num_pages: 592
description: In a panoramic history of our criminal justice system from colonial times to today, one of our foremost legal thinkers shows how America fashioned a system of crime and punishment in its own image.Lawrence M. Friedman argues that the evolution of criminal justice has reflected transformations in America's character. Thus the theocratic world of seventeenth-century Puritanism generated a peculiar equation between crime and sin. The extraordinary geographic and social mobility of nineteenth-century America produced its own distinctive approach to crime and punishment. And the expressive individualism of the twentieth century encouraged and emphasis on "crimes of the self."Crime and Punishment in American History covers vast and fascinating terrain: the Salem witchcraft trials; the Red Scare after World War I; the emergence of the professional detective; the development of laws against fornication and gambling and the reform of rape laws; the rise of the insanity defense; the growth of a prisoners' rights movement; and much more. It is about vigilantes, outlaws, embezzlers, swindlers, and what happened to them; about the growth of white collar crime; and about revolutionary changes in the relationship between gender and criminal justice.
language: English
title: Crime and Punishment in American History: The Price of Freedom in the History of American Criminal Justice
titlecomplete: Crime and Punishment in American History: The Price of Freedom in the History of American Criminal Justice
genres: True Crime, Politics, History, Crime, Law, Nonfiction, American History
ratings_count: 141
awards: awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: History
publisher: Basic Books