<P> Demographic change in the eighteenth century coincided with shifts in the configuration of crime . After 1700, literary evidence from a variety of sources--e.g., ministers, newspapers, and judges--suggest that property crime rates rose (or, at least, were perceived to). Conviction rates appear to have risen during the last half of the eighteenth century, rapidly so in the 1770s and afterward and especially in urban areas . Contemporary accounts also suggest widespread transiency among former criminals . </P> <P> Communities began to think about their town as something less than the sum of all its inhabitants during this period, and the notion of a distinct criminal class began to materialize . In the Philadelphia of the 1780s, for example, city authorities worried about the proliferation of taverns on the outskirts of the city, "sites of an alternative, interracial, lower - class culture" that was, in the words of one observer, "the very root of vice ." In Boston, a higher urban crime rate led to the creation of a specialized, urban court in 1800 . </P> <P> The efficacy of traditional, community - based punishments waned during the eighteenth century . Penal servitude, a mainstay of British and colonial American criminal justice, became nearly extinct during the seventeenth century, at the same time that Northern states, beginning with Vermont in 1777, began to abolish slavery . Fines and bonds for good behavior--one of the most common criminal sentences of the colonial era--were nearly impossible to enforce among the transient poor . As the former American colonists expanded their political loyalty beyond the parochial to their new state governments, promoting a broader sense of the public welfare, banishment (or "warning out") also seemed inappropriate, since it merely passed criminals onto a neighboring community . Public shaming punishments like the pillory had always been inherently unstable methods of enforcing the public order, since they depended in large part on the participation of the accused and the public . As the eighteenth century matured, and a social distance between the criminal and the community became more manifest, mutual antipathy (rather than community compassion and offender penitence) became more common at public executions and other punishments . In urban centers like Philadelphia, growing class and racial tensions--especially in the wake of the Revolution--led crowds to actively sympathize with the accused at executions and other public punishments . </P> <P> Colonial governments began making efforts to reform their penal architecture and excise many traditional punishments even before the Revolution . Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut all inaugurated efforts to reconstitute their penal systems in the years leading up to the war to make incarceration at hard labor the sole punishment for most crimes . Although war interrupted these efforts, they were renewed afterward . A "climate change" in post-Revolutionary politics, in the words of historian Adam J. Hirsch, made colonial legislatures open to legal change of all sorts after the Revolution, as they retooled their constitutions and criminal codes to reflect their separation from England . The Anglophobic politics of the day bolstered efforts to do away with punishments inherited from English legal practice . </P>

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