Brockway, Zebulon

Following the Civil War, collective violence, personal crime, and crimes against persons rose precipitously. Immigrants and the urban poor were seen by elites as lacking in control and in need of training to aid their assimilation. The criminal justice process was insufficient to deal with the problem of crime in the urban milieu. Since the goal of the justice system was to maximize efficiency of the capitalist system, and criminals were lumpenproletariat, it would follow that these potential workers should and could be converted into dependable lower-class workers. The goal ...