Late-twentieth-century law decriminalized what Victorian vice laws had criminalized

Evidence

After the 1920s, the tide began to turn. The ideology that sustained the war on vice slowly but surely decayed. Prohibition was the first casualty. By the 1930s, it was history. And, in the last decades of the twentieth century, society, and the legal system as well, turned its back on a once powerful anti-​vice movement, and rejected it almost completely. Permissiveness, not repression or suppression, was the watchword of the late twentieth century. The animal instinct won battle after battle. Pornography was, essentially, decriminalized, especially in big cities. State after state, in the north and west, reformed the sex laws in their criminal codes. In the end, the law legitimated whatever consenting adults chose to do to and with each other. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4293

Categorization

• XREF: The rise and fall of moralistic criminal law ties to the chapter’s earlier point that unenforced vice laws persisted because classes wanted official morality preserved — now the ideology itself decayed. — connects to: A late-nineteenth-century crusade criminalized victimless vices like obscenity and gambling — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 818; Victorian America criminalized only public, notorious sin rather than private vice — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3324; Laws against sex and vice resurged strongly in late nineteenth-century America — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3323 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Articulates the late-century repeal of ‘victimless crime’ criminalization as a wholesale reversal, not piecemeal reform.

Broader Connections

• Decriminalization of drugs and sex work advances abolitionist decarceration #expands (0.80) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 291
• Post-emancipation Black Codes criminalized work refusal and reestablished forced labor #corroborates (0.75) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 384
• The Thirteenth Amendment’s crime clause legalized post-emancipation re-enslavement via penal servitude #expands (0.70)