Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (review)

During the late nineteenth century, the leading students of criminality shifted their frame of analysis, focusing increasing attention on the criminal rather than the crime. A century later, the historians of criminality who contributed to this collection of essays shifted the focus again, this time from the criminal to the criminologist. Criminals and Their Scientists explores the intellectual construction of criminality, examining the scientists, psychiatrists, and criminal anthropologists who developed biological explanations for deviance and forged authoritative theories about degeneration and "born criminals." More than any other single figure, Cesare Lombroso, an Italian, Jewish physician, commands center stage in the book, but less widely known experts—such as Emil Kraepelin, Gustave Aschaffenburg, and Alexandre Lacassagne—play important roles as well. Most of the essays concentrate on scientists and analyze the "history of criminology as discourse and practice" in Western Europe (1). This volume, however, also discusses the influence of judges, social workers, and prison officials, and it includes essays on the development of scientific criminology in the United States, Argentina, Australia, and Japan.

A huge, slightly unwieldy collection, with 21 chapters and nearly 500 pages of text, Criminals and Their Scientists contains essays that vary in quality, readability, and scope. Some of them are broadly conceived and explain the larger process through which scientific—particularly medical—assumptions and methods redefined core ideas about the sources of criminal behavior. Other essays are more narrowly framed, such as Jane Caplan's study of tattoos and discourses of criminality and Martine Kaluszynski's examination of international congresses of criminal anthropology. A few offer even more unusual perspectives on the topic. David G. Horn, for instance, explores Lombroso's experiments on pain sensitivity as a measure of evolutionary progress. Horn explains that, according to Lombroso, a "well-appointed laboratory" would include various tools and measuring devices, such as an Anfosso tachianthropometer, a Sieweking's esthesiometer, an Eulenberg baristesiometer, a Nothnagel thermesthesiometer, a Zwaardesmaker olfactometer, a Regnier-Mathieu dynamometer, a Mosso ergograph, and a modified campimeter (321).

The essays provide cross-cutting perspectives on the intellectual history of scientific criminology. Many of them borrow from Foucault's ideas about the history of knowledge, and few rely on social-scientific methods.¹ Taken together, the essays add nuance but also a dose of messiness to our understanding of the development of scientific assumptions about crime and punishment. Ideas did not develop or spread in a linear fashion and were not always received in coherent ways. Mary S. Gibson's first-rate essay, for example, reveals that Lombroso's theories changed significantly over time and gradually blended both biological and environmental components, a perspective lost on many contemporaries—and on many historians. Likewise, Richard F. Wetzell demonstrates that leading German criminologists continued to debate the environmental sources of criminality, even as the Nazi regime embraced genetic determinism. Social conditions also affected the particular facets of scientific criminology that became authoritative. In short, a century ago, as today, political debates, cultural pressures, and professional disagreements shaped and confounded efforts to use "science" to explain the roots of evil.