Word: communalized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...controlled most public and much private conduct as well. This is why there was such frequent resort to humiliation as a penalty. Stocks, pillory, and tar and feathers were effective because the opinion of one's townsmen was so important. The colonists paid a price for government by communal consensus: there was not much privacy, and what we now regard as liberties of conscience often existed only at the pleasure of public opinion...
...doubled and by 1790 more than tripled. Of course the population was increasing as well, and so the rate at which crimes were being committed may not (no one knows) have gone up as sharply. But indisputably there was more crime and there were more criminals. The effectiveness of communal control by force of public opinion was fading...
...response to these conditions was the creation of new, specialized institutions to deal with what had once been left to spontaneous and communal control. At the time of the Revolution, the "police" were nothing but night watchmen who set up the hue and cry if a fire broke out or a horse died in the street. But big cities began to suffer more noisome problems. By the 1820s one out of every 65 Bostonians was, according to Haverford College Historian Roger Lane, engaged in selling liquor. The dozen "houses of infamous character" that nourished in the West End of Boston...
...combination of solitary reflection and spiritual guidance. The high hopes of the reformers proved, of course, impossibly Utopian-probably in theory, certainly in practice. As crime increased, the prisons were soon overcrowded, and thus neither solitude nor guidance was any longer possible. More important, the breakdown of familial and communal controls that had made prisons necessary in the first place ensured that the prisons could not be successful-how does one reform in a year or two a personality that has been deformed by a decade or two of neglect or abuse...
...channel constructive ones. Today there are virtually no institutions left to invent: crime increases in spite of police, prisons, and public and private government. For a long time, and to our great disadvantage, we clung to the myth that there was a bureaucratic or governmental alternative to familial and communal virtue, that what parents, neighbors, and friends had failed to do, patrolmen, wardens, counselors and psychiatrists could provide. We struggled to maintain the hope that the police and schools could prevent crime and that prisons and treatment programs could rehabilitate criminals...