Wayward Minor Court of New York (1947), is still quite valuable. Mention should be made of Mary Ellen Odem’s fine doctoral dissertation, “Delinquent Daughters: The Sexual Regulation of Female Minors in the United States, 1880-1920” (University of California at Berkeley, 1989).
The campaigns against vice are dealt with, along with other topics, in the excellent study by Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (1982), as well as in the rather mordant and consistently interesting study by Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law (1990). In general, the literature on victimless crime, prostitution, and the like, is growing; in addition to the books mentioned, see, for example, Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (1980). (I have already noted the various vice-commission reports.) Drug regulation is treated in David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (1973), but this subject needs a lot more work. Henry Chafetz,