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The Reformatory, Child-Saving, & Race Laws
This era is dense with criminal justice activity. Federal law is growing. The police remain marginally effective and totally corrupt. Vice and disorder thrive, and moral crusaders set their sights on drinking, gambling, and drug use. The penitentiary, once so promising, has not cured crime after all, so the reformatory is born. Juveniles become the target of newly educated and idle upper class Protestant women whose benevolence fuels a child-saving movement. Charles Darwin's 1859 Origin of the Species, positing evolution, has challenged prevailing religious beliefs about man's origins, helping set the stage for ideas that promote heredity and biology as causes of criminal behavior. Science and doctors begin to take the place of clergy and religion as society's collective conscience. Those who are in power make use of the tools of criminal justice, from legal codes to punitive practices, to express their racial hatred and anti-immigrant sentiment. Newly freed blacks are targeted by the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws developed to recreate the economic and social conditions of slavery. Native Americans bear the brunt of a national campaign to assimilate them and eradicate their culture. Anti-Chinese feelings simmer on the west coast and result in an array of laws specifically targeting Asians. The United States begins to rely more heavily on the multiple arms of the criminal justice system. Law, punishment, and theory are used creatively toward the ideological purposes of a nation defining itself. |