The Criminal Brain: Understanding Biological Theories of Crime

2. Moral Insanity and the Origins of Criminology

19 2 Moral Insanity and the Origins of Criminology Criminology—the effort to account for crime scientifically— emerged, like other social sciences, out of the 18th -century political, philosophical, and scientific upheavals known as the Enlightenment. In the distant background lay the medieval world, with its authoritarianism, political hierarchies, and preference for theological and metaphysical explanations. In the middle background lay the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of ancient scientific texts and its dramatic advances in engineering and the physical sciences. In the immediate background lay the so-called Age of Reason, with its emphasis on logic, rationality, and systematization. The pace of change accelerated during the late 18th century with democratic revolutions in North America and France, growing pressure for humanitarian reforms, and a pell-mell rush to “do” science of all sorts. Among the results were the efforts made by Cesare Beccaria in Italy and Jeremy Bentham in England to replace autocratic systems of criminal punishment with more rational laws and institutions.1 Enlightenment impulses led, in the early 19th century, to efforts to establish social sciences through nonspeculative or “positive” methods—by establishing facts from which natural laws could then be derived inductively. This was the cultural context—the flow of 18th -century rationalism and enthusiasm for science into 19th -century positivism—in which the first efforts to study crime scientifically took place.2 How, specifically, did scientific criminology get started? Who first realized that criminal behavior might be studied as a science, and what did they mean by “science”? How did they picture the mind of the arch-criminal and see it as different from the minds of run-ofthe -mill criminals and law-abiding citizens? In what follows, I trace the origins of criminological science to the work of three men: the American psychiatrist Benjamin Rush, the French psychiatrist Philippe 20 Moral Insanity and the Origins of Criminology Pinel, and the English insane asylum physician James Cowles Prichard. Although they used different terminologies, all three developed the concept of moral insanity, and all three identified a specific type of criminal—remorseless, incapable of resisting impulses to harm others, and morally savage, but in other respects normal. In their view, moral Physiognomical studies by Giovanbattista della Porta. Della Porta, a scientist of the Italian Renaissance, studied human physiognomy or facial expressions. His book influenced the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater and through him, 19th-century phrenologists and criminal anthropologists. Della Porta was trying to read character—the workings of the human brain—from physiognomy. From De humana physiognomonia, orig. 1586. Moral Insanity and the Origins of Criminology 21 insanity was innate, and it could be affected by biological factors such as diet and alcohol consumption; but it did not necessarily involve a physical abnormality of the brain or any other part of the body. Next I follow the concept’s development, first examining its fate in the United States, where psychiatrists tended to reject the idea but where their counterparts in institutions for the mentally retarded took it up, relabeling it moral imbecility and redefining it in hereditarian terms. In England, the concept of moral insanity fared better, although at the end of the century psychiatrists began fusing it with another concept, that of degeneration. In their work, too, moral insanity was redefined as a somatic and hereditary affliction, and morally insane criminals became degenerates, subhumans who had not fully evolved. Benjamin Rush and Moral Derangement Benjamin Rush (1745–1813) is most often remembered as an American patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence, but politics was only one of many fronts on which he worked for social betterment. A devout Presbyterian and believer in human perfectibility, Rush opposed slavery and the death penalty and advocated, among other reforms, animal rights, equal education for women, and affordable medicine for the poor. The most influential American physician of his day,3 he taught medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and became famous (in some circles, infamous) for the depleting treatments—restricted diets, massive bloodlettings, purgatives, and emetics—he prescribed to weaken not just patients but their diseases. But his reputation as the founder of American psychiatry rests on his efforts, novel at the time, to treat and possibly alleviate mental illness. Breaking (at least in part) with the older theological understanding of madness as a sign of sinfulness, the Philadelphia physician redefined insanity as a disease. Rush produced two major commentaries on the causes of...