“O homem que é propenso a cometer um crime”: O paradigma indiciário e o racismo de Estado no cientificismo policial do século XIX

Abstract

The following article examines the persistence of an evidential paradigm as a degree of analysis for understanding the practical relationship established over the course of the nineteenth century between strands of knowledge, their technologies, and the police. To do so, it describes a series of technologies such as photography, biometrics, and anthropometrics, which were adopted by police practice and by criminology, which was of positivist inspiration in the period. It considers just how knowledge, technologies, and the variations their adoption acquire in the police practices of producing and managing the truth of crime and the criminal individual can shed light on the correlation between the essentialization of the criminal and what Foucault, throughout In Defense of Society (1976), referred to as ‘state racism’. The research is based on a perspective that emphasizes the practical relationship between knowledge, technologies, truth production, and institutional powers, and makes indiscriminate use of primary sources such as Galton, Bertillon, Vernois, and Lombroso, taking methodological inspiration from the lines of analysis mainly provided by Michel Foucault on the disciplinary social formations and their transition to biopolitics.