Inventing the Criminal

A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945

Richard F. Wetzell

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781469613826, 9780807825358
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861042
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of biological research into the causes of crime, but the origins of this kind of research date back to the late nineteenth century. Here, Richard Wetzell presents the first history of German criminology from Imperial Germany through the Weimar Republic to the end of the Third Reich, a period that provided a unique test case for the perils associated with biological explanations of crime.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources from criminological, legal, and psychiatric literature, Wetzell shows that German biomedical research on crime predominated over sociological research and thus contributed to the rise of the eugenics movement and the eventual targeting of criminals for eugenic measures by the Nazi regime. However, he also demonstrates that the development of German criminology was characterized by a constant tension between the criminologists' hereditarian biases and an increasing methodological sophistication that prevented many of them from endorsing the crude genetic determinism and racism that characterized so much of Hitler’s regime. As a result, proposals for the sterilization of criminals remained highly controversial during the Nazi years, suggesting that Nazi biological politics left more room for contention than has often been assumed.

CHAPTER ONE
THE ORIGINS OF MODERN CRIMINOLOGY

German criminology emerged as a recognized scientific field in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a result of three interconnected developments: the emergence of a new German penal reform movement, the publication and reception of Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the “born criminal,” and an increasing interest in criminological questions among German psychiatrists. First, however, I will provide a brief survey of criminological research in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century because some familiarity with this background is essential for properly assessing the developments that took place at the end of the century. On the one hand, the existence of medical-biological explanations of crime earlier in the nineteenth century shows that Lombroso was not the first to advance such an explanation. On the other hand, the substantial amount of work in “moral statistics” and on the subculture of professional criminals demonstrates that nineteenth-century researchers paid far more attention to social than to biological factors in crime. Only if this is understood can one appreciate the drastic shift in emphasis from social to medical-biological explanations of crime that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century.

Before setting out on this brief survey, I should point out that the origins of criminology are a matter of debate. Some scholars regard the psychiatrist Lombroso, whose book on the born criminal appeared in 1876, as the founder of criminology,¹ while others argue that modern criminology originated with Cesare Beccaria’s treatise on penal reform more than a century earlier.² Still others propose that the origins of criminology are to be found in the work of early nineteenth-century moral statisticians³ or nineteenth-century psychiatrists.⁴ To decide the question of origins, one must first settle on a definition of the term “criminology.” This is best done by determining its place among what we might call the “penal sciences,” which the German penal reformer Franz von Liszt divided into three main branches: a pedagogical-practical branch concerned with training criminal lawyers and judges, consisting of criminal jurisprudence (the study of criminal law) and criminalistics (or forensics: scientific methods of gathering evidence); a scientific branch “concerned with the causal explanation of crime (criminology) and punishment (penology)”; and a political branch concerned with improving penal legislation (penal policy).⁵ In accordance with this classification, the term “criminology” will be used here to denote the scientific study of the causes of crime. This definition differs from a broader one that includes penology and penal policy in the subject of criminology⁶ and a narrower one that conceives of criminology as the study of criminals (rather than crime).⁷

If criminology is thus defined as the scientific study of the causes of crime, it follows that the liberal penal reformers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—Cesare Beccaria in Italy, Sir Samuel Romilly, John Howard, and Jeremy Bentham in Britain, Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach in Bavaria—who are sometimes referred to as the “classical school of criminology”⁸were not really criminologists in this sense because they were concerned with penal policy rather than the causes of crime.⁹ Instead, my survey of nineteenth-century criminological research will focus on three groups of researchers who did investigate the causes of crime: physicians who advanced medical explanations of criminal behavior; “moral statisticians” who analyzed criminal statistics; and police officials and others who did fieldwork investigating the “breeding grounds” of crime and the subculture of “professional criminals.”

Following this survey, the second half of the chapter will examine two of the factors that facilitated the development of criminology into a recognized scientific field at the turn of the century: Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal and the emergence of a new German penal reform movement. The increasing interest in medical explanations of crime among turn-of-the-century German psychiatrists will form the subject of the next chapter.

Medical Explanations of Crime

Among nineteenth-century medical explanations of criminal behavior, three were particularly influential: Franz Joseph Gall’s phrenology, Etienne-Jean Georget’s “homicidal monomania,” and James Prichard’s “moral insanity.” Gall began his work on the anatomy of the brain in Vienna, where he practiced medicine from 1785 to 1805. When his anatomical work was attacked as irreligious in 1805, he left Vienna, spent two years teaching at various German universities, and finally settled in Paris, where he taught until his death in 1828. His studies of brain anatomy led Gall to develop the theory that human behavior was regulated by twenty-seven different “faculties” or “propensities,” each located in a particular part of the brain. In addition, he believed that the exterior bone structure of the skull indicated which of these propensities were highly developed and which were atrophied in any particular individual. Three of these propensities could give rise to criminal behavior if they were highly developed: greed, which could lead to theft; the instinct of self-defense, which could lead to violent fights; and the “carnivorous instinct” (l’instinct carnassier), which could lead to murder.¹⁰ On his travels through Germany in 1805, Gall visited several prisons and found the faculty of greed well developed in all the thieves, whom he was reportedly able to pick out by the shape of their skulls.¹¹

Although some criminal jurists regarded Gall’s phrenology as a serious threat to the notion of legal responsibility, Gall insisted that an individual’s propensities merely inclined behavior in certain directions but did not determine it, thus leaving the notions of free will and legal responsibility intact. Nor did Gall claim that his theory accounted for all crimes. Instead, he distinguished between crimes that resulted directly from well-developed propensities (such as for theft, fights, or murder) and crimes that resulted from circumstances without such propensities. Because he believed that criminals from propensity were more likely to become recidivists, Gall suggested that an offender’s sentencing should take into account the results of a phrenological examination (cranioscopie) so that criminals from propensity could be given longer prison sentences.¹² Not surprisingly, contemporary courts remained skeptical and did not introduce phrenological examinations.¹³

Gall did, however, develop a following among the French medical profession. A few years after his death, in 1831 some of his followers founded the Phrenological Society of Paris, which continued to promote a medical approach to crime. Although Gall himself had been pessimistic about rehabilitating persons with pronounced propensities for theft or murder, the next generation of phrenologists strongly believed in the possibility of reeducation. They stressed that normal and “criminal” traits did not differ in kind but only in degree. Since theft and normal acquisitiveness, for example, derived from the same basic propensity, environmental influences might redirect the propensity away from crime.¹⁴ Phrenology flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century but gradually became discredited in the latter half of the century. By the 1870s, when Lombroso developed his theory of the born criminal, the mainstream of the medical profession had rejected Gall’s ideas.¹⁵ Nevertheless, Gall’s phrenology played an important role in preparing the ground for Lombroso’s theories. Although Lombroso never posited the causal connection between criminal behavior and the shape of the criminal’s skull that Gall had postulated, Gall helped to popularize the notion that many criminals committed their crimes as a result of innate propensities.

At the same time that Gall was developing his phrenological theories, French psychiatrists developed another medical explanation of crime. At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, Philippe Pinel, the French pioneer of psychiatry, abandoned the view that madness necessarily involved an intellectual disturbance and advanced the concept of manie sans délire or manie raisonnante, a partial insanity that left the patient’s intellectual powers intact. Developing this concept further, Pinel’s student Jean-Etienne Esquirol introduced the notion of “monomania” to denote “a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind.” In 1825, Etienne-Jean Georget, a student of Esquirol’s, used this concept to challenge several judicial verdicts by arguing that the accused had suffered from “homicidal monomania.” After sparking considerable controversy, the notion of homicidal mania became widely accepted among the most influential circles of French psychiatry, holding sway for more than two decades before being attacked and then quickly abandoned in the early 1850s.¹⁶

In the meantime, in 1835, the British psychiatrist James Prichard coined the term “moral insanity,” which outlived and eventually replaced the notion of monomania. Strongly influenced by Pinel and Esquirol, Prichard distinguished between two types of insanity: one affecting the intellect and the other affecting emotions and will. The latter he called moral insanity.¹⁷ According to Prichard, a morally insane person was “incapable not of talking or reasoning upon any subject proposed to him—for this he will often do with great shrewdness and volubility—but of conducting himself with decency and propriety in the business of life. His wishes and inclinations, his attachments, his likings and dislikings have all undergone a morbid change.”¹⁸ Such a condition did not necessary lead to criminal behavior, but it could. As Prichard observed, “There is scarcely an act in the catalog of human crimes which has not been imitated … by this disease.”¹⁹

Prichard’s moral insanity soon found its way into the French and German psychiatric vocabulary. But while Prichard’s term originally designated emotional-volitional disorders in general, in France and the German states moral insanity took on a more specific meaning, referring to violent, immoral, and criminal behavior that was attributed to an isolated defect of the “moral sense.” In the 1840s the French psychiatrist Bénédict-Augustin Morel introduced Prichard’s concept to the French as “folie morale.” By the 1860s it had supplanted the French diagnosis of monomania and been incorporated into Morel’s influential degeneration theory.²⁰ In German-speaking Europe the reception of Prichard’s concept was complicated by the fact that most German psychiatrists believed in the unity of mental faculties and hence rejected the notion that an individual’s moral sense could be disturbed without his intellectual faculties being affected. But while some dismissed Prichard’s concept, others used the term “moral insanity,” or moralischer Schwachsinn, to refer to cases of mental illness that seemed primarily, but not exclusively, to affect an individual’s moral sense.²¹ Moral insanity, however, was generally regarded as a rare disorder and could therefore explain only a limited number of crimes.

Gall’s phrenology, Georget’s homicidal monomania, and Prichard’s moral insanity demonstrate that Lombroso was by no means the first to advance a medical-biological explanation of crime. And although only the notion of moral insanity survived into the late nineteenth century, there can be no doubt that all three theories helped to prepare the ground for Lombroso by popularizing medical theories of crime.

Moral Statistics

For the systematic explanation of crime, the work of nineteenth-century “moral statisticians” was far more important than that of medical doctors. The two pioneers in this area were Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, and André-Michel Guerry, a lawyer at the royal court in Paris.²² Both of them published their first analyses of criminal statistics in the early 1830s, just a few years after the French government started publishing official crime statistics in 1827. Their work was an attempt to apply the empirical approach of the natural sciences to the study of society. Their main finding was that the number of recorded crimes remained virtually constant from year to year. As Quetelet put it in a famous passage: “The share of prisons, chains, and the scaffold appears fixed with as much probability as the revenues of state. We are able to enumerate in advance how many individuals will stain their hands with the blood of their fellow creatures, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners, pretty nearly as one can enumerate in advance the births and deaths which must take ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• INVENTING THE CRIMINAL
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 THE ORIGINS OF MODERN CRIMINOLOGY
• CHAPTER 2 FROM CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY TO CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1880–1914
• CHAPTER 3 CRIMINOLOGY AND PENAL POLICY, 1880–1914
• CHAPTER 4 CRIMINAL SOCIOLOGY IN THE WEIMAR YEARS
• CHAPTER 5 VARIETIES OF CRIMINAL BIOLOGY IN THE WEIMAR YEARS
• CHAPTER 6 CRIMINOLOGY UNDER THE NAZI REGIME
• CHAPTER 7 CRIMINOLOGY AND EUGENICS, 1919–1945
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX