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Book Reviews
| Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800. By Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. x, 353 pp. Tables and figures, notes, index. $59.95.)
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Jack Marietta and G. S. Rowe's Troubled Experiment is a fascinating exploration of crime and justice in early Pennsylvania. Rooted in extensive quantitative research and analysis, Troubled Experiment aims to make larger moral and political claims about the contexts and causes of crime in early America and beyond. In their pursuit of these aims, Marietta and Rowe have searched the extant records of criminal prosecutions and convictions, sought out public commentary on the problem of crime, attempted to place the accused and the victims in their social and religious contexts, and traced the evolution of both law and courts across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. |
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From one perspective, Marietta and Rowe tell a recognizable story. Dividing the history of the law in early Pennsylvania into three periods (from the founding to 1718, from 1718 to 1776, and 1776 to 1800), they recount the transformation of criminal justice from the high ideals of Penn and his fellow founders, through the reconfiguration of the criminal law codes in 1718, the increasing Anglicization of criminal law, forms, and practices (with the development of a more professional bar and bench and a dramatic hardening of the criminal code), to the revolutionary and early republican effort to uproot the more spectacular penal displays and the search for a newer more "Enlightened" justice (with a diminished reliance on the death penalty, the growing use of early penitentiaries, and the revolutionary conflicts over justice, democracy, and the political community). |
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