Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania

Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania

I was looking for information on mass murder in Colonial America, and found this book by Jack D. Marietta and Gail S. Rowe, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2006. This is a highly detailed analysis of crime and how the criminal justice system operated in Pennsylvania in the period 1682-1800. As the book's Introduction explains:

This is a history of crime in a place where there should have been no significant crime and a history of laws and law enforcement where there should have been little need for them. The place, after all, was Pennsylvania, the "Holy Experiment," "the golden age ... which has apparently never existed except in Pennsylvania," the "best poor man's country on earth," a land with peace and happiness reigning with justice and liberty among this people of brothers.... If any place enjoyed the prospect of liberating men and women from the conditions that presumably engender crime--poverty, oppression, and war among them--Pennsylvania was it. And yet, in this same place, a husband killed and mutilated his wife, and then crushed the skulls of his two children and a neighbor's child. An eight-year-old girl was raped in her Chester County home while her parents were out of the house. A cordwainer who sat at his front door in Philadelphia, smoking his pipe, died when an unknown person drove a knife through his heart.

This is a book driven by the data--a detailed examination of criminal justice records from a state that the authors tell us had the highest crime rates of all the colonies. There are tables showing the number of homicide accusations by decade (total: 513), and the number of those accusations that led to indictments (total: 382). There are murder rates for all of Pennsylvania, for Philadelphia, and for Chester County. There are breakdowns by morals crime: how many charges by decade for fornication, bastardy, adultery, bigamy, buggery, sodomy, incest, drunkenness, tolerating drunkenness, violating Sabbath, profane swearing, blasphemy, scolding, practicing magic/witchcraft, gambling, horse racing, and conducting lottery. (Okay, I'm describing a day in the life of some members of Congress.)

I'm impressed with how the authors have used the tax lists to demonstrate that for the most part, not only those accused of the most serious crimes were generally poor or transient (and likely both), but so were their victims--much like today, where the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder supplies most of the victims and victimizers.

The authors also use the declining rates of prosecution for most crimes of sexual morality as the Quaker percentage declines to argue that the Quaker elite became increasingly willing to adopt a more libertarian point of view. The one great exception is bastardy, where, just like today, illegitimacy led to dependency on the community. And at the same time that this more relaxed notion of public morality was taking effect, violent crime rates were rising. The obvious reason is that much of the new immigrant population that did not share Quaker values about fornication, swearing, and drunkenness, also didn't share their values about nonviolence.

There is a very detailed discussion of what happened to crime rates among African-Americans after 1780, when slavery was gradually phased out in Pennsylvania. They make the interesting point that while the expected epidemic of crime from freed slaves did not happen, the arrival of large numbers of Haitian refugees after the 1794 slave rebellion there seems to have caused a substantial increase in African-American crime.

The most controversial aspect of the book is the conclusion, where Marietta and Rowe argue that the underlying ideology of Pennsylvania played a major part in why it was such a violent and criminal society. Keep in mind that by "liberal" here they mean classical liberalism, which was somewhere between modern libertarianism and modern liberalism:

The power that the reformers withdrew from established churches, hierarchical governments, and hereditary castes, they expected to distribute among the people, who would enjoy personal libety and self-determination. Commerce too deserved to be freed from historic constraints. Enlightenment thinkers found nothing objectionable in increasing the reach and sway of free markets in society. Quite the opposite: they extolled them. So liberal Pennsylvania was open and tolerant, exceptionally free of authoritarian elites in public and religious life, unburdened by a military hierarchy, juridically humane for its day, and physically bountiful enough to win the acclaim of residents and visitors and to attract thousands hopeful of pursuing happiness. This liberal society provided the context for surprisingly abundant crime in Pennsylvania. This intersection of liberalism with abundant crime was more than coincidence. Liberalism supported and stimulated crime. While it solved many past problems, it disclosed new ones.

Liberals may have misunderstood human nature and credited people with too much altruism or too little selfishness.... But Pennsylvania did not reckon with the number of base and selfish men and women who came to Pennsylvania.