Crime and Punishment

America saw a rise in crime during the mid-1920’s or the “interwar period”. Even worse, it was violent crimes like murder and robberies that began to inflate. This began a war on crime which slowly became detached from real crimes. “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…” (Adler, “Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America,” 35). Punishment in the 1920’s revealed a lack of punishing offenders which in turn did not protect the public. The percentage of those convicted hovered around 20 percent in many states.

After the crest of crime around 1925, crime began to decrease for the next 15 years. No historian can explain this drop-in crime. There are assumptions that demographic factors contributed to the decline such as aging factors and the leveling of sex ratios. Unfortunately, this drop did not affect the panic on crime and punishment increased during this period of lower rate of crime. This was due to President Hoover unleashing a campaign making all bank robbers into “public enemies” and New York enacting the Baumes Laws in 1926. These laws lengthened sentences for felons using firearms, extended prison sentences for repeat offenders, and limited the rights of defendants. Police across the nation were pressured into joining this war with rewards.

With new arsenals and little training, this reinvented the police force into crime fighters. Black-on-white violence remained constant during this time and popular perception paired with inhumane law enforcement tactics evolved African Americans into the new dangers. Race-control and crime-control began to look the same. Any little hint that a “colored man” was suspected of a crime, the police took matters way too far. For example, in 1943 a late-night shipyard worker by the name of John Sansone was shot and killed. A nurse had heard the gunshot and looked out the window and supposedly saw a man of color in vicinity of the victim. This led to a man-hunt with the police superintendent ordering all “Negroes” found on the streets late at night to be arrested. Police did not catch the killer, but they did detain round a thousand African Americans and charged them with bogus crimes like loitering or even vagrancy charges for those who did not hold a legitimate occupation. This directly led into the rise of mass incarceration. "“...since 1970 the number of felons confined in state and federal prisons has multiplied by a factor of eight, and the overall prison incarceration rate in the United States has zoomed to nearly 500 per 100,000 people, a fivefold increase. As late as 1977 the prison population had barely surpassed 300,000.” (Lichtenstein, “Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the Postwar Carceral State,” 116).