British Criminology Before 1935

British Criminology Before 1935

Description

“Criminology”, as a professional academic discipline, did not exist in Britain before 1935, and was established only gradually and precariously thereafter. So whatever this essay is about, it cannot be about criminology in quite the sense we think of it today. Instead, it examines some of the lines of emergence of that discipline, and in particular, the theoretical and institutional processes which gave rise to a scientific criminology in Britain. Given the short space available to me here, this can be no more than a very selective account, highlighting a few important currents, while ignoring much that would be essential to a proper genealogy of the subject. My central concern will be to show that the development of British criminology can best be understood by concentrating less upon the spread of ideas from abroad and more upon the ways in which penal and social institutions acted as a practical surface of emergence for this kind of knowledge. What is presented is not an abstracted history of ideas, but instead an attempt to situate criminology within the institutional practices and power relations which have formed its immediate context and foundation. It should be possible, in turn, to situate this history of institutional pragmatics within a wider field of social forces [ . . .] but no such analysis is attempted here. By convention, modem 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 co 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 co 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 categorisation. To some extent this was effectively the rediscription 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.

Source Publication

The Origins and Growth of Criminology: Essays in Intellectual History 1760 -1945

Source Editors/Authors

Piers Beirne

Publication Date

1994

British Criminology Before 1935

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