This article presents an overview and analysis of the relationship of psychiatry and criminal justice in three different areas: the role of medical expert testimony in criminal trials; the role of psychiatrists in criminological research; and the influence of psychiatry on the penal reform movement. The first section argues that the increased use of medical expert testimony in the criminal courts demonstrates the increasing social acceptance of the psychiatric claim that borderline mental abnormalities were widespread and frequently connected to criminal behaviour. The second section examines the reasons why psychiatrists became so interested in research into the causes of criminal behaviour, and relates this interest to psychiatrists’ efforts to expand their professional territory. The third section argues that psychiatry exerted an important influence on the penal reform agenda. Not only was psychiatry crucial to the treatment of mentally deficient offenders, but the penal reformers’ demand to make every offender’s punishment dependent on his ‘social prognosis’ promised to give psychiatric expertise a central role in criminal justice. The article’s conclusion examines to what extent it makes sense to speak of a medicalization of criminal justice in this period.

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This book presents research on the history of criminology from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century in Western Europe (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Italy) and in Argentina, Australia, Japan, and the United States. Approaching the history of criminology as a history of science and practice, the essays examine the discourse on crime and criminals that surfaced as part of different discourses and practices, including the activities of the police and the courts, parliamentary debates, media reports, as well as the writings of moral statisticians, jurists, and medical doctors. In addition, the book seeks to elucidate the relationship between criminological discourse and politics, society, and culture by providing a comparative study of the worldwide reception of Cesare Lombroso's criminal-anthropological ideas.