The criminal justice system in the United States underwent dramatic changes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the turn of the century, police departments across the country attempted to professionalize their workforce. There was an effort to lift the standards of police work by training men and establishing a merit system for hiring and promotion. August Vollmer, police chief of Berkeley, California, was a leader in the movement to upgrade the standards of the police force. In 1916, Vollmer developed the first academic law-enforcement program at the University of California at Berkeley. By 1915, 122 out of the nation’s 204 largest police departments were regulated under civil service systems.
Despite efforts to modernize policing across the country, police departments still faced the problems of discipline,
Graft, corruption, and police brutality. In the early 20th century, “nightstick” justice was still common. For example, a policeman new to the New York City police force was told that his job was to “protect the good people and treat the crooks rough.” His role was to protect law-abiding citizens. At the same time, the police who walked the city streets presumed that people with past criminal records were guilty and needed to be intimidated through brute force.
In addition to the police force, widespread reforms during the Progressive Era permanently altered the criminal justice system. Between 1900 and 1920, progressives initiated many reforms in the treatment and punishment of offenders. Reformers set out to establish individualized programs for rehabilitation. In state after state, a broad coalition of judges, district attorneys, wardens, superintendents, citizens, settlement house workers, criminologists, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists helped to pass probation, parole, and indeterminate sentencing laws for adult offenders, and created juvenile courts for delinquents.
In the early 20th century, probation became a common alternative to incarceration for adult offenders. Probation was the immediate release of a criminal into the community after conviction. Limitations were placed on the freedom of offenders, and they remained under supervision by authorities. In 1900, six states had probation systems; by 1920, 33 states provided for probation. Another alternative to traditional incarceration was indeterminate sentencing, when the offender was sent to prison for an indefinite term until the criminal was “cured.” Before 1900, judges set the specific term of sentencing for adult offenders. After 1900, judges set minimum and maximum terms. Meanwhile, parole boards held discretionary power and decided the precise time of release within the limits set by the judge. The parole system spread across the country as rapidly as other innovations in criminal justice. In 1900, only a handful of states allowed for paroles. By 1923, over half of all offenders in the nation were released by parole.
Between 1900 and 1920, reformers created a new juvenile justice system. Progressives thought that it was inhumane to lock up juveniles in the same institutions as habitual criminals. Under these circumstances, reformers argued, the prison system of the 19th century served as schools in which troubled youths learned the ways of vice. Consequently, in the late 19th century, many states had set up separate reform schools for boys and girls as an alternative to prison. Expanding on the idea, progressives created special criminal courts to administer juvenile justice. The juvenile courts gave the criminal justice system broad discretionary authority in dealing with delinquents, troubled youths, and neglected and abused children. The juvenile courts originated from a movement of “child savers,” led by settlement house workers such as Jane Addams at Hull-
House in Chicago, Illinois. In 1899, a groundbreaking law in Illinois set up a juvenile court for Cook County, which included the city of Chicago and its suburbs. Although the Illinois law separated juveniles from adult offenders, it continued to place delinquents in the same institutions as children who had not broken the law but were abandoned, abused, or neglected.
The juvenile courts extended state control over poor children and imposed middle-class Protestant values on them and on working-class families who were, more often than not, Catholic or Jewish immigrants. Many officials who served on juvenile courts considered delinquency not an illegal act but a “state, condition, or environment into which the child enters.” Thus, they intervened to prevent troubled children from becoming criminals, rather than institutionalizing children after they had already broken the law. On the other hand, parents were not wholly victims of the juvenile justice system. Instead, working-class and immigrant parents used the courts as a tool of last resort to control their rebellious children. More often than not, parents, not social workers or policemen, brought troubled children into court.
Early in the 20th century, the movement against vice and immorality reached its peak, climaxing during the Prohibition era. In many cases, vices were made illegal by new legislation in the 20th century, but the public and authorities still either tolerated the activities or looked the other way. For example, gambling was an illegal vice, and many cities cracked down on gambling establishments periodically. But after a wave of arrests, gambling tended to bounce back.
The campaign against sexual immorality met with more success. In 1910, Congress passed the Mann Act, or “White Slave Traffic Act.” Intended to prevent women who lived in cities from falling prey to a life of immorality and prostitution, the Mann Act prohibited harboring women across state lines for the purposes of commercialized vice. The Red-Light Abatement Movement, the effort to close down vice districts where houses of prostitution were concentrated, also peaked in the early 20th century. Between 1910 and 1917, at least 43 cities created vice commissions that investigated the underworld of vice and prostitution. A wave of crackdowns on red-light districts took place across the country. But after the police shut down houses of prostitution and arrested prostitutes in cleanup campaigns, vice seemed to resurface. Vice also gave rise to opportunities for police corruption.
In the 1920s and 1930s, crime prevention increasingly became a national issue. Before the 20th century, the criminal justice system operated mostly at the state level. The number of prisoners in federal institutions slowly gained ground compared to the number housed in state prisons. In 1910, there were 66,831 prisoners in the state system, compared to 1,904 in federal institutions. By 1940, there were 146,325 in state prisons and 19,260 in the federal system.
In 1919, the adoption of the Prohibition Amendment (the Eighteenth Amendment), which made the liquor trade illegal, contributed to the increasing power of the federal government in the criminal justice system. In the same year, the enforcement mechanism to the Prohibition Amendment, the Volstead Act, also was passed. Violating the Volstead Act was a federal crime. As a result, the law put thousands of people in jail across the nation.
With enormous profits to be made in bootlegging and blind pigs (illegal after-hour drinking establishments), organized crime flourished during the Prohibition era. Bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution were part of the underworld culture of organized crime. After 1925 Al Capone, the boss of organized crime in Chicago, ruthlessly murdered his rivals until he went to jail for tax evasion. Ultimately, criminalizing the liquor trade proved to be a failure, and the Prohibition laws were repealed in 1933. Prohibition was unenforceable in a nation that was “dry” in public, but “wet” behind closed doors.
In 1929, crime symbolically became a national issue when President Herbert Hoover stated in his inaugural address, “Crime is increasing.” He proposed a federal commission to study the problem. The result was the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, chaired by George W. Wickersham, a former attorney general in the administration of William Howard Taft. In 1931, the Wickersham Commission published 14 reports, studying police behavior, penal institutions, and the causes of crime. It accused the criminal justice system of brutality, corruption, and inefficiency. In the end, the commission’s recommendations collected dust on the shelf, but the commission brought crime to the public’s attention as a national issue. As a member of the Wickersham Commission, Morris Ploscowe had asked whether the state of the criminal justice system suggested that something was wrong in “the very heart of. . . government and social policy in America.” According to legal historian Lawrence Friedman, the role of the federal government in responding to crime increased when the New Deal “sucked power” from the states to deal with the economic crisis of the Great Depression.
See also PROGRESSiviSM.
Further reading: Lawrence M. Friedman, Cri-me and Funishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 1997); David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).
—Glen Bessemer
World History
