Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [369]
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Public funding, however, is quite another matter, as the fuss over grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to “obscene” and “blasphemous” artists and works shows quite graphically.
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Between 1947 and 1950, an average of 115 prisoners entered California prisons annually on drug charges; the figure for 1985 was 3,609; for 1990, 13,741.147
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Lynne Henderson suggested this very apt metaphor to me.
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The statute interfered with freedom of speech, among other things. As construed, it was a “dragnet which may enmesh anyone who agitates for a change of government”; and it was too “vague and indeterminate” in setting boundaries to freedom of speech.46
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This was, of course, the celebrated case that tore France apart politically at the end of the nineteenth century. Dreyfus was an army officer, and a Jew; he was (falsely) accused of treason, convicted, and eventually exonerated.
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The police officers were unaware that someone in the neighborhood happened to catch the incident on his home video recorder.
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Even the notorious Tawana Brawley episode, in 1987, underscores the point. Tawana Brawley, a young black woman, claimed she was the victim of white violence in Wappingers Falls, New York. She was almost certainly lying, but many blacks were ready to believe her because she told a story that could well have been true and all too often was true. On the case, see Robert B. McFadden et al., Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax (1990).
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The intended targets were members of another gang, eating in the same restaurant.
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These people, “burned out with drugs and liquor,... friendless and homeless and hopeless,” are sent to the Bridewell “because we have no other place to send them.” They are not “criminal” by nature; but few of them “can ever be regenerated or restored, for no foundation is left upon which to build.”1
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The Chief Jailer was in charge. In its first year, the Sunrise Court processed 15,797 men; about two-thirds of them were released. The procedure was simple: each man was “given a cup of black coffee and made to sign a book which [was] kept as a record.” “Repeaters” and parole violators were kept in jail until the regular police court opened. Cases of “Mexicans” were “disposed of by officers who [spoke] their language.” The “Sunrise Court” was in fact not a court at all; it was an institution run by Tom Murphy “of the Murphy family of temperance fame.” Murphy, at his own expense, installed two “distinct features” in “Sunrise Court.” One was a “sanitary fountain, that the men may reach immediately upon their release in the morning.” The other was “hot black coffee,” served up just before release.2
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Vagrants included people “wandering or strolling about in idleness,” and people who led “an idle, immoral or profligate life, who have no property to support them and who are able to work and do not work.”
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Many of the cases involved confessions: defendants wanted to know exactly what they had confessed to or admitted doing. This was certainly the thrust of the 1950s version of Rule 16. In a leading California case, John Dyson Powell, who had been accused of embezzling public funds, wanted copies of a signed statement he had made in the office of a chief of police, as well as a transcript of a tape recording made in that same office.9
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In the actual case, the defendants had been tried for “conspiring to bribe a federal prohibition agent.” The trial began with a jury, but a juror became ill. All hands agreed to proceed with eleven jurors. These eleven found the defendants guilty. The Supreme Court held that a “constitutional jury” meant twelve not eleven, and went on to discuss the case as if a jury had been completely waived.17
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Of course, it is hard to psyche out these matters in advance; but Kalven and Zeisel’s figures do suggest that defendants are roughly on target. They rarely