NCJ Number
121132
Date Published
1989
Length
326 pages
Annotation
In the late nineteenth-century, Philadelphia had a notoriously corrupt criminal justice system, which was police dominated, and built on the primary justice structure that had been created by the new constitution.
Abstract
The corruption of the police and the magistrates after 1874 rested largely on the extinct relationship between aldermen and private litigants. When the first twenty-four police magistrates were elected in February 1875, the criminal justice system in Philadelphia was markedly different from what it had been a generation earlier. The transformation of the State is one of the most prominent themes of nineteenth-century American history. It demonstrates the expansion and increasing complexity of government and of the professionalization and decreasing popular character of politics. The United States moved from a society that was scarcely governed to one in which the government regularly touched the daily lives of people by the end of the century. After discussing the history of the courts involvement of law enforcement, authority and criminal justice before the advent of the police, the city's system of private prosecution workings and the adaptation of massive social change is shown. The dilemmas that prompted reform, beginning with the establishment of a professional police force and ending with the restructuring of primary justice, are considered.