Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [90]
Roughly speaking, there are two general ideas about how criminal acts and criminal actors are related. Crime might be just one aspect of a person; or a quirk, a sport, a failing, a weakness, a temporary lapse. Or it might be something organic to the person—something total and all-consuming. Each period seemed to make a distinction of this kind; each period cut the cake in different ways. The colonists, as we saw, treated most criminals as plain sinners, people who fell from grace; their sins could be washed away or prayed away or whipped away. But there were also dyed-in-the-wool criminals, the incorrigibles. A witch was an extreme case, perhaps: a person who delivered herself body and soul to the devil. Beating and shaming did not work, of course, with such a person.
Vice laws, too, presupposed such a distinction. The law criminalized a good deal of what people did for kicks: gambling, sex, drinking. But the gambler and drinker, and the fallen woman’s “john,” were not thoroughgoing criminals; their indulgences were merely aspects of their lives, lapses, little weaknesses. The professional gambler and the prostitute, on the other hand, were steeped in criminality to the bone; vice was their way of life. Such was the judgment of society.
What was the difference between these two classes? The devil had apparently given up overt soul-seeking. By the end of the century, a genetic theory had become popular. Crime, for some people, was inherited; it was in the blood; degraded social behavior passed from father (and mother) to son. The great Italian penologist, Cesare Lombroso, had a kind of “revelation” in 1870, when he looked at the skull of a bandit and noticed “atavistic anomalies,” such as the “enormous middle occipital fossa.” He began (he thought) to understand at last the “irresistible craving for evil for its own sake.”67 The criminal, in other words, was a type; a throw-back, an atavism, a born degenerate.
In 1874, the New York Prison Association sent a man named Richard L. Dugdale to visit some of the county jails of the state. In one upstate jail, he found, to his surprise, a cluster of prisoners who were blood relatives. One man was “waiting trial for receiving stolen goods”; a daughter was a witness against him; her uncle was charged with burglary; two brothers from another branch of the family, nineteen and fourteen years old, had “maliciously pushed a child over a high cliff and nearly killed him.” These were all members of the “Juke” family (a pseudonym), a rogue’s gallery of thieves, brutes, prostitutes, vagrants and no-goods; they were all the descendants of a single line of rotten apples.68
This discovery opened Dugdale’s eyes. It “brought seething to the surface” the idea that the “dangerous classes” were “not only a physical, but a biological threat—philoprogenitive, promiscuous, and irresponsible”; people who, “breeding like rats in their alleys and hovels, threatened ... to overwhelm the well-bred classes of society.”69 Dugdale set about to trace the family back to its roots. Their “ancestral breeding-spot” was “along the forest-covered margin of five lakes,” an area that was “one of the crime cradles” of New York State. Here squatters lived in rude log or stone houses, sleeping on floors of straw, in situations that “must often have evolved an atmosphere of suggestiveness fatal to habits of chastity.”70
From a bastard son, the bad seed of the original “Mr. Juke” and one