Crime and Punishment in American History

"Lawrence Friedman’s book is a panoramic social history of our criminal justice system from the colonial times to the end of the twentieth century. It shows how changes in the definitions of crime and the contours of the criminal justice system mirrored society. What we choose to criminalize and how we view the seriousness of those crimes, judged by what we designate as punishment, is a social construction. It’s a reflection of its era. Yes. I thought it would be good to pick a book that was a much wider lens than the studies of individual cases. Also, although his work is academic, Friedman writes in a style that is as accessible and as witty as any of the other writers that I have chosen. His work is not about the individual psychology of any particular crime; it’s about the way in which particular crimes speak to an era. Yes. It’s a good idea to have a context in which to place the specific cases. Much of the time when you’re dealing with a particularly famous trial—say, that of Lizzie Borden—the amount of press attention, legal talent, and actual time is so different than would be expended in a more ordinary case. I think it’s worth having a sense of what the norm is, so you can see the way in which these cases deviate from it. It explains why they’re significant, and what makes them different. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This is one problem identifiable across all of the choices we’ve discussed, except perhaps the Malcolm book which she reports closer to ‘real time.’ Most of the books deal with particularly sensational crimes, chosen by writers who have a historical vantage point and can assess which crimes merit sustained study. I think we’re fascinated by the taboo and prefer it at a safe remove. Pearson’s wry humor, for example, creates a distancing effect from the horror. It allows the reader to enjoy it in a way that you wouldn’t if you focused, as Truman Capote does in In Cold Blood (a classic of this genre), on the story of the victims’ ordinariness and the perpetrators’ sad histories. In terms of the entertainment quotient, distancing is critical. Capote describes In Cold Blood as a ‘non-fiction novel’ and it is often considered an elevating moment, the turning point for the genre that had been seen as déclassé . As I’ve noted, prior writers produced work that was artfully composed, featuring intriguing characters with depth. But In Cold Blood is novelistic because you feel deep empathy for the characters in a way we associate with fiction. He’s probably not so reliable as a nonfiction writer for that reason, despite his immersion in the case. I empathized with all of the characters in the sense that I thought it would be awful to be trapped in that house. There’s a suffocating tension in the household. If anything, I felt most sorry for the stepmother, who is invoked as the reason for the murders but is otherwise completely absent from the story. She figures only as this mythic evil stepmother type, who has somehow come between father and daughter. Yet there’s no real evidence that she was at all like that as a person. “There’s something deeply uncomfortable about the idea that a woman would act with such violence, even today” In many of these really well-done, carefully paced, deeply researched stories, which focus particularly on someone who’s been wrongfully convicted (true crime Netflix dramas, or a podcast like Serial , for example), the victim is pretty much removed from the story. Obviously, there’s no incentive for the victim’s family to participate in the making of the documentary because they think the correct person has been found guilty. And, of course, the victim is not there to speak for him or herself. You don’t get to know them in the way that you get to know the accused. I think what I’ve learned is that the discomfort remains. It’s easy to dismiss, as many have done, the jury’s verdict in Lizzie Borden’s case as a false gallantry and a late Victorian blindness about women’s capacity to commit violence—at least when speaking of outwardly respectable middle-class women. But I think there’s something deeply uncomfortable about the idea that a woman would act with such violence, even today. And not simply because the accused was a woman who seemed, at least on paper, to be the epitome of upper middle-class feminine virtue. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . My own unease centers on her ordinariness. Because we have the advantage of hindsight, we know that not only did Lizzie Borden live a pretty normal life before the murders, but we also know that she lived a fairly ordinary life after the murders. Many people at the time thought that she was a kind of human sphinx, an unreadable cipher, onto whom they could project their fears about the biological evil under the civilized veneer of femininity. But perhaps she was just an otherwise ordinary person and one wonders whether that is true of many people at the center of terrible crimes."