Crime

Crime. During the mid–seventeenth century, public officials in Puritan Massachusetts expressed fears that crime and disorder were tearing apart the fabric of society. Nearly three and a half centuries later, prominent observers made similar claims, reporting that crime was surging and undermining public order. For Puritans, however, the criminality consisted not of mugging, murder, and crack‐cocaine use, but of fornication, Sabbath‐breaking, and tippling (excessive drinking). Although commentators in virtually every era have insisted that crime had reached epidemic proportions, the history of crime in America is not the story of ever‐increasing rates of disorder. Rather, both the level and the character of crime have changed along with America society. Shifting patterns of crime, therefore, provide an important perspective on the development of American society.

Over time, levels of criminal behavior have waxed and waned. Homicide, for instance, has been far more common in some periods of American history than in others, and the contexts that sparked lethal violence have changed dramatically during the four centuries since Europeans established settlements in North America. Similarly, urban riots have punctuated some eras and virtually disappeared in others.

Even the definition of criminal behavior has proved to be malleable. Some forms of conduct have been criminalized, as policy‐makers have sought to use the legal system to establish or to reinforce social norms. In seventeenth‐century New England, for instance, gossiping and lying were criminal offenses. Anxious to bolster the authority of elders and thus to promote stability in new settlements, lawmakers in Connecticut in 1650 made disobedience to parents a capital offense. Conversely, cursing, witchcraft, and abortion have been decriminalized over the course of American history.

Finally, the standards for discretionary law enforcement have changed markedly over time. White law‐enforcers and jurors in the nineteenth‐century South, for instance, typically overlooked dueling and the lynching of African Americans, although both activities violated the law. Likewise, for much of American history law enforcers ignored domestic violence, and until well into the twentieth century policemen seldom arrested parents who killed their newborn children. In 1908, for example, a Chicago newspaper reported the discovery of the body of a one‐day‐old infant in the Chicago river, found with a rope tied around its neck. “The body was wrapped in a cloth and bore no marks of violence,” the newspaper noted, “beyond the bruises made by the rope.” Neither the police nor the county coroner treated the death as a criminal act. Although laws concerning the murder of infants have changed little since 1908, such a discovery would surely trigger a homicide investigation in modern America, reflecting shifting social values.

In short, as values and ideologies changed, standards of acceptable behavior, definitions of crime, and patterns of enforcement shifted accordingly. Thus, criminality must be understood and analyzed in historical context.

Early America.

The ideologies and social conditions of the Colonial Era shaped assumptions about deviant behavior and the nature of crime. Because the criminal‐justice systems of particular colonies reflected the values of the early settlers, crime—and ideas about crime—varied from colony to colony. Perhaps nowhere was this process more apparent than in Puritan New England.

The religious intensity of Puritan settlers infused every facet of life in seventeenth‐century New England, including criminality. Puritans believed that moral weakness and Satanic influence posed the greatest challenges to the survival of their society. Thus, they viewed sin and crime in similar—and nearly interchangeable—terms and relied on Mosaic law to undergird their legal system. As a consequence, Puritans made adultery and blasphemy capital offenses. Furthermore, such moral offenses as fornication (premarital sexual relations) and such offenses against public order as drunkenness, which threatened to undermine the religious focus of town life, became the targets for law enforcers and emerged as the most common crimes in Puritan society. Devout New England Puritans were not unusually promiscuous or intemperate. Rather, their values made them particularly sensitive to sexual relations, and patterns of crime reflected Puritan ideas about evil more than actual patterns of conduct. Over time, however, the religious zeal of New Englanders faded, and policy‐makers and law enforcers came to view such behavior as less menacing and less worthy of prosecution. By the late eighteenth century, New England law enforcers arrested few fornicators or adulterers, though premarital and extramarital sex had hardly disappeared.

Settlers in other colonies had migrated in search of wealth and status—rather than religious goals—and, therefore, devoted less attention to moral offenses. Rates of prosecution for Sabbath‐breaking in Virginia counties during the mid–seventeenth century, for example, were one‐eighth those of Essex County, Massachusetts, during the same era. Law enforcement and criminality in the Chesapeake region focused greater attention on property crimes, particularly those affecting the cash crop of the area, tobacco. Maryland lawmakers, for instance, made it a capital offense to break into and rob a tobacco house.

Despite sharp variations in the emphases of law enforcers and in patterns of arrest, in colonial America the combination of relative cultural homogeneity, powerful pressures for conformity, modest social class divisions, and general prosperity resulted in few murders and little extreme violence. The legal development and expansion of slavery, however, produced one significant—and difficult to measure—category of violent behavior. As lawmakers degraded the legal status of Africans and African Americans, making them slaves and, therefore, chattel, violence against slaves ceased to be illegal behavior, except in the most egregious cases. Just as assessments of crime in early America failed to include most forms of violence against Native Americans, the relative absence of serious crime in British colonies must be qualified by the recognition that the use of violence to maintain order and hierarchy in areas with slave populations was not ordinarily considered criminal conduct.

Industrial America.

Urbanization and immigration redefined crime during the early nineteenth century, producing a surge in disorder and violence during the decades before the Civil War and a dramatic reduction in disorder and violence during the late nineteenth century until the mid–twentieth century. Early industrialization strained social relations in the North, particularly in urban centers. In addition, millions of European immigrants and native‐born farmers concentrated in cities during the Antebellum Era. This rapid influx of newcomers exaggerated group loyalties and triggered ethnic, religious, and political tensions that erupted into nearly eighty major riots, with a death toll of close to one thousand people. Cities such as Baltimore, Maryland, Philadelphia, and New York City each experienced close to a dozen large riots and hundreds of smaller gang wars between 1820 and 1865. The rioting peaked in the New York City draft riots of July 1863, when a protest against the conscription of local men into the Union Army exploded into a torrent of violence against African Americans that claimed more than one hundred lives.

During the mid–nineteenth century, middle‐class northerners forged new ideas about the nature of crime and criminality. Moving away from narrowly religious assumptions about the roots of crime, they increasingly believed that individuals had the power to resist temptation; strong people possessed the self‐control to resist the evils and pitfalls that plagued urban society. Relying first on “moral suasion,” such as temperance pledges, and later on institutional and legal forces, such as the common school and the municipal police, middle‐class city dwellers struggled to inculcate such discipline in workers and immigrants. As a consequence of this crusade to “uplift” the poor and the foreign born, law enforcers devoted new attention to discouraging rowdy and undisciplined behavior, resulting in a wave of arrests for drunkenness, vagrancy, and disorderly conduct.

Middle‐class pressures for conformity, however, were undercut by other social trends in mid‐nineteenth‐century northern society. If employers and moral reformers celebrated emotional restraint and eschewed passionate behavior, plebeian culture—blending ethnic‐, class‐, and gender‐based traditions—prized aggressiveness. In working‐class areas with a high proportion of unattached newcomers, young men reveled in visiting brothels, attending bare‐knuckle boxing matches, engaging in drinking rituals, and affirming their status through demonstrations of toughness; raucous behavior emerged as a badge of cultural independence from the suffocating strictures of proper society. Within plebeian society, therefore, pressures for conformity produced a surge in disorderly behavior and violence during the decades preceding the Civil War. The typical brawl, which contributed to soaring rates of assault and homicide in antebellum cities, involved young, immigrant workers who had been drinking, who belonged to the same ethnic group, and who used their fists or knives to settle trivial disputes.

Although this surge in crime sparked fears about a “dangerous class” lurking in the city, it was short‐lived. During the final third of the nineteenth century, arrest rates for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and assault fell sharply in most cities, despite the heightened sensitivity of law enforcers. In Oakland, California, for instance, the overall arrest rate dropped by nearly 50 percent between 1875 and 1900. Some forms of disorder became more discreet, as law enforcers concentrated brothels in red‐light districts and compelled madams to shield prostitution from public view. But the transformation was not merely one of appearances. Homicide rates plummeted during the late nineteenth century, falling by as much as 50 percent in cities such as Philadelphia and Boston, despite high levels of unemployment and poverty and the arrival of millions of immigrants. The decline in rates of violence is particularly significant since handguns became inexpensive and readily available—for the first time—late in the century, and since law enforcers began to arrest those who engaged in hitherto accepted or overlooked forms of domestic violence, such as child abuse and wife beating.

Overlapping cultural, institutional, and legal forces contributed to this process. Demands for sobriety, punctuality, and discipline in the workplace discouraged rowdiness among workers. Public schools inculcated similar habits, using classroom discipline to encourage children to develop self‐control; police campaigns to arrest disorderly and transient young men for violating vagrancy and tramp laws reinforced this message. Moreover, changing gender ideologies weakened the bachelor subculture that had earlier exalted aggressive behavior. Such a trend toward social order, however, was not unique to American cities; rates of violence had been falling in much of western Europe for at least two centuries.

This decline in arrest rates and in levels of disorder and personal violence is doubly remarkable in view of the demographic and intellectual changes of the era. Immigration from southern and eastern Europe surged during these years. Experiencing discrimination by law enforcers and employers, many of the newcomers, suspicious of the legal system, settled their scores themselves. Nonetheless, rates of assault and homicide generally fell. During the same period, policy‐makers, influenced by the work of the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso and the New York prison reformer Richard L. Dugdale (1841–1883), searched for genetic sources of crime. The so‐called savage tendencies of Mediterranean peasants and the widely circulating reports of the Italian Mafia, particularly after the assassination of David Hennessey, the New Orleans police chief, in 1890, made native‐stock Americans fear the newcomers.

Three exceptions to this trend underscore the ways in which urbanization and industrialization generated order. First, in the Deep South, an area with modest levels of industrial development and relatively few cities, rates of violence remained extremely high. According to one study, South Carolina had more homicides in 1878 than the combined total of homicides in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Michigan, and Minnesota. Second, levels of violence among African Americans, who faced systematic exclusion from the jobs and schools that encouraged order in northern cities, soared, while they plummeted for other groups. Homicide rates for African Americans during the early twentieth century, for example, were three times higher than the rate for the general population in New York City, six times higher in Chicago, and fourteen times higher in Omaha, Nebraska, and this gap would grow larger over the course of the century. Third, newly settled western areas experienced high rates of disorder and violence. Such disorder, ranging from drunkenness to vigilantism and violence, however, waned when sex ratios evened, public institutions matured, and the economy of western cities grew. In short, in regions where the influence of middle‐class—or bourgeois—values was less pronounced and among groups denied the rewards of urban, industrial society, levels of violence remained high. Industrial society was neither harmonious nor crime‐free, though its dictates discouraged public disorder and thus reduced some forms of crime.

Modern America.

Despite numerous short‐term fluctuations, the trend toward lower levels of disorder and violence persisted until the 1960s. The United States then experienced a dramatic surge in crime that lasted for nearly two decades. Unlike earlier shifts in criminal activity, during the modern wave both property crime and violent crime exploded. Reported robberies and burglaries, for example, increased approximately threefold. Violent crime followed a similar trajectory as riots erupted in major cities and rates of homicide doubled in many areas, peaking around 1980 and falling during the next twenty years. The character of crime changed as well. Although violent crime touched all of American society, it became particularly concentrated in inner cities, among teenagers, and among African Americans; during the early 1970s, for instance, urban centers with more than one million residents experienced homicide rates twice as high as cities with between 100,000 and 250,000 residents.

Numerous explanations, none wholly sufficient, have been offered to account for this crime wave. The relative decline of the industrial economy simultaneously robbed poor city dwellers of stable employment, challenged the reward system that encouraged delayed gratification, and weakened inner‐city schools. Demographic forces may also partially account for the crime wave. Just as disorder and violence rose during the early nineteenth century, when American society included a disproportionate number of young and unmarried people, the more recent wave coincides roughly with the baby boomers entering their teenage years. Persistent racial discrimination and crime related to illicit drugs, particularly crack cocaine, contributed to the surge as well.

As in earlier eras, crime assumed a distinctive character in late twentieth‐century America. The post‐1960 crime surge hit much of the world and virtually every European nation. Although rates of property crime, such as burglary, tended to be similar in the United States and western Europe, levels of violent crime remained, as in the past, significantly higher in the United States. In 1900, for example, the homicide rates for New York City and Chicago were approximately ten times that of London. At the close of the century, the gap persisted and perhaps even widened. In the mid‐1980s, the homicide rate in the United States was more than five times that of western Europe nations, and the robbery rate was more than four times higher; late twentieth‐century America possessed one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. Such extraordinary and long‐standing levels of violent crime, in fact, suggest one realm in which American social development has been distinctive—or exceptional.

In the later 1990s, as the economy boomed, overall violent crime rates declined markedly, reversing several decades of upward trends. In 1999, for example, the violent crime rate dropped 7 percent from 1998. Rates for the minority population of inner cities, however, and especially for inner‐city youth under the age of eighteen, remained for higher than the national average. These data again underscored the complex fluctuations in patterns of crime—chronologically, regionally, and demographically.
See also Draft Riots, Civil War; Education: The Public School Movement; Eugenics; Gun Control; Organized Crime; Prisons and Penitentiaries; Temperance and Prohibition; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

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Lawrence M. Friedman and and Robert V. Percival . The Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870–1910, 1981.
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Elizabeth Pleck , Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present, 1987.
Ted Robert Gurr, ed., Violence in America: The History of Crime, 1989.
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Jeffrey S. Adler