CRIME FANTASIES

Throughout American history the public has been gripped by fantasies of criminal activity. These crime fantasies manifest in two distinct but related typologies: witch-hunts and crime panics. On the one hand, witch-hunts target individuals based on their beliefs and are exemplified by the two Red Scares of the early and mid-twentieth century and the persecution of the Quakers in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay. But when the public's fantasization of crime begins to influence the criminal justice system, it creates profound issues of unfairness.13 This article shows that there are two distinct types of crime fantasies: witch-hunts and crime panics. Witch-hunts create new crimes by penalizing people because of their beliefs, while crime panics involve the overzealous prosecution of a particular type of crime. These two types of related, but distinct, crime fantasies ought to be kept separate for the sake of conceptual clarity and to enable tailored criminal justice reform.