Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [87]
In the Minnesota statutes of 1894, to take one example, there is page after page of regulation and prohibition. No one could sell liquor without a license. No one could sell liquor to a minor, or to any student or pupil, or to any habitual drunkard; or to anybody who was drunk, habitually or not; or on the sabbath; or to an Indian; or “within the capital buildings,” if the legislature was in session; or within half a mile of the state fair; or within that distance from Hamline University; and so on.47
A number of states had “local option” laws; these permitted counties to decide whether or not to ban the sale of liquor altogether or permit it under conditions. Georgia and a number of other southern states were “local option” states.48 Liquor control thus became enmeshed in local politics; the result was a crazy quilt of bans and conditions, sometimes with small, puzzling variations. The 1872 session of the Mississippi legislature passed a law that made it illegal to sell liquor “in less quantities than five gallons” in or around Thomastown; druggists could sell liquor “for medicinal, culinary, or sacramental purposes, or for use in the arts” (whatever that meant). The buyer had to swear that this was the case. The ban in the town of Greensboro was on sales of less than one gallon; in Greenwood, in Leflore County, the bottom limit was twenty gallons, though “porter, ale and beer” were excepted. There was a total prohibition for two miles around Colfax Institute, in Choctaw County. The cordon around Tougaloo University extended for three miles.49
In 1880, Massachusetts passed a law to take the cover off the sale of liquor, so to speak. No licensed seller could block off his business with a “screen, blind, shutter, curtain, partition, or painted, ground, or stained glass window, or any other obstruction, which shall interfere with a view of the business.”50 Texas, too, in 1887, required taverns to be “open.” No screen or similar device could obstruct “the view through the open door or place of entrance.”51 An “open” saloon, of course, would find it harder to sell liquor to minors; the law would throw saloons open to public scrutiny, driving out various forms of wickedness. The philosophy of these laws was diametrically opposed to the spirit of the Victorian compromise. The saloon was not to lock itself discreetly away from the eyes and ears of respectable people.
In the late nineteenth century, too, the first true drug laws were passed.52 Generally speaking, narcotic addiction was no crime in the nineteenth century. It was considered an evil, a vice; but it did not carry a criminal label. There were scattered laws and ordinances against opium dens, which were associated with the Chinese. Newspapers spoke of “opium fiends,” and “opium joints.” Morphine addicts were objects of pity and horror. A California newspaper described the arrest of two “morphine fiends,” a mother and son, in 1894, on a charge of battery. Young Eugene Sullivan had “pallid lips” that spit out “great flecks of foam.” His mother was a picture of “loathesome degradation,” “a grinning death’s head” who “gibbered and raved.”53 But their sorry state of dependence did not, in itself, bring them under the sway of criminal justice.
The early drug laws struck out at opium, the Chinese, and their dens of iniquity. Idaho (1887) made it a crime for a “white person” to maintain “any house or place kept as a resort for purposes of smoking opium”; it was also an offense for a “white person” to be “found in any house, or place kept for use as a resort ... for the purpose of smoking opium.”54 In California, in 1881, the penal code was amended to create a new misdemeanor: operating a place “where opium ... is sold or given away, to be smoked at such place,” or to “visit” or “resort” to “any