ABSTRACT
After reading this chapter students should understand and be able to discuss:
How the Civil War was followed by the gradual transformation of southern criminal justice
Why and how law enforcement coexisted with some forms of vice in the so-called Victorian compromise
The police reform efforts of future president Theodore Roosevelt
The changing nature of violence in various regions of the country
The increasing visibility of women in criminal justice reform movements (juvenile justice, corrections, etc.)
The role played by gender stereotypes in the Lizzie Borden trial and verdict
The impact of the first National Prison Congress on the development of new alternatives to fixed sentencing
Efforts at reforming and improving the criminal justice system for juvenile and female inmates
During the so-called Victorian era of the nineteenth century (which paralleled the reign of England’s Queen Victoria in roughly the last half of the nineteenth century and overlapped with the American Gilded Age), a double standard existed in which certain moral offenses were tolerated as long they did “not threaten the general fabric of society.” 1 According to this “Victorian compromise,” gambling, prostitution, and other related forms of vice and 225crime were tolerated under the assumption that there was little that could be officially done to eradicate them. Historian Lawrence Friedman describes this compromise as “a muddled but powerful theory of social control” 2 in which private sins could be tolerated in the “dark corners and back alleys” as long as public order was not compromised.