British Criminology Before 1935
Files
Description
[ . . . ] By convention, modern scientific criminology is said to have begun with Lombroso's criminal anthropology in the 1870s, and in one sense this is true enough, since it was the impact of Lombroso which sparked off the international congresses and debates of the 1880s and brought the idea of a criminological science to public prominence for the first time. But criminology in Britain did not develop out of the Lombrosian tradition. Nor did it derive from the European movement, despite the way in which Edwardian penal reforms appeared to follow its lead—even despite the fact that it would later be a group of European émigrés who did most to establish an academic profession of criminologists in this country. In fact the scientific approach to crime and punishment was not something which Britain reluctantly imported from abroad. On the contrary, there existed in Britain, from the 1860s onward, a distinctive, indigenous tradition of applied medico-legal science which was sponsored by the penal and psychiatric establishments, and it was this tradition which formed the theoretical and professional space within which ‘criminological science’ was first developed in this country. If we are to understand criminology and its social foundations it is important not to confuse these two traditions, or to collapse one onto the other. In particular, we should avoid assuming that any criminological work which is ‘positivist’ in style is somehow derived from the 'Scuola Positiva' of Lombroso. Much of the early British criminology which I will describe falls into the broad epistemological and methodological categories which we nowadays call ‘positivist’—but it had little to do with Lombroso's Positivism, nor indeed with that of Comte. Lombrosian criminology grew, somewhat accidentally, out of an anthropological concern to study man and his natural varieties. The identification of human types led Lombroso and others to isolate such types as the genius, the insane, the epileptoid and the criminal, and to subject them to scientific scrutiny and categorization. To some extent this was effectively the redescription in scientific language of distinctions which were already established in cultural terms, and certainly the excitement which followed Lombroso's identification of 'the born criminal' occurred because his work allowed a spectacular convergence between human science and the concerns of social policy. His differentiation of ‘the criminal type’ chimed with deep-rooted cultural prejudice and also with the real processes of differentiation which were then being established by the expanding prison system, so that the apparent policy implications of Lombroso's work immediately became a focus for widespread attention. But although Lombroso was well aware of the social policy relevance of his anthropology, and took pains to promote it, he was not, at first, particularly well informed about the practical realities of crime and punishment. In consequence, his penology was not just radical and at odds with current practices: it was also naive and uninformed, demonstrating a lack of familiarity with the normal range of offenders and with the institutions which dealt with them. In fact it is clear that Lombroso had developed his conception of the criminal type more out of theoretical commitment than from practical experience or observation. And although exposure to criticism and his increasing involvement in penal affairs eventually led him to amend his initial framework, and to tone down his more outrageous propositions, it was the clear and unqualified claims of his early work which continued to define the Lombrosian tradition, particularly for those who viewed it from afar. The psychiatric and medico-legal framework within which Britain developed its early criminological science was different from the Lombrosian tradition in a number of important respects. Unlike anthropology, psychiatry was not concerned to isolate discrete types of human individuals and classify them by means of racial and constitutional differences. Instead, it was a therapeutically oriented discipline based upon a classification system of psychiatric disorders which, like the disease model of nineteenth century medicine, discussed the condition separately from the individual in whom it might be manifested. Within the classification system of morbid psychology there were a variety of conditions which criminals were typically said to exhibit—insanity, moral insanity, degeneracy, feeble-mindedness, etc. But generally speaking, the criminal was not conceived as a psychological type. Instead the spectrum of psychiatric conditions might be usefully applied to a part of the criminal population: there was no separate criminal psychology or psychiatry, based upon ontological difference.
Source Publication
Criminological Perspectives: A Reader
Source Editors/Authors
John Muncie, Eugene McLaughlin, Mary Langan
Publication Date
1996
Edition
1
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "British Criminology Before 1935" (1996). Faculty Chapters. 697.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/697
