by Abigail McCarthy

About the author: Abigail McCarthy is a writer and frequent contributor to Commonweal magazine, an independent journal of opinion edited and managed by lay Catholics.

As the crime bill swung into its second round the summer of 1994, vacationers with whom I was sharing Cape Cod tended to grow nostalgic about the relatively crime-free times of their youth. I, too, thought fondly of the days when we put the key on the ledge over the front door—if we locked the door at all— and the only crimes that fretted our parents were kids swiping melons from nearby farmers’ fields or, once or twice, some petty embezzlement by a hard- pressed employee in one of the town’s businesses.

Oh, we were aware of big crime. In his time Jesse James and...