1930 s crime essays
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Hitchcock and the whodunnit
Jeffrey S. At first glance, this story seems familiar, if baffling. Patterns of crime and punishment in the United States moved in opposite directions, disrupting social life, distorting political institutions, and roiling race relations.
Violent crime surged, and rates of murder and robbery exploded, particularly in large cities, for a quarter century. Criminals seemed more vicious than ever. Unable to respond to the crisis, the American legal system appeared weak and ineffective. Feckless, corrupt policemen proved no match for a new breed of criminal, while gullible jurors, indifferent prosecutors, and clever defense attorneys who exploited legal technicalities rendered the criminal justice system toothless, leaving the public in peril.
With few offenders apprehended, let alone convicted, the prison population remained small, and executions were rare, despite the explosion in crime. But then both trends reversed. Rates of violent crime plummeted, falling to their lowest levels in decades. Like the earlier rise in crime, the drop in violence was most precipitous in the nation's major urban centers, although murder, assault, and robbery fell nearly everywhere.
Notwithstanding this plunge in serious crime, legislators embarked on a far-reaching law-and-order crusade.
Conviction rates soared and prison populations skyrocketed, even as crime levels plunged. While the rate of capital crime decreased, the rate of executions increased.
At the same time, law and order became racialized, and conviction and incarceration rates for African Americans jumped disproportionately. The mismatch between patterns of crime and punishment has commanded particular attention from historians, including many of the contributors to this special issue. This disjuncture, however, occurred not during the closing decades of the twentieth century; rather, it unfolded between the end of World War I and the start of World War II.
During the interwar period policy makers, political leaders, and law enforcers launched a massive, hydra-headed response to a crime wave that quickly crested, justifying more aggressive policing, spearheading a dramatic expansion in federal law enforcement, forging the rise of the federal prison system, producing a sharp increase in prison populations, and establishing the high-water mark for executions in the nation's history.
To be sure, the recent increase in incarceration is more pronounced than its interwar counterpart. But the late twentieth-century law-and-order crusade and the ensuing birth of the carceral state are built on the social, legal, and political changes of an earlier, less familiar disjuncture between crime and punishment, when less crime produced more punishment, particularly for African Americans.
The relationship between crime and punishment is complex; trends in the latter are often only loosely connected to the former. This essay explores the curious, counterintuitive connection of U.
Historians have produced a rich literature on early twentieth-century violence, particularly on homicide, and the prison. Less is known, however, about the relationship between crime and punishment or the process through which suspects became prisoners during the interwar period. Aggregate-level data, often generated by legislative reports and Progressive Era investigations, provides snapshots of the number of crimes committed, the number of suspects charged, and the number of inmates, though such quantitative evidence fails to reveal which crimes were cleared, which suspects were indicted, tried, convicted, and incarcerated, or how this changed over time, making it difficult to explore the relationship between patterns of crime and trends in punishment.
Analyzing this relationship requires an analysis of case-level data, which allows scholars to trace individual suspects through the criminal justice system from arrest to trial. This essay blends aggregate-level data with case-level data and hence links broader patterns of crime and punishment to the trends unearthed by tracking individual cases.
The case-level analysis draws particularly from a remarkably rich cache of New Orleans police and court records and traces more than 2, homicides from crime to punishment.
With its colorful history and Deep South racial and institutional conventions, New Orleans was hardly a typical American city; yet its patterns of crime and punishment mirrored national interwar trends, much as recent changes in violence and incarceration reflect local conditions but still follow national rhythms.
New Orleans suffered from high rates of violent crime, though homicide rates rose and fell in virtual lockstep with those of other cities. While historians have not systematically examined conviction data for this period, New Orleans's trends in punishment are also consistent with aggregate-level state and national imprisonment patterns.
Thus, shifts in criminal justice in New Orleans suggest how national trends and the changing politics of law and order intersected with the realities of crime and punishment in interwar America. The violent-crime spike at the start of the twentieth century reflected a confluence of social and cultural forces, including a surge in the proportion of young men in the population, an increase in racial conflict and ethnic tensions, and shifts in gender roles. Between and the nation's homicide rate swelled by nearly 50 percent.
The increase was especially large in major cities; Baltimore's homicide rate doubled, New Orleans's and Chicago's tripled, and Cleveland's quadrupled.
The character of violent crime changed as much as the level of crime. Al Capone's exploits notwithstanding, Prohibition, organized crime, and bootlegging contributed only modestly to the surge in lethal violence during the s, and city dwellers expressed little concern that turf wars between rival gangsters would affect them. The urban violence of the s, however, was another matter and included an explosion in robberies and robbery-homicides.
A new breed of criminal seemed more calculating and more predatory, as holdup men and bank robbers, armed with Thompson submachine guns and fast getaway cars, invaded business districts, targeted respectable citizens, and evaded law enforcers.
By the early s Chicago's robbery rate swelled to one hundred times the rate for London. A series of sensational violent crimes, including the Wall Street bombing, the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and the murder trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago, contributed to a crime panic.
The nation's criminal justice system appeared paralyzed as violent crime soared while incarceration and execution rates remained nearly flat. Report after report revealed that the criminal justice system neither punished offenders nor protected the public. In American cities, four out of every five killers went unpunished. At the peak of Chicago's crime wave in the mids, local prosecutors secured convictions in 22 percent of homicide cases. Louis fared worse, convicting 14 percent, Nor were homicide cases an aberration; data on other felonies painted an equally bleak picture of criminal justice in s urban America.
Prosecutors in Chicago won convictions in 20 percent of felony cases, compared to 21 percent in New York City and 25 percent in Cincinnati. Simply put, the overwhelming majority of violent offenders went free.
Contemporary experts attributed the failure to incompetence and inefficiency at every level of the criminal justice system, but they heaped particular criticism on the police. Other critics held jurors responsible for the breakdown of law and order.
Prosecutors and judges especially blamed befuddled jurors—and the unscrupulous defense attorneys who confused them—for the low conviction rate in felony cases. There was some truth to these charges. Popular justice trumped the rule of law for early twentieth-century jurors who embraced expansive notions of self-defense and typically acquitted white men who had killed to affirm masculine privilege.
Jurors across the nation endorsed informal means of resolving disputes and refused to interfere with manly rituals for defending personal reputation, family honor, and community values. Southern law enforcers disingenuously insisted that jurors—still all-white—would not convict African Americans charged with intraracial violence.
Instead, the judges and prosecutors who discharged the lion's share of felony cases deserved most of the blame. In New York City, 58 percent of felony cases were dismissed or discharged before they reached grand juries, and that figure approached three-fourths in homicide cases. Inadequate police work sometimes compelled district attorneys to dismiss charges. More often, however, even with murders, prosecutors dropped cases they deemed unimportant.
Southern district attorneys, for example, routinely eliminated cases involving black-on-black violence. Yet prosecutors secured convictions in only 6 percent of African American intraracial homicide cases. Northern prosecutors employed a similar approach with immigrant crime, anticipating intransigence from foreign-born witnesses, believing such violence inevitable, and hence casually dismissing cases.
Even if middle-class city dwellers cared little about black-on-black or immigrant-on-immigrant crime, they expressed alarm that violence seemed to be bleeding into respectable neighborhoods, particularly as robbery and robbery-homicide rates mounted and as crime surveys exposed the impotence of legal institutions.
At the same time, popular ideas about the role of government shifted. Americans increasingly expected legal institutions to preserve social order, gradually privileging the rule of law over popular justice. During the mids the crime wave abruptly crested in most cities, and rates of violence plummeted for the next fifteen years. From to rates of lethal violence tumbled by 20 percent in Boston, 28 percent in New Orleans, 31 percent in New York City, 32 percent in Chicago, and 37 percent in St.
The decrease continued through the s, even as poverty mushroomed. Between and , homicide rates plunged by three-fourths in Detroit, by nearly two-thirds in New Orleans, Chicago, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, and by more than 50 percent in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Memphis.
See figure 1. In some cities and states , the decrease began slightly later, though this trend extended to every corner of the nation. From the mids until , the homicide rate dipped by one-third nationally. Nonlethal violence followed a comparable trajectory; rates of aggravated assault fell by 23 percent and robbery by 47 percent between and This graph shows the homicide rates per , people in Chicago and New Orleans between and S ource : Forrest E.
Linder and Robert D. Nearly every kind of lethal violence plummeted, though the dip in male-on-male intraracial crime accounted for the overwhelming majority of the decrease.
In New Orleans, the African American rate dropped by 64 percent and the white rate by 55 percent. Robbery-homicide rates fell by one-third, street homicide by one-half, and gun homicide by three-quarters. State-level data reveal similar trends. In Louisiana the homicide rate dipped by 46 percent among African American residents and by 45 percent among white residents.
Illinois experienced a parallel reduction, with the African American rate shrinking by 67 percent and the white rate by 48 percent. In spite of the ravages of the Great Depression, on the eve of World War II the United States was the least violent it had been for at least four decades, confounding long-held and enduring assumptions about the relation of poverty and violence. Although demographic factors, such as the leveling of sex ratios and the aging of the population, probably contributed to the decrease, neither historians nor criminologists have fully explained the sharp drop in violent crime that occurred during the s.
The steep drop in violent crime, however, had little effect on the crime panic. During the mids, policy makers launched a war on crime—a crusade that assumed a life of its own, increasingly detached from actual crime.
Long after the crime wave of the early s had ended, the war on crime persisted. And like most wars, this one enhanced the authority of the state and provided myriad opportunities for political leaders to pursue other agendas, often concealed within anticrime measures.
Early in the crime wave the federal government entered the fray, beginning with Prohibition, but then governmental power assumed new crime-fighting forms. Justice Department officials leveled scathing criticism at municipal policemen and proposed to fill the crime-fighting void. In an assistant U. By the early s the Hoover administration had established a federal prison system and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
For Franklin D. Roosevelt, the crime panic necessitated federal action but also provided another vehicle for broadening the power of the federal government. Edgar Hoover proved to be a master at manipulating public anxiety about crime. In New York enacted the Baumes Laws, which limited the rights of defendants, mandated extended prison terms for recidivists, and lengthened the sentences of those convicted of felonies using firearms.
New York officials claimed credit when crime rates fell, and the law became a model for other states; within two years, California, Kansas, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oregon, Vermont, and Michigan copied New York's get-tough-on-crime legislation.
Municipal law enforcers faced intense pressure to join the war on crime and reaped great rewards for doing so.
S Crime Essays. This handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre. Free organized crime papers, essays, and research papers. The Mafia was It wasn't until the sound era and the s that gangster films truly became an.
You may opt out or contact us anytime. By Manuel H. Brother Raul and friend Ernie wanted to see the films too, even though they had been made eight years earlier. Mother was not enthusiastic. We were not dissuaded and found ourselves sitting in the darkened theater on Sunday afternoon as the curtains parted.
But the main thrill might result from a specific tension between a logical quest and an ever expected meta-religious instant of revelation: doubt and certainty, mastery and subversion. Who done it?
The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster. Robert Warshow 'The gangster as tragic hero' in The immediate experience : movies, comics, theatre and other aspects of popular culture , Doubleday, Garden City, New York , pp. The tragedies and heroics of self-styled gangsters, including Squizzy Taylor, Long Harry Slater, and Henry Stokes, colour our imaginings of inter-war Melbourne.
Crime in the Great Depression
Jeffrey S. At first glance, this story seems familiar, if baffling. Patterns of crime and punishment in the United States moved in opposite directions, disrupting social life, distorting political institutions, and roiling race relations. Violent crime surged, and rates of murder and robbery exploded, particularly in large cities, for a quarter century. Criminals seemed more vicious than ever. Unable to respond to the crisis, the American legal system appeared weak and ineffective.
Crime and the Great Recession
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D uring the seventies and eighties, scarcely any newspaper story about rising crime failed to mention that it was strongly linked to unemployment and poverty. The argument was straightforward: if less legitimate work was available, more illegal work would take place. Certain scholars agreed. Economist Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, a Nobel laureate, developed a powerful theory that crime was rational—that a person will commit crime if the expected utility exceeds that of using his time and other resources in pursuit of alternative activities, such as leisure or legitimate work.
My 1930s Education at the Movies
During the Great Depression, with much of the United States mired in grinding poverty and unemployment, some Americans found increased opportunities in criminal activities like bootlegging, robbing banks, loan-sharking—even murder. The passage of the 18th Amendment and the introduction of Prohibition in fueled the rise of organized crime, with gangsters growing rich on profits from bootleg liquor—often aided by corrupt local policemen and politicians. According to the FBI , Chicago alone had an estimated 1, gangs by the mids, a situation that led to turf wars and other violent activities between rival gangs. Prohibition was unpopular with the public and bootleggers became heroes to many for supplying illegal alcohol during hard times. In hit movies like Little Caesar and The Public Enemy both released in , Hollywood depicted gangsters as champions of individualism and self-made men surviving in tough economic times. The end of Prohibition in deprived many gangsters of their lucrative bootlegging operations, forcing them to fall back on the old standbys of gambling and prostitution, as well as new opportunities in loan-sharking, labor racketeering and drug trafficking. The kidnapping and murder of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh in increased the growing sense of lawlessness in the Depression era. Amidst a media frenzy, the Lindbergh Law, passed in , increased the jurisdiction of the relatively new Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI and its hard-charging director, J. Edgar Hoover. But after the so-called Kansas City Massacre in June , in which three gunmen fatally ambushed a group of unarmed police officers and FBI agents escorting bank robber Frank Nash back to prison, the public seemed to welcome a full-fledged war on crime. A new anti-crime package spearheaded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his attorney general, Homer S.
