| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

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. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-3955-3.)
Troubled Experiment is "a history of crime where there should have been no significant crime," assert Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe (p. 1). Yet within a generation of William Penn's debarkation at Philadelphia on October 29, 1682, crimes of property and violence in this Quaker paradise were unexpectedly commonplace, and after the 1720s, Pennsylvania's "homicide rate exceeded London's rates for the whole eighteenth century" (p. 73). Historians ever since have questioned why Penn's "civic utopia on the Delaware" became "a society troubled by crime and disorder" (pp. 7, 263).	1
Perhaps more surprising than the reality of crime in Pennsylvania is the fantasy that it was, or should have been, otherwise. The myth originated with Penn: his imprisonment by the British, his "vision of a novel, enlightened society in the New World" (p. 8), his promulgation of a penal code milder than in England or any of its colonies, and his support of religious freedom and immigration—Penn seems to be America's founding father and epic hero combined (according to William Bradford, he possessed a mind "like a mountain, whose summit is enlightened by the first beams of the sun" [An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death Is Necessary in Pennsylvania, 1793, p. 14]).	. . .

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