Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860-1918

Abstract

Tracing the Criminal provides a remarkable account of the reception of scientific criminology in Britain during the period 1860–1918. Neither universally embraced, nor uniformly rejected, scientific criminology argued that the criminal constitute a sub-human category that was distinguishable from ‘normal’ law-abiding members of society. Examining the ideas and research of the era, Neil Davie elucidates the reception of this claim in British criminology, representing a radical shift in thinking about ‘the criminal’ that went beyond a taxonomic capacity to an ability to provide ‘scientific’ explanations of criminals and criminality. This latter claim reflects a positivistic belief that—through scientific methods and evidence—it was possible to ‘know’ the criminal. The Foreword, written by Bryan S. Turner, crystallizes the implications of the Lombrosian ‘born criminal type’ and links the substantive focus of Tracing the Criminal to contemporary debates. In the Introduction, Davie notes that Darwinian thought posed a threat to professional British criminologists, who were primarily employed by the state in the Prison Service. The idea that the ‘criminal’ and/or ‘criminality’ was inherent in specific individuals rendered the criminologist a glorified ‘gaoler’ of those incarcerated for their nature. This idea carried with it a sense of fatalism: once a person exhibited criminal tendencies, little could be done other than incarceration. Ironically, criminologists leveraged this fatalism to argue for a criminological agenda that focused on prisons and deterrence. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the prison, through mediatization, served as a site for professionalization. Medical personnel were not content to simply assess prisoners for administrative purposes, and sought a more ‘rewarding and socially prestigious function’ than that of a ‘filing clerk’.