Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






Criminal Justice System after the Civil War

Stagnation, disillusionment, and decline plagued the institutional framework fashioned by lawmakers before the Civil War. The government-sponsored mobilization required by the Civil War renewed belief in the efficacy of institutional solutions. On every level of the federal system, "American governments and private associations, or quasi-public ones, were the globe's pioneers in efforts to institutionalize the public good." 29 Lawmakers after the Civil War, who were usually portrayed as committed to the cause of social and economic laissez-faire, actually laid the ground for reforms- including parole, probation, and the indeterminate sentence--that are typically ascribed to the Progressive era (see Chapter 10). As with economic policy making, the robust state-based federalism of the Gilded Age emphasized local and state solutions to industrialization and urbanization.

 

The Problem of Crime

The crime rate is the incidence of reported crimes per 100,000 population. Because much crime is never reported, the real crime rate is doubtless higher than the reported rate, and some experts believe that as much as one-half of all crime is never reported. Until the 1850s the crime rate grew steadily. Thereafter, however, the pattern changed abruptly, and at virtually every level and in a startling variety of regions in the late nineteenth-century Western world (not just the United States), the rate of felony offenses declined. The absolute numbers of crime indeed increased, but not as quickly as the population. Crimes of public disorderliness (drunkenness and disturbing the peace) also declined; unlike the felony rate, however, these crimes continued to decline well into the twentieth century.

A declining crime rate in the last half of the nineteenth century has important implications. Scholars have long argued that industrialization and urbanization contributed to the development of serious crime. They have insisted that teeming cities filled with immigrants and a growing wage-labor force caused crime. They also argue that criminal justice reforms mounted after the Civil War were ineffective and frequently contributed to class antagonism and repression.

Not only do falling crime rates contradict these assumptions, but so too does the most intensive study of the operation of a single criminal justice system, that of

-178-

Alameda County, California from 1870 to 1910. There the "crime rates probably declined in the county. Apparently, in the late nineteenth century, Oakland [the major city in the county] became less violent, more orderly." 30 What happened in Alameda County likely happened elsewhere. The criminal justice system probably became more effective, as professionalization took hold, and, at the same time, urbanization and industrialization imposed a social discipline that slowed the rate of criminal activity.

Quite apart from the statistical evidence, Americans after the Civil War were convinced that crime plagued their lives. Lawmakers responded by reasserting traditional institutional solutions at the same time that they broke new ground through measures that combined individualized treatment, bureaucratic organization, and professionalization.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 795


<== previous page | next page ==>
Discovery of the Asylum | Prison, Individualized Treatment, and the Scientific Basis of Crime
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.008 sec.)