as synonymous with "sin" and (as Hester Prynne could attest) a criminal justice sys- tem that emphasized the public na-ture of punishment.
The colonies also imported not a few criminals. As Samuel Walker notes in Popular Justice (Oxford, 1980, cloth & paper), after an act of Parlia- ment in 1717, Britain sent 30,000 fel- ons to the American colonies.
Walker's concise, well-written his- tory of crime and criminal justice in the United States runs through the late 1970s. He traces...