People seem to have an insatiable appetite for reading about true crime....Many in the cast of [true crime] characters are professionals, or semi-professionals whose lives revolve around matters of crime. Lay people, too have a role--as jurors, for example. There is also, of course, the story of a much larger cohort of lay men and women: people accused of breaking the law; and their victims. Their stories are not, in the main, pleasant or uplifting; the lives caught up in these webs are so often ruined and wasted lives; through these pages parade example after example of foolishness, vice, self destruction, selfishness, evil, and greed. They are stories with few, if any heroes; and few, if any happy endings. But [these stories] are important to the country; and they exert a weird fascination.
Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History, 1993
Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History, 1993
No comments:
Post a Comment