Menninger spent the last half of his eyewitness account of the disappearance of sin (Chapter 3) on the displacement of “sin” by “crime”.  He presented his own history of the convoluted process.

Originally, “sin” was not a “crime” (a behavior to be punished by the state).  There were good reasons for this.  Parents, churches, communities and workplaces served as effective deterrents.

For the family, one deterrent was parental intervention, as in “spare the rod and spoil the child”.

(Native American Indians were shocked at the way the Puritans beat their children.  Ironically, North American Indians were far closer to the Lebenswelt of the Paleolithic than the Lebenswelt of the Puritans.  They were not ultra-civilized beings looking down at the barely civilized barbarians.  They lived in a world where they did not know any different, until these Europeans arrived.  They had no idea that Civilization was coming and what that meant.)

For the churches, public confession and condemnations originally served as very effective deterrents against sin.  The Celtic church changed that by developing a tradition of private confession.

The community had other deterrents, such as citizen participation, police, courts and prisons.

For the workplace, training in almost any discipline also served to deter sin.  This “training” was not “what you learn in college”.  This was “on the job training”.  Skinner called it “aversive conditioning”.  Practitioners called it “getting the job done”.