Crime and Punishment in American History
by By Friedman, Lawrence Meir
Category: Law , General

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 an 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 rise of the American penitentiary; 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.Informed by the perspective of the social sciences, this book is a social history of crime and punishment, the story of the social reaction to crime. Not a history of criminal law or an intellectual history of penology or a treatise on the philosophy of good and evil, this book chronicles the development of a working system of criminal justice, from arrest to trial to prison and punishment.Serious crime has skyrocketed in our day, affecting the lives of millions of people directly and all of us indirectly. This elegant and magisterial history helps us understand why this is happening - where we have been and where we are heading. It is a story that needs to be told.