I now turn to Chapter 5.

How did “sin” become “crime”?  Menninger’s storyline applies only to Western Civilization (formerly known as “Christendom”).

Early on, states were only concerned about their own property.  “Crime” was so defined.

What about the other transgressions, offenses and similar matters?  Either a state-appointed magistrate or a religion-appointed priest could rule on claims by non-royalty over one another.

This, ironically, is what we are returning to in some European jurisdictions, where state-appointed judges and Islamic clerics rule over identical persons based on entirely different sets of “laws”.

Over time, “the clergy was increasingly willing to relinquish their responsibilities for dealing with these ugly matters (50)”.  Transgressions of morality split into the merely “sinful” and the “criminal”.

Apparatuses of the state developed to handle these “crimes”.  They grew into proud, mighty, monstrous, slow, cruel, destructive, ineffective and tremendously expensive structures.

Menninger went into great detail about several of these structures (53-66), concluding that the new custom was to legislate “morality” and coerce “virtue” by law.

Menninger disapproved, quoting Oliver Goldsmith, “Nothing can be more certain than that numerous written laws are a sign of a degenerate community, and are frequently not the consequences of vicious morals in a state, but the causes.”