New Directions in the History of Criminology

In the almost twenty years since Peter Becker and I convened a conference on the history of criminology, the field has witnessed a remarkable wave of new scholarship. This essay draws on the wealth of new research to reflect on some of the challenges facing historians of criminology: how to write a history of criminology that addresses the heterogeneity of expert discourses and embeds them within the larger context of discourses on crime in civil society; whether it is possible to develop a t..

Inventing The Criminal: A History Of German Criminology, 1880-1945

https://works.swarthmore.edu/alum-books/1846/thumbnail.jp

Badness, madness and the brain - the late 19th-century controversy on immoral persons and their malfunctioning brains

<p>In the second half of the 19th-century, a group of psychiatric experts discussed the relation between brain malfunction and moral misconduct. In the ensuing debates, scientific discourses on immorality merged with those on insanity and the brain. This yielded a specific definition of what it means to be immoral: immoral and insane due to a disordered brain. In this context, diverse neurobiological explanations for immoral mind and behavior existed at the time. This article elucidates these different brain-based explanations via five historical cases of immoral persons. In addition, the article analyses the associated controversies in the context of the period's psychiatric thinking. The rendering of the immoral person as brain-disordered is scrutinized in terms of changes in moral agency. Furthermore, a present immoral person is discussed to highlight commonalities and differences in past and present reasoning.</p>