GARLAND David. of Crimes and Criminals 1991

1
Of Crimes and Criminals: The

Development of Criminology in Britain
David Garland
INTRODUCTION: THE CONTINGENCY OF THE

CRIMINOLOGICAL PRESENT
This essay presents an interpretation of the historical development of crim

inology in Britain. Any such history is inevitably a contentious undertaking,
entailing theoretical choices and rhetorical purposes as well as the selection
and arrangement of historical materials. Whether they acknowledge it or not,
histories of the discipline necessarily come up against fundamental issues—
What is ‘criminology’? What are its central features? How are its conceptual
and historical boundaries identified? In what institutional, political or cultural
contexts should it be situated? It may therefore be useful to begin by outlining
some of the theoretical assumptions which underpin the interpretation offered
here.
I take criminology to be a specific genre of discourse and inquiry about
crime—a genre which has developed in the modern period and which can be
distinguished from other ways of talking and thinking about criminal conduct.
Thus, for example, its claim to be an empirically grounded, scientific under
taking sets it apart from moral and legal discourses, while its focus upon crime
differentiates it from other social scientific genres, such as the sociology of
deviance and control, whose objects of study are broader and not defined by
the criminal law. Since the middle years of this century, criminology has also
been increasingly marked off from other discourses by the trappings of a dis
tinctive disciplinary identity, with its own journals, professional associations,
professorships and institutes. One of the central concerns of this essay will be
to try to explain how such a discipline came to exist as an accredited special
ism, supported by universities and governments alike.
My broad historical argument will be that modem criminology grew out
I am grateful to the following friends and colleagues for their help with this essay: Stanley Cohen,
Mitchell Duneier, James B. Jacobs. Dorothy Nelkin. Robert Reiner, Paul Rock, and Peter Young.
Research for this project was assisted by the Lindsay Bequest Fund of the Edinburgh University
Law Faculty and by the New York University School of Law.
k
12 David Garland
of the convergence of two quite separate enterprises—‘the governmental

project’ and ‘the Lombrosian project’—which together provided a social and
an intellectual rationale for the subject. By talking about a ‘governmental
project’ I mean to refer to the long series of empirical inquiries, which, since
the eighteenth century, have sought to enhance the efficient and equitable
administration of justice by charting the patterns of crime and monitoring the
practice of police and prisons. This tradition of inquiry was eventually to
become a major part of the criminological enterprise and to provide crimi
nology with its central claim to social utility. The ‘Lombrosian project’, in
contrast, refers to a form of inquiry which aims to develop an etiological,
explanatory science, based on the premise that criminals can somehow be
scientifically differentiated from non-criminals.1 Although each of these
projects has undergone important revisions during the twentieth century, and
the situation of criminology has been significantly altered by its entry into the
universities, I will suggest that the discipline continues to be structured by the
sometimes competing, sometimes converging, claims of these two programmes.
One pole of the discipline pulls its members towards an ambitious (and, 1 have
argued elsewhere—Garland 1985Z?—deeply flawed) theoretical project seeking
to build a science of causes. The other exerts the force of a more pragmatic,
policy-orientated, administrative project, seeking to use science in the
service of management and control. Criminologists have sometimes sought to
overcome this tension by rejecting one project in favour of the other—
either giving up the search for causes in favour of a direct policy
orientation, or else disengaging from governmental concerns in the name of
a pure (or a critical) science. However, the combination of the two seems
essential to criminology’s claim to be sufficiently useful and sufficiently
scientific to merit the status of an accredited, state-sponsored, academic
discipline.
The coming together of these two projects was by no means inevitable. The
historical record suggests that it took several decades for officials to accept
that the Lombrosian search for the causes of crime had any relevance to
their administrative tasks, and, in fact, Lombroso’s criminology had to be
1 I use the concept of a ‘project’ here to characterize an emergent tradition of inquiry which,
despite a degree of variation, shares a cluster of aims and objectives. The ’governmental' project
refers to those inquiries which direct their attention to the problems of governing crime and
criminals. Studies which fall within this tradition are not necessarily official, state-sponsored
studies, although, from the nineteenth century onwards, the state came to dominate work of this
kind. Nor are these inquiries necessarily focused upon state practices (such as criminal laws, police,
prisons, etc.), since the governance of crime and criminals also occurs through ‘private’ institutions
such as the family, boys’ clubs, settlement houses, and so on. As I discuss later, the study of crime
and criminal justice practices was not at first separate from a much broader concern with the
rational goverance of the population in all its aspects. (On the concept of governmentality, see
Foucault 1979; Burchell el al. 1991.) The ’Lombrosian’ project refers to that tradition of inquiry,
beeun by Lombroso. which aims to differentiate the criminal individual from the non-criminal. By
naming the etiological project in this way 1 wish to emphasize the continuity in scientific objective
which runs from Lombroso to the present, rather than to suggest a continuity of method or
of substantive analysis: most etiological studies of the twentieth century have de-entphasized the
biological determinants which Lombroso took to be fundamental.
i
The Development of British Criminology 13
extensively modified before it could be of service to policy-makers and state

authorities. Beyond that, the very idea of a science devoted to ‘the criminal’
seems in retrospect to have been something of an historical accident, originally
prompted by a claim that was quickly discredited: namely, that ‘the criminal
type’ was an identifiable anthropological entity. Were it not for the con
tingency of that intellectual event there might never have been any distinctive
criminological science or any independent discipline. As an historical counter-
factual, it is perfectly plausible to imagine that crime and criminals could have
remained integral concerns of mainstream sociology and psychiatry and that
‘criminological’ research undertaken for government purposes could have
developed without the need of a university specialism of that name. If this is
so, and criminology has a contingent rather than a necessary place in the halls
of science, then its history becomes all the more relevant to an understanding
of the discipline.
In the light of the assumptions and arguments I have outlined here, history
becomes essential to an understanding of the modern criminological enterprise.
If we are to understand the central topics which criminology has marked out
as its own, if we are to understand the discipline’s relation to institutional
practices and concerns, if we are to understand some of the key terms and
conceptions which structure the discourse, then we will have to ask genea
logical questions about the constitution of this science and examine the
historical processes which led to the emergence of an accredited disciplinary
specialism. Moreover, the kind of historical inquiry required is one which is
sensitive to context and contingency, and to the relation between intellectual
developments and the social practices out of which they emerge. If my claim
is correct, and criminology is a product of the convergence of certain ideas and
interests, in a particular institutional context, then its history cannot be
treated, as it so often is, as the gradual unfolding of a science which was always
destined to appear. Such is the prevalence of this kind of history that it may
be worth discussing the shortcomings of received accounts, before going on to
sketch an alternative approach.
Textbook Histories
Criminology’s history is most often constructed in the form of a preface. It
appears, usually in a few compressed and standardized pages, as the opening
section of a book or article, introducing the reader to the subject and placing
the author’s text within a longer tradition. Sometimes the prefatory history has
a job to do, providing the reader with enough historical understanding to
appreciate the significance and provenance of the text that follows. At other
times it is merely decorative, a routine flourish with little real purpose beyond
getting started in a way that has come to be expected of authors. Ironically,
this routine repetition of conventional historical wisdom can have an influence
quite out of keeping with its value as scholarship. The telling and retelling of
the standard historical tale is a most effective way of persuading the discipline's
14 David Garland
recruits that whatever else may be contested, this much, at least, can be taken
for granted.
Occasionally, textbooks, research monographs, or critical studies make a
feature of their historical introductions, offering a more extensive (and usually
more tendentious) account of the subject’s history, which acts as a kind of
framing device for subsequent arguments.2 On such occasions, history becomes
a way of conducting theoretical debate by other means. The recovery of a lost
theoretical tradition, the reinterpretation of the subject’s early history, claims
and counter-claims about the true ‘founders’ of the discipline, or critical
summaries of previous patterns of thought, are all ways in which the subject’s
history gets drafted into current controversies and made to do duty for one
side or the other.
The history of the discipline has, on a few occasions, formed the central
subject-matter for a book or an article. Most of these excursions into historical
criminology are minor attempts to attribute importance to a particular author
whose influence upon the subject is felt to have been slighted,3 but some
historical writings have more ambitious intentions. Books such as Mannheim’s
Pioneers in Criminology (1960) or Radzinowicz’s Ideology and Crime (1966)—
both published by leading figures in the process of discipline-building—played
an important role in shaping the contours and self-consciousness of the discip
line, and sought to enhance its status by invoking a distinguished
Enlightenment past and a progressive scientific mission. The recent collection
entitled The History of British Criminology (Rock 1988a)—edited by one of the
sociologists who helped remake British criminology in the 1960s and 1970s—
professes similar discipline-forming ambitions, aiming to introduce new
generations of criminologists to a revised history more in keeping with con
temporary interests and understandings. It is not just the textbooks which have
to be adjusted when a discipline changes; history must also be rewritten.
The received history of the discipline, often simplified into a tale of icons
and demons (Beccaria, Lombroso, Burt, Radzinowicz . . .), a few key distinc
tions (classicism, positivism, radicalism . . .), and an overarching narrative in
which ideological error is gradually displaced by the findings of science (e.g.
the myth of the born criminal and its subsequent debunking), plays a small but
significant role in shaping the horizons and reference points of contemporary
criminology. A discipline’s practitioners work with a sense of where their
subject has come from and where it is going, which issues are settled and which
are still live, who are the exemplars to imitate and who the anathemas to be
avoided. Perhaps most importantly, the received history provides practitioners
with a standard-issue kit of collective terms and shared values. Thus, for
example, anyone who learned about the discipline’s history from the textbooks
of the 1970s would find it hard to identify with the methods and aspirations
of ‘positivism’, even though this term was broad enough to include virtually
2 See e.g. the historical introductions to the following: Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973; Morris
1957; Matza 1964.
3 See e.g. Savitz er al. 1977; also Lyell 1913, Levin and Lindesmith 1937.
IT1W
the whole discipline prior to the rise of ‘labelling’ theories and the associated
anti-positivist critiques.4
The standard textbook account of criminology’s history begins with the
writings of criminal law reformers in the eighteenth century, particularly
Beccaria, Bentham, Romilly, and Howard. These writers are said to have char
acterized the offender as a rational, free-willed actor, who engages in crime in
a calculated, utilitarian way and is therefore responsive to deterrent, pro
portionate penalties of the kind that the reformers preferred. This ‘classical
school of criminology’, as it is usually called, was subsequently challenged, in
the late nineteenth century, by writers of the ‘positivist school’ (Lombroso,
Ferri, and Garofalo are usually cited) who adopted a more empirical, scientific
approach to the subject, and investigated ‘the criminal’ using the techniques
of psychiatry, physical anthropology, anthropometry, and other new human
sciences. The positivist school claimed to have discovered evidence of the
existence of ‘criminal types’ whose behaviour was determined rather than
chosen and for whom treatment rather than punishment was appropriate.
Subsequent research refuted or modified most of the specific claims of
Lombroso, and restored the credibility of some of the ‘classicist’ ideas he
opposed, but the project of a scientific criminology had been founded, and this
enterprise continues, in a more diverse and sophisticated way, today.
This standard textbook history is, of course, broadly accurate—it would be
very surprising if it were not. But the broad sweep of its narrative and the
resounding simplicity of its generic terms can be profoundly misleading if
they are taken as real history, rather than as a kind of foundational myth,
developed for heuristic rather than historical purposes.
Misleading Categories
A major defect of these histories is their uncritical use of key terms which then
subsequently enter into standard criminological discourse in an equally unself
conscious way. The term ‘classicism’, to take an important example, is used
as a generic term to denote the criminology of Beccaria and Bentham, and
eighteenth-century thought more generally. It is also used, by extension, to
describe modern theories which affirm the rationality and freedom of offenders’
decision-making processes (see Roshier 1989). But, despite this conventional
usage, it actually makes little sense to claim that these eighteenth-century
thinkers possessed a ‘criminology’, given that they made no general distinction
between the characteristics of criminals and non-criminals, and had no con
ception of research on crime and criminals as a distinctive form of inquiry.
To use such a term to characterize eighteenth-century thought seriously
4 See e.g. lhe discussions of’positivism’ in Taylor. Walton, and Young 1973 and in Matza 1964.
The tradition of ’positivist criminology’ has recently been re-evaluated and reaffirmed in the USA
(see Gottfredson and Hirschi 1987), and in Britain, some of its sternest critics have modified their
views and realigned themselves with some of its central concerns. For a discussion of the changing
relationship between ‘radical criminology’ and ’positivism’, see Young 1988.
16 David Garland
misrepresents the character of these writings and forcibly assimilates them to

a project that was not invented until a century later.
The notion that these various writers all maintained the same rational, free
will view of the offender is also a distortion, derived from the polemics of late
nineteenth-century positivists rather than from a reading of the eighteenth
century texts. There are, for example, quite major differences between authors
such as Bentham and Howard on the questions of human nature and freedom
of choice; and Beccaria, as a good Lockean empiricist, viewed human charac
ter and conduct as shaped by sense impressions and habit as well as by free
will and reason.5 Other eighteenth-century writers on crime approached the
question from a quite different perspective, stressing the social conditions
which shaped individual conduct and using a deterministic language to
describe the process of becoming criminal.6 The notion of ‘classicism’ thus
tends to dissolve under close scrutiny, deriving any coherence it has not from
the facts of intellectual history but from the requirements of contemporary
criminological teaching.
‘Positivism’ holds up little better as a descriptive term, although, unlike
classicism, it at least has the merit of having been the self-description of a
school of criminologists. The use of this word to describe the specific claims
of Lombroso and his scuola positiva in the late nineteenth century (the born
criminal, the constitutional and hereditary roots of criminal conduct, criminal
types, etc.) and also to describe the huge and diverse range of criminological
work which has been carried out within an empiricist framework (i.e. using
‘theory-neutral’ observation as a basis for inductive propositions, stressing
measurement, objectivity, etc.) has been a source of great confusion in the
discipline. Potted histories entrench this muddle whenever they talk indiscrimi
nately about a ‘positivist era’ which stretched from the 1870s to the 1960s.
The Object of Inquiry

One of the most problematic issues to be addressed by any intellectual history
is the question of criteria for inclusion and exclusion. If one is writing the
history of criminology, what is to count as relevant? Where does the subject
start and where does it stop? Textbook histories generally avoid the issue and
simply begin with Beccaria, the arbitrariness of this decision being concealed
by the fact that this is by now the traditional place to start. But one can see
the problem much more clearly on those occasions when the intellectual
history of criminology is the subject of a whole article or series of chapters.
Thus, for instance, Israel Drapkin’s essay in the Encyclopedia of Crime and
Justice (Drapkin 1983)—like the more historically orientated textbooks by
Bonger (1936) and Void (1958)—seeks to provide a more serious, scholarly
account of the subject’s history. Drapkin traces criminology’s intellectual
5 On the differences between Howard and Bentham, see Ignatieff 1978. On Beccaria as a
Lockean empiricist, sec Zeman 1981.
6 See the discussion of writers such as Henry Dagge and Mannasseh Dawes in Green 1985.
history back through the early modern period, the Middle Ages, and the
classical period to the ancient world and ‘prehistoric times’. The problem here
is that the selection criteria are unargued and hopelessly broad. Criminology’s
history becomes the history of everything that has ever been said or thought
or done in relation to law-breakers, and the links between this amorphous past
and the particular present remain vague and unspecified. Worse still, the
writings of ancient and medieval authors are ransacked in search of ‘crimino
logical’ statements and arguments, as if they were addressing the same ques
tions in the same ways as modern criminologists, and we are introduced to
anachronistic creatures such as ‘early modern criminology’ and St Thomas
Aquinas’ analysis of‘criminogenic factors’ (Drapkin 1983: 550).
This criminology-through-the-ages style of history is objectionable on a
number of grounds. First of all, it distorts the meaning of earlier writers
and conceals the fact that their statements are structured by assumptions and
objectives—not to mention institutional contexts and cultural commitments—
which are quite different from those of modern criminology.7 Secondly, it gives
the false impression that criminology is our modern response to a timeless and
unchanging set of questions which previous thinkers have also pondered,
though with notably less success. Criminology is seen as a science which was
waiting to happen, the end point of a long process of inquiry which has only
recently broken through to the status of true, scientific knowledge. This
progressivist. presentist view of things fails to recognize that criminology is, in
fact, a socially constructed and historically specific organization of knowledge
and investigative procedures—a particular style of reasoning, representing, and
intervening—which is grounded in a particular set of institutions and forms of
life. It is a ‘discipline’, a regime of truth with its own special rules for deciding
between truth and falsity, rather than the epitome of right thought and correct
knowledge. To adopt this fallacious way of thinking about the discipline’s
history is to cut off from view the other ‘problematizations’ (as Foucault
would call them) that the historical record reveals, and to forget that our
own ways of constituting and perceiving ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ are established
conventions rather than unchallengeable truths. An important purpose of
writing history is to help develop a consciousness of how conventions are made
and remade over time, and thus promote a critical self-consciousness about
our own questions and assumptions. The myth of an emergent criminology,
progressing from ancient error to modern truth, does little to improve our
understanding of the past or of the present.
My remarks up to now have been directed against criminology’s history as
told by criminologists to criminologists. But in recent years our historical
understanding of the subject has been considerably advanced by the work of
‘outsiders’ who owe no allegiance to the discipline and whose work is driven
by quite different historical and critical concerns. The writings of Michel
Foucault (1977), Robert Nye (1984), Daniel Pick (1989), Martin Wiener (1990)
7 The classic discussion of this problem in the history of ideas is contained in Skinner 1969.
16 David Garland
misrepresents the character of these writings and forcibly assimilates them to

a project that was not invented until a century later.
The notion that these various writers all maintained the same rational, free
will view of the offender is also a distortion, derived from the polemics of late
nineteenth-century positivists rather than from a reading of the eighteenth
century texts. There are, for example, quite major differences between authors
such as Bentham and Howard on the questions of human nature and freedom
of choice; and Beccaria, as a good Lockean empiricist, viewed human charac
ter and conduct as shaped by sense impressions and habit as well as by free
will and reason.5 Other eighteenth-century writers on crime approached the
question from a quite different perspective, stressing the social conditions
which shaped individual conduct and using a deterministic language to
describe the process of becoming criminal.6 The notion of ‘classicism’ thus
tends to dissolve under close scrutiny, deriving any coherence it has not from
the facts of intellectual history but from the requirements of contemporary
criminological teaching.
’Positivism’ holds up little better as a descriptive term, although, unlike
classicism, it at least has the merit of having been the self-description of a
school of criminologists. The use of this word to describe the specific claims
of Lombroso and his scuola positiva in the late nineteenth century (the born
criminal, the constitutional and hereditary roots of criminal conduct, criminal
types, etc.) and also to describe the huge and diverse range of criminological
work which has been carried out within an empiricist framework (i.e. using
‘theory-neutral’ observation as a basis for inductive propositions, stressing
measurement, objectivity, etc.) has been a source of great confusion in the
discipline. Potted histories entrench this muddle whenever they talk indiscrimi
nately about a ‘positivist era’ which stretched from the 1870s to the 1960s.
The Object of Inquiry

One of the most problematic issues to be addressed by any intellectual history
is the question of criteria for inclusion and exclusion. If one is writing the
history of criminology, what is to count as relevant? Where does the subject
start and where does it stop? Textbook histories generally avoid the issue and
simply begin with Beccaria, the arbitrariness of this decision being concealed
by the fact that this is by now the traditional place to start. But one can see
the problem much more clearly on those occasions when the intellectual
history of criminology is the subject of a whole article or series of chapters.
Thus, for instance, Israel Drapkin’s essay in the Encyclopedia of Crime and
Justice (Drapkin 1983)—like the more historically orientated textbooks by
Bonger (1936) and Void (1958)—seeks to provide a more serious, scholarly
account of the subject’s history. Drapkin traces criminology’s intellectual
5 On the differences between Howard and Bentham, sec Ignatieff 1978. On Beccaria as a
Lockean empiricist, see Zeman 1981.
6 See the discussion of writers such as Henry Dagge and Mannasseh Dawes in Green 1985.
history back through the early modern period, the Middle Ages, and the
classical period to the ancient world and ‘prehistoric times’. The problem here
is that the selection criteria are unargued and hopelessly broad. Criminology’s
history becomes the history of everything that has ever been said or thought
or done in relation to law-breakers, and the links between this amorphous past
and the particular present remain vague and unspecified. Worse still, the
writings of ancient and medieval authors are ransacked in search of ‘crimino
logical’ statements and arguments, as if they were addressing the same ques
tions in the same ways as modern criminologists, and we are introduced to
anachronistic creatures such as ‘early modern criminology’ and St Thomas
Aquinas’ analysis of‘criminogenic factors’ (Drapkin 1983: 550).
This criminology-through-the-ages style of history is objectionable on a
number of grounds. First of all, it distorts the meaning of earlier writers
and conceals the fact that their statements are structured by assumptions and
objectives—not to mention institutional contexts and cultural commitments—
which are quite different from those of modern criminology.7 Secondly, it gives
the false impression that criminology is our modern response to a timeless and
unchanging set of questions which previous thinkers have also pondered,
though with notably less success. Criminology is seen as a science which was
waiting to happen, the end point of a long process of inquiry which has only
recently broken through to the status of true, scientific knowledge. This
progressivist, presentist view of things fails to recognize that criminology is, in
fact, a socially constructed and historically specific organization of knowledge
and investigative procedures—a particular style of reasoning, representing, and
intervening—which is grounded in a particular set of institutions and forms of
life. It is a ‘discipline’, a regime of truth with its own special rules for deciding
between truth and falsity, rather than the epitome of right thought and correct
knowledge. To adopt this fallacious way of thinking about the discipline’s
history is to cut off from view the other ‘problematizations’ (as Foucault
would call them) that the historical record reveals, and to forget that our
own ways of constituting and perceiving ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ are established
conventions rather than unchallengeable truths. An important purpose of
writing history is to help develop a consciousness of how conventions are made
and remade over time, and thus promote a critical self-consciousness about
our own questions and assumptions. The myth of an emergent criminology,
progressing from ancient error to modern truth, does little to improve our
understanding of the past or of the present.
My remarks up to now have been directed against criminology’s history as
told by criminologists to criminologists. But in recent years our historical
understanding of the subject has been considerably advanced by the work of
‘outsiders’ who owe no allegiance to the discipline and whose work is driven
by quite different historical and critical concerns. The writings of Michel
Foucault (1977), Robert Nye (1984), Daniel Pick (1989), Martin Wiener (1990)
7 The classic discussion of this problem in the history of ideas is contained in Skinner 1969.
IS David Garland
and Marie-Christine Leps (1992) have, in their different ways, situated crim
inological discourse on a wider canvas, showing how this form of knowledge
was grounded in quite specific institutional practices, political movements, and
cultural settings. None of these authors provides an overall account of crim
inology’s development, each one being concerned to understand the crimino
logical ideas prevailing in a particular period or setting, rather than to produce
a genealogy of the discipline. But the analyses of these and other writers are
of great importance for the understanding of criminology’s past and their work
adds breadth and depth to the somewhat narrower, diachronic account which
the present chapter sets out. Similarly valuable is the recent work done in the
newly developed field of the history of the human sciences by authors such as
Nikolas Rose (1988), Roger Smith (1988), Kurt Danziger (1990), and Ian
Hacking (1990). These writers have set out important methodological and
theoretical guidelines for work in this area—guidelines which I have tried to
follow in the present chapter. They have also developed cogent historical
analyses of disciplines such as psychology and statistics which are of great rel
evance for any account of criminology’s development.8
ORIENTATIONS: A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
I begin with the clear assumption that the phenomenon to be explained is a

present-day phenomenon—the modern discipline of criminology—and that my
task is to trace its historical conditions of emergence, identify the intellectual
resources and traditions upon which it drew, and give some account of the
process of its formation and development. This explicit concern to write a
history of the present acknowledges that our contemporary problems and
practices are quite distinct from those of the past; but equally, it recognizes
that our present arrangements were constructed out of materials and situations
which existed at earlier points in time. The present is continuous with the
past in some respects, and discontinuous in others. It is the historian’s job to
identify the processes of transmutation which characterize change and, in
particular, the generation of those differences which constitute our modernity.
Modern criminology, like any other academic specialism, consists of a body
of accredited and systematically transmitted forms of knowledge, approved
procedures and techniques of investigation, and a cluster of questions which
make up the subject’s recognized research agendas. These intellectual materials
and activities are loosely organized by means of a ‘discipline’—the standard
form of academic organization. The discipline establishes and enforces appro
priate norms of evidence and argument, evaluates and communicates research
findings and other contributions to knowledge, fixes and revises the canon of
8 The history of anthropology also contains many suggestive parallels with that of criminology:
see e.g. Darnell 1974.
theoretical and empirical knowledge, supervises the training of students, and

distributes professional status and authority among accredited practitioners.
These disciplinary functions are carried out, more or less effectively, by means
of a variety of institutions—professional journals and associations, institutes
and university departments, professional appointments, processes of peer
review, letters of recommendation, training courses, textbooks, conferences,
funding agencies, and so on—which make up the material infrastructure of
the enterprise.9 One has only to describe these taken-for-granted features
explicitly to demonstrate that the modern discipline of criminology is indeed
‘modern’, and to pose the question of how such an institutional structure came
to form itself around an intellectual specialism of this kind.
Modern criminology is a composite, eclectic, multidisciplinary enterprise.
The subject is typically located in departments of law, sociology, or social
policy—though there are now several independent centres of criminology in
British universities—and training in criminology is normally at the post
graduate level, following on a first degree in a more basic field of study. In
their research and teaching, criminologists draw upon a variety of other
disciplines, most notably sociology, psychology, psychiatry, law, history, and
anthropology—indeed, one of the major dynamics of modern criminology is
the incessant raiding of other disciplines or ideologies for new ideas with which
to pursue (and renew) the criminological project. They also address themselves
to a wide range of research topics which somehow or other relate to crime
and its control. Major areas of work include research on the incidence and dis
tribution of criminal behaviour, inquiries about the causes or correlates of
criminal conduct, clinical studies of individual delinquents and ethnographies
of deviant groups, penological studies, victim studies, the monitoring and
evaluation of criminal justice agencies, the prediction of future criminal
conduct, the study of processes of social reaction, and historical work on
changing patterns of crime and control. The list of ‘central’ topics is long and
diverse, and each topic breaks down further into numerous sub-topics and
specialisms. When one considers that these substantive areas have been
approached using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, drawing
upon the whole gamut of theoretical perspectives (psychoanalysis, functional
ism, interactionism, ethnomethodology, Marxism, econometrics, syster
theory, postmodernism, etc.) and ideological concerns (the implicit welfari
of most twentieth-century criminology, the radicalism of the 1970s, feminis
left realism, etc., etc.) it becomes apparent that modern criminology is high
differentiated in its theoretical, methodological, and empirical concerns.
The very diversity of the modern subject makes the question of its historical
emergence and identity seem even more puzzling. How did this vast, eclectic
bundle of disparate approaches, theories, and data come to acquire the status
of a distinct academic specialism? At one level, the answer to this has already
been set out above: the subject derives whatever coherence and unity it has
On scientific disciplines and their development, see Lemaine et al. 1976.

20 David Garland
front the exertions of its discipline-forming institutions. The danger of an

exploding, unmanageable chaos of concerns is held in check by textbooks and
teaching and a pattern of professional judgements which draw the subject
together and establish its de facto boundaries. But this response begs a prior
question, which is: Why has there emerged a discipline of this kind? What
makes it possible and desirable to have a distinctive, specialist discipline of
criminology in the first place? It seems to me that an answer to this question
can be formulated if one has regard to the basic problem-structures or projects
of inquiry which underlie these disparate investigations. My argument is, as
suggested above, that criminology is structured around two basic projects—the
governmental and the Lombrosian—and that the formation and convergence
of these projects can be traced by studying the texts and statements which
constitute criminology’s historical archive. Criminology, in its modern form
and in its historical development, is orientated towards a scientific goal but
also towards an institutional field, towards a theoretical project but also
towards an administrative task. Whatever fragile unity the discipline achieves
emerges from the belief that these two projects are mutually supportive rather
than incompatible, that etiological research can be made useful for adminis
trative purposes, and that the findings of operational research further the ends
of theoretical inquiry. Occasionally, criminologists lose this faith, and when
they do, their arguments cast doubt on the very viability of the discipline.10
As with most ‘human sciences’, criminology has a long past but a short
history.11 Discourse about crime and punishment has existed, in one form or
another, since ancient times, but it is only during the last 120 years that there
has been a distinctive ‘science of criminology’, and only in the last fifty or sixty
years has there been in Britain an established, independent discipline organized
around that intellectual endeavour. My account of the emergence of the
modern British discipline will be divided into four parts:
1. a brief discussion of what I will call ‘traditional’ representations of crime
and criminals;
2. an outline of the empirical analyses that were brought to bear upon crime
and criminal justice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which
began the tradition of inquiry which 1 call the governmental project;
3. an account of the emergence of a positive, specialist ‘science of the
criminal’—the Lombrosian project—in the late nineteenth century, both
in continental Europe and in Britain;
4. an account of how these two projects converged in a way and to an extent
which facilitated the formation of a criminological discipline in Britain in
the middle years of the twentieth century.
10 See e.g. the debates surrounding the development of a radical criminology which aimed to
disengage from the policy goals of the state—a development which, for some writers, came
to imply the dissolution of criminology as a discipline. Sec Bankowski et al. 1976, Hirst 1975. See
also the recent reflections on the relationship between criminology and criminal justice policy by
Petersilia 1991 and Bottoms 1987.
11 For a theoretical discussion addressing this issue in the history of psychology, see Smith 1988.
This order of exposition implies a certain developmental pattern, and to

some extent that seems appropriate. Criminological thought and practice have
developed, at least in some respects, in a ‘scientific’ direction, and the analysis
presented here is concerned precisely to chart this evolution and to reconstruct
the events and developments which played a role in that transmutation. The
chronology of events is constructed in order to show how our particular ways
of organizing thought and research have come into existence. But it needs
to be emphasized that no overall process of progressive development is
being asserted here, and there are no exclusive boundaries neatly separating
the thought of one period from the thought of another. Some residues of the
‘traditional’ ideas to be found in the seventeenth century still circulate today
in the form of common-sense and moral argument. Forms of thought and
inquiry which flourished in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have
been rediscovered in the late twentieth and adapted to serve contemporary
purposes. Conversely, certain ideas and arguments which appeared progressive
and persuasive to criminologists at the start of the present century have come
to seem pseudo-scientific and faintly absurd.
Criminology’s history is not one of steady progress and refinement, although
whenever a framework of inquiry has endured for a long enough time, such
refinements have taken place. Instead, it is a story of constant reformulation
in response to shifting political pressures, changes in institutional and admin
istrative arrangements, intellectual developments occurring in adjacent
disciplines, and the changing ideological commitments of its practitioners. The
very fact that a basic orientation of the discipline links it to a field of social
problems and to administrative efforts to govern that field imparts a certain
instability to the subject and constantly transforms its objects of study. As a
discipline criminology is shaped only to a small extent by its own theoretical
object and logic of inquiry. Its epistemological threshold is a low one, making
it susceptible to pressures and interests generated elsewhere.
TRADITIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF CRIME
Social rules and the violation of them are an intrinsic aspect of social organ
ization, a part of the human condition. Discourse about crime and criminals—
or sin, villainy, roguery, deviance, whatever the local idiom—is thus as old as
human civilization itself. Wherever generalized frameworks developed fo-
the representation and explanation of human conduct, whether as myths
cosmologies, theologies, metaphysical systems, or vernacular common sense—
they generally entailed propositions about aberrant conduct and how it should
be understood. As we have seen, some writers have taken this recurring
concern with law-breakers as sufficient licence to talk about a ‘criminology’
which stretches back to the dawn of time. But rather than see such writings
as proto-criminologies struggling to achieve a form which we have since
I
David (iarland
ii sx'iw more appropriate to accept that there are a variety of ways

w xxhKh crime can be problematized and put into discourse, and that ‘crimi-
txvo^x' vs only one version among others. The propositions about crime and
cxnn'.nats xxhtch appear in the writings of ancient and medieval philosophers,
tSe theologies of the Church of Rome and the Protestant Reform tradition, the
mythxx.'-magieal cosmologies of the Middle Ages, and the legal thought of
the early modem period were not aspiring criminologies, even though their
subject-matter sometimes bears a resemblance to that which criminology seeks
to explain. These broad resemblances begin to appear less compelling when
one looks in detail at what the discourses involved and their implicit assump
tions about the world. Entities such as fate and demons, original sin and
human depravity, temptation, lust, and avarice are the products of mental
frameworks and forms of life rather different from our own.12
The differences between these mentalities and our own can be quite instruc
tive. pointing up some of the peculiarities of our accustomed ways of thinking
about crime. It is significant, for example, that the major tradition of Western
thought—Christianity, in all its variants—-did not separate out the law-breaker
as different or abnormal, but instead understood him or her as merely a
manifestation of universal human depravity and the fallen, sinful state of all
mankind.13 ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ is an understanding of things
quite alien to much of the criminology that was written in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. In the same way, the explicitly moral and
spiritual terms in which the Christian tradition discusses individual wrong
doing, the lack of reference to systematically controlled empirical evidence, the
invocation of the Devil, or demons, or divine intervention to account for
human action, and the appeal to scriptural authority as proof for propositions
are all starkly contrastive reminders of the rather different rules governing
modem criminological discourse.
But traditional accounts of crime—Christian and otherwise—are not
entirely remote from modern thinking about the subject. Scattered around in
the diverse literature of the early modern period, in criminal biographies and
broadsheets, accounts of the Renaissance underworld, Tudor rogue pamphlets,
Elizabethan dramas and Jacobean city comedies, the utopia of Thomas
More and the novels of Daniel Defoe,14 one can discover rudimentary versions
of the etiological accounts which are used today to narrate the process of
becoming deviant. Stories of how the offender fell in with bad company,
became lax in his habits and was sorely tried by temptation, was sickly, or
tainted by bad blood, or neglected by unloving parents, became too fond of
drink or too idle to work, lost her reputation and found it hard to get employ-
12 For a wide-ranging discussion, see Jean Delumeau’s account (Delumeau 1990) of sin and fear
in thirteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe.
13 For developments of this point, see Zeman 1981; and also Faller 1987.
14 On criminal biographies and broadsheets, see Faller 1987; Sharpe 1985. On crime and
criminals in Tudor rogue pamphlets and Jacobean city comedies, see Curtis and Hale 1981. For
descriptions of the Elizabethan underworld, see Judges 1930; Salgado 1972.
ment, was driven to despair by poverty or simply driven to crime by avarice

and lust—these seem to provide the well-worn templates from which our
modern theories of crime are struck, even if we insist upon a more neutral
language with which to tell the tale, and think that a story’s plausibility should
be borne out by evidence as well as intuition.15 Indeed, Faller’s research (Faller
1987) suggests that what was lacking in these seventeenth- and eighteenth
century accounts was not secular or materialist explanations of the roots of
crime, which were present in abundance alongside the spiritual explanations
proffered by the church. What was lacking was a developed sense of differ
ential etiology. Crime was seen as an omnipresent temptation to which all
humankind was vulnerable, but when it became a question of why some
succumbed and others resisted, the explanation trailed off into the unknow
able, resorting to fate, or providence, or the will of God. When, in the late
nineteenth century, the science of criminology emerged, one of its central
concerns would be to address this issue of differentiation and subject it to
empirical inqury.
‘Traditional’ ways of thinking about crime did not disappear with the
coming of the modern, scientific age, though they may nowadays be accorded
a different status in the hierarchy of credibility. These older conceptions—
based upon experience and ideology rather than systematic empirical inquiry—
have not been altogether displaced by scientific criminologies, and we continue
to acknowledge the force of moral, religious and ‘common-sensical’ ways of
discussing crime. Expert, research-based knowledge about crime and criminals
still competes with views of the subject which are not ‘criminological’ in their
style of reasoning or their use of evidence. Judges, moralists, religious funda
mentalists, and populist leader-writers still offer views on criminological
subjects which are quite innocent of criminological science. Unlike physics or
even economics, which have established a degree of monopoly over the right
to speak authoritatively about their subjects, criminology operates in a culture
which combines traditional and scientific modes of thought and action.
Intuitive, ‘instinctive’, common-sense views about crime and criminals are
still more persuasive to many—including many in positions of power and
authority—than are the results of carefully executed empirical research.
THE SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS OF CRIME IN THE EIGHTEENTH

AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES
In most criminological histories, the true beginnings of modern criminological

thought are seen in writings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
15 Matza (1969) analyses the recurring narratives of everyday discourse and shows how, in a
slightly adapted form, these come to comprise the basic explanatory structures of contemporary
criminological theory.
24 David Garland
Radzinowicz's monumental History (1948) begins in 1750, as does his historical

essay on Ideology and Crime (1966). Mannheim’s earliest ‘pioneer’ is Beccaria,
whose Of Crimes and Punishments first appeared in 1764. Even The New
> Criminology (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973), the radical and immensely
influential textbook of the 1970s, begins its account with Beccaria and ‘the
classical school of criminology’. There are good grounds for choosing to
emphasize the role of these eighteenth-century writings in the formation of
criminology, but, as I suggested earlier, the connections are not as straight
forward as is usually assumed. 1 have already argued that the writings of
Beccaria. Bentham, and the others did not constitute a criminology. But
despite this, they did establish and develop some of the key elements and
conditions necessary for the subsequent development of the subject in its
modern form. They are quite properly a part of criminology’s genealogy,
having been a direct source for some of the subject’s basic aims and charac
teristics, as well as having produced a stock of propositions and arguments
which would feature prominently in the criminological discourse which devel
oped in the twentieth century.
There are several genealogical strands which link certain eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century writers with the criminology which followed. Most
importantly, Enlightenment writers such as Beccaria, Bentham, and Howard
wrote secular, materialist analyses, emphasizing the importance of reason and
experience and denigrating theological forms of reasoning. They viewed them
selves as proceeding in a scientific manner and dealing objectively with an issue
which had previously been dominated by irrational, superstitious beliefs and
prejudices. Members of the scuola positiva would later disparage the ‘classical
school’ for its ‘unscientific’ reliance upon speculative reasoning rather than
observed facts, but this is not how these writers viewed themselves. Indeed, it
was the ‘classicists’ who first established the claim that crime and its control
could be studied in a neutral, scientific manner.
Another important connection between the literature of the reformers and
the criminology that followed was that the reformers of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries were writing about a set of legal institutions
which were becoming (partly through those reformers’ efforts) recognizably
modern. The institutional concerns which animated the writings of Beccaria,
Bentham, Howard, and the rest are, in an important sense, modern concerns—
about the systematic arrangement of criminal laws and procedures in order to
promote social policy goals; about the sentencing choices of magistrates; about
the organization and conduct of professional police; about the design and
purposes of prison regimes. The interest of these writers in the psychology of
offending, the nature of criminal motivation, the possibilities of deterrence
and reform, and the most appropriate way for state institutions to regulate
individual conduct, are also questions which were to be become quite central
to later criminology. These issues gripped the imagination of eighteenth
century thinkers because they lived in a world caught up in the dynamics of
modernization. This was the period which saw the emergence of the central-
ized administrative state, a national economy and a population inceasingly

subject to governance, an autonomous, secular legal system, the political
relations of liberalism, and institutional enclosures like the prison and the
asylum with their reformative, disciplinary regimes. The writings of Beccaria,
Bentham, and Howard—like those of Benjamin Rush in America—were the
first soundings of a modernist discourse about crime. As intellectual responses
to the challenge of crime in a newly urbanized market society, they were
addressing problems of a novel type, quite unknown in traditional social
thought. This new social and institutional environment, modified in certain
ways, also formed the background against which the science of criminology
would subsequently emerge, and in that respect there is a broad continuity
of reference which makes eighteenth-century discourse ‘modern’ in a way
that earlier writing is not. (Indeed, it is precisely because the reformist
discourse of Beccaria et al. and the scientific discourse of Lombroso share a
common institutional context that they are able to be viewed as ‘opposites’.
Each one entails a programme for directing the modern field of criminal
justice.)
If one widens the lens to look beyond Beccaria and Bentham to some of the
other discourses on crime and criminals dating from this period, one can detect
other lines of affiliation. Patrick Colquhoun and Henry Fielding, as well as a
large number of Parliamentary and private committees of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, used empirical evidence to situate and measure
the extent of various crime problems (‘the late increase in robbers’, the relation
between ‘indigence’ and crime, ‘the alarming increase in juvenile delinquency’,
the ‘police of the metropolis’, and so on).16 As Leon Radzinowicz (1956), and,
more recently, Robert Reiner (1988) have pointed out, these inquiries formed
part of a wider ‘science of police’ which flourished in this period, concerned
not just with crime or criminals, but with the regulation and maintenance of
the whole population in the interest of economy, welfare; and good governance
(see also Foucault 1979; Pasquino 1978). John Howard’s investigation of the
state of the prisons was undertaken as a work of charity and reform, but his
methods were doggedly empirical, and his study laid much stress on measure
ment and systematic observation as a basis for its findings.17 Howard’s work
in the 1770s sparked the beginnings of a line of empirical penological inquiry
which, from the 1830s onwards, became an increasingly important element in
the British criminological tradition.
By the middle years of the nineteenth century this ‘scientific’ style of reason
ing about crime had become a distinctive feature of the emergent culture of
amateur social science. The papers delivered by Rawson W. Rawson, Joseph
Fletcher, and John Glyde to the Statistical Society of London used judicial
statistics and census data to chart the distribution and demography of crime
16 See Colquhoun 1797, 1800. 1806. 1814; Fielding 1751; and the discussion of the parliamentary
and private committees of inquiry of this period in Radzinowicz 1956.
17 See Howard 1973 [1777], 1973 [1789] and the discussion of his work in Ignatieff 1978.
26 David Garland
and to match up crime rates with other social indices—just as A. M. Guerry

and Adolphe Quetelet had been doing in France and Belgium.18 On the basis
of carefully calculated correlations, they drew conclusions about the moral and
)l ’< social causes which influenced criminal conduct and presented their findings
as instances of the new statistical science and its social uses. Henry Mayhew,
writing in the middle years of the nineteenth century, was essentially a journalist
concerned with ‘the social question’ and the problem of the poor. But unlike
the moralists of a century earlier, his journalism was founded upon an empiri
cal approach, using ethnographic and survey methods as well as life histories
and statistical data; and his analyses of London Labour and the London Poor
(1861-2) offered a series of empirically supported claims about the patterns
and causes of professional crime in the city.19
Another line of inquiry which flourished in this period, and whose advocates
would later be seen as progenitors of criminology, centred not upon the
population and its governance by a well-ordered state, but instead upon indi
viduals and their ability (or lack of ability) to govern themselves. As early as
the 1760s and 1770s, Henry Dagge and Mannasseh Dawes argued that the
law’s notions of a free-willed offender were often enough fictions in the face
of real social and psychological circumstances which limited choice and shaped
human conduct, and they drew upon the new materialist psychologies of the
time to explain how it was that causal processes could be acknowledged with
out entirely destroying the belief in man’s free will (see Green 1985). Indeed,
both Thomas Zeman (1981) and Piers Beirne (1993) have recently shown that
Cesare Beccaria’s account of human conduct is shaped not by metaphysical
assumptions about the freedom of the will, but instead by John Locke’s
empiricist psychology and the new ‘science of man’ developed by the thinkers
of the Scottish Enlightenment.
During the nineteenth century this reconceptualization of human character
and conduct was taken up and developed in the field of medicine, especially
psychological medicine. The art of ‘physiognomy’—which, it was claimed,
enabled its practitioners to judge character and disposition from the features
of the face and the external forms of the body—had been known since the
seventeenth century, but the essays of J. C. Lavater purported to give a
scientific foundation to this useful skill (Lavater 1792).20 The craniometry and
phrenology of F. J. Gall and J. C. Spurzheim made similar claims in the early
nineteenth century, this time focusing upon the shape and contours of the
18 See the discussion of the work of Rawson, Fletcher, and Glyde in Morris 1957. Beirne (1993)
provides detailed discussions of the work of Guerry and Quetelet and their place in the develop
ment of criminological thought.
19 For a discussion of Mayhew’s work and its relation to subsequent criminological analyses,
see Morris 1957.
20 Richard Sennett (1977) provides an interesting account of various nineteenth-century efforts
to judge character by outward appearance and describes the cultural predicament which prompted
these concerns.
human skull as an external index of character.21 By the 1830s physiognomy

and phrenology had lost much of their scientific credibility and had become
the obsession of a few enthusiastic publicists, but the quest to uncover the
links between physical constitution and psychological character was continued
in a different and more important line of research: the new science of
psychiatry.
The emergence of a network of private asylums in the eighteenth century led
to the development of a new quasi-medical specialism which was at first called
alienism and subsequently came to be known as psychological medicine or
psychiatry. The writings of asylum managers about their patients—about their
conduct, the antecedents of their madness, and the forms of treatment to which
they responded—formed the basis for a major tradition of scientific investi
gation, and one which would subsequently be an important source of crimino
logical data and ideas.
Attempts to link psychological characteristics to physical constitutions
formed an abiding concern of this new discipline, but equally significant for
our purposes, is its intense focus upon the insane individual—a focus permitted
and encouraged by the long-term confinement of asylum patients under the
daily gaze of the alienist (see Porter 1987). The new psychiatry produced a
huge scientific literature concerned with the description of different mental
types, case histories and causal analyses of how their madness developed,
and detailed accounts of how they responded to various forms of ‘moral’ and
medical treatment. What was developing here was a new kind of empirical
psychology, concentrating upon pathological cases and their rational manage
ment. And because many of these cases involved criminal conduct (whether of
a minor or a serious kind) one of the offshoots of this enterprise was a devel
oping diagnostic and prognostic literature claiming to give a scientific account
of certain kinds of individual criminals. Particularly after the Lunacy Acts of
the mid-nineteenth century, when the asylum network was expanded to house
the country’s poor as well as the well-to-do, the new psychiatric profession had
more and more to say about conditions such as ‘moral imbecility’, ‘degeneracy’,
and ‘feeblemindedness’ which were deemed to be prevalent among the popu
lations dealt with by the poor-houses and the prisons. Consequently, when a
science of the criminal began to develop in the last decades of the century,
there already existed a tradition of work whose concerns ran in parallel with
its own and from which it could draw a measure of support and encourage
ment. Indeed, for about fifty years after the publication of Lombroso’s
L'Uomo Delinquente (1876) the journals of the psychiatric profession were
virtually the only ones in Britain which took a serious interest in Lombroso’s
project.
If one were reviewing all of the ideas and undertakings of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries that bore a resemblance to elements which later
21 On phrenology and its links to subsequent criminological studies, see Savitz et al. 1977. More
generally, see Cooter 1981.
d
I 28 David Garland
appeared within the discipline of criminology, there would be other stories to

tell. The various forms of charitable and social work with the poor, the societies
for the care of discharged convicts, the management of workhouses, inquiries
about the causes and extent of inebriety, investigations into the labour
market, the employment and treatment of children, education, the housing of
the poor, the settlement and boys’ club movements, could all be identified as
the roots of particular ingredients in the modern criminological mix. But one
needs to recall that the ideas and forms of inquiry set out here did not add up
to an early form of criminology for the simple reason that they did not ‘add
up’ at all; nor could they until the later emergence of a form of inquiry
centred upon the criminal, which drew together these various enterprises under
the umbrella of a specialist criminological discipline. In their own time, they
were discrete forms of knowledge, undertaken for a variety of different
purposes, and forming elements within a variety of different discourses, none
of which corresponds exactly with the criminological project that was sub
sequently formed. Beccaria, for example, developed his arguments about the
reform of the criminal law within the broader context of a work on political
economy. Colquhoun’s writings about crime and police were, for him, one
aspect of a treatise on government in which he addressed the changing prob
lems of governance thrown up by the emergence of urbanized market society
and the baleful effects of trade and luxury upon the manners of the people.
Physiognomists, phrenologists, and psychiatrists were attempting to under
stand the physical and mental roots of human conduct rather than to develop
a particular knowledge of offenders and offending. Like the utilitarian
psychology developed by Bentham, these were attempts to capture the springs
of human action in general, not to single out the criminal for special and
exclusive attention. None of these discourses was struggling to create a dis
tinctive criminological enterprise, though once such a subject was created, each
formed a resource to be drawn upon, usually in a way which wrenched its
insights about crime apart from the framework which originally produced
them.
Certainly, if one looks back from the perspective of the present, one can
glimpse the outlines of the governmental project and the Lombrosian project
gradually taking shape in this period. Empirical studies of the police, of prisons,
of crime rates and of the deterrent effects of criminal laws—the very stuff of
criminology’s governmental concerns—are already underway, conducted at
first by amateurs but later by state officials utilizing the elementary tools of
scientific method. However, these studies were not, at the time, viewed as
distinct from other inquiries, into the market, morals, workhouses, or poverty.
The broad concern animating all of these studies and more was a concern with
governance and the use of empirical data and scientific methods to improve
government’s grip on the population. Only with the later professionalization
and specialization of the various state agencies—and with the invention of
‘criminology’—did the study of governance in criminal matters come to be
viewed as distinct from the governance of the population in general. Similarly,
one can see in the work of the nineteenth-century phrenologists and psy
chiatrists a concern to understand human conduct in scientific terms, to
identify character types, and to trace the etiologies of pathological behaviours.
But at this historical moment there was no focus upon the criminal as a
special human type and no felt need for a specialism built around this entity.
The splitting off of criminological studies, both in the administrative field and
in the clinic, was a late nineteenth-century event which significantly changed
the organization of subsequent thought and action.
Since the formation of criminology, its practitioners have repeatedly
identified what they take to be their ‘roots’—the various lines of descent which
link their present practice to work done a century and more before. But this
is perhaps the wrong way to look at things. A more accurate account might
suggest that at the end of the nineteenth century the idea of a specialist
criminological science emerged—centred, as it happens, on the figure of the
‘criminal type’—and that, after a process of struggle, adaptation, and con
vergence, this subsequently led to the establishment, in a rather different form,
of an independent criminological discipline. Since the discipline was charac
terized by an eclectic, multidisciplinary concern to pursue the crime problem
in all its aspects, the subject is continually expanding to embrace all of the
ways in which crime and criminals might be scientifically studied, and in so
doing, it has constantly created new predecessors for itself. The connection
between eighteenth- and twentieth-century discourse about crime is not a
matter of tenacious traditions of thought which have survived continuously for
200 years. Rather, it is a matter of a certain broad similarity between forms of
inquiry and institutional arrangements which prevailed in the eighteenth and
the twentieth centuries, together with the tendency of the modern discipline to
embrace everything that might be scientifically said about crime and criminals.
Each time a new element is added to the criminological armoury—be it
radical criminology, ecological surveys, or sociological theory—someone
sooner or later discovers that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers were
doing something similar, and that this new approach should therefore be
considered a central feature of the criminological tradition, albeit one that
was temporarily (and inexplicably) forgotten. But this recurring ‘recovery of
tradition’ is perhaps better understood as a bid for intellectual respectability
and disciplinary centrality than as a serious claim about the development
of the subject. After all, the crucial requirement of a genealogy is continuity of
descent, and it is precisely this continuity which is missing wherever ‘traditions’
have to be ‘rediscovered’.
If this account is accurate, and if criminology is a specific organization of
knowledge which first emerged in the late nineteenth century, then the key
problem is to try to describe its particularity and to explain the historical
transmutation which produced this new form of enterprise. It has to be shown
how the project of a specialized science emerged out of some other project or
set of projects, and how it marked itself off from what went before. It is to
that task that I now turn.
30 David Garland
THE EMERGENCE OF A POSITIVE SCIENCE OF

THE CRIMINAL
From Criminal Anthropology to the Science of Criminology

The idea of a specialist science of the criminal was born out of the interaction
of a specific intellectual endeavour and a certain social context. As is often the
case, a transmutation was produced in the history of ideas when a particular
set of ideas and inquiries was found to have relevance to a field which had
previously been regarded as quite separate. Ironically enough, the scientific
work which led Cesare Lombroso to found a specialist ‘science of the
criminal'—a key ingredient in the formation of the modern discipline of
criminology—was not, in fact, criminological in any sense that we would
recognize. Lombroso’s criminal science grew, somewhat accidentally, out of an
anthropological concern to study humanity and its natural varieties, using the
methods of anthropometry and craniometry to measure the physical features
of human subjects. Influenced by the physical anthropology of Paul Broca and
a Darwinian concern with species and their evolution, Lombroso’s study of
Italian army recruits and asylum and prison inmates was an attempt to identify
different racial types and to subject them to scientific scrutiny and categorization
(see Gould 1981). By the 1870s, however, the science of‘racial anthropology’,
like the science of degeneracy developed by Morel, had begun to overlap with
potent social concerns, as is shown by its identification of ‘types’ such as the
genius, the epileptoid, and the insane which were patently derived from social
policy interests rather than evolutionary processes. Thus, when Lombroso
‘discovered’ the ‘criminal type’ he was extending a line of research which
was already well established, and actually restating, in a more vivid form, an
observation that had already been made by psychiatrists such as Maudsley and
prison doctors such as J. Bruce Thomson.
But if Lombroso’s ‘discovery’ was old news, the significance he gave to it
was altogether novel. For him, the apparent distinctiveness of the criminal type
prompted an idea that no one had imagined before: the idea of a distinctive
science of the criminal. His conception of the criminal as a naturally occurring
entity—a fact of nature rather than a social or legal product—led Lombroso
to the thought of a natural science which would focus upon this entity, trace
its characteristics, its stigmata, its abnormalities, and eventually identify the
causes which make one person a criminal and another a normal citizen. And
the startling thing about this Lombrosian project for the scientific differen
tiation of the criminal individual was that, despite its dubious scientific
credentials, it immediately met with a huge international response. In the
twenty years following the appearance of L'Uomo Delinquente in 1876 this
strange new science came to form the basis of a major international movement,
manifesting itself in an outpouring of texts, the formation of new associations,
international congresses, specialist journals, national schools of thought, and
interested officials in virtually every European and American state. At the

same time, Lombroso himself became something of a household name,
featuring in the fiction of Tolstoy, Musil, Bram Stoker, and Conan Doyle as
well as in countless journalistic essays and scientific reports.22
In the years immediately following the publication of Lombroso’s sensational
claims a group of talented disciples gathered around him and a journal, La
Scuola Positiva, was founded to publicize the new research and its practical
implications. But disciples such as Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo were
not content merely to repeat the master’s formulations, and even the early
work of this Italian school showed a considerable diversity and eclecticism,
widening out the analysis to examine the social and legal aspects of criminality
as well as its ‘anthropological’ character. This process of differentiation within
the research enterprise was amplified by the formation of rival schools of
inquiry, notably the ‘French School’ which emphasized the sociological and
environmental determinants of crime and played down the role of fixed
constitutional attributes, and the ‘German school’ which included the study of
criminalistics and the development of new forensic techniques and procedures.
A series of highly publicized international congresses, beginning in 1883, aired
these disputes at length, with much acrimony on all sides, and resulted in the
modification of most of Lombroso’s original claims, particularly on the subject
of the ‘born criminal’ and the fatalistic implications this notion was seen to
have for the treatment and reform of offenders.
What eventually emerged from this process—especially in the writings of
important second-generation figures like Prins, Saleilles, and Von Hamel—was
a scientific movement which was much more eclectic and much more ‘practical’
than the original criminal anthropology had been (see Garland 1985a). One
indication of the process of revision and modification whereby Lombroso’s
original formulations were reworked into a more acceptable form was the
adoption of the term ‘criminology’, which came into general use in the 1890s.
The term was originally used not as an exact synonym for criminal anthro
pology but as a neutral generic term which avoided the partisanship implicit
in the original term and others—such as ‘criminal sociology’, ‘criminal biology’,
and ‘criminal psychology’—which competed with it.
This new science of criminology, as it developed in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, was characterized by a number of distinctive features.23 It
was an avowedly scientific approach to crime, concerned to develop a ‘positive’,
factual knowledge of offenders, based upon observation, measurement, and
inductive reasoning, and rejecting the speculative thinking about human
character which had previously informed criminal justice practices. In keeping
22 On the spread of the criminological movement at the end of the nineteenth century,
see Garland 1985a; Nye 1984. On Lombroso in contemporary fiction, see Pick 1989; Gould 1981.
On the development of criminal anthropology in the USA, see Rafter 1992. On the reception
of Lombroso’s work in Britain, see Radzinowicz and Hood 1986, which also provides the
most detailed account of the indigeneous traditions of thinking about crime in the nineteenth
century.
23 For an analysis of the science of criminology and its early development, see Garland 19856.
32 David Garland
with its Lombrosian origins, it focused its attentions upon the individual
criminal, and in particular upon the characteristics which appeared to mark
off criminals as in some way different from normal, law-abiding citizens. 1*
assumed that scientific explanation amounted to causal explanation and there
fore set itself the task of identifying the causes of crime, though it should be
added that the notion of ‘cause’ was understood in a wide variety of ways.,
some of which were more ‘determinist’ than others, and the kinds of cause
identified ranged from innate constitutional defects to more or less contingent
social circumstances. Finally, it addressed itself to the investigation of a new.
pathological phenomenon—‘criminality’—which it deemed to be the source of
criminal behaviour and which, in effect, became the subject’s raison d'etre and
the target of its practical proposals.
This concern to produce a differential diagnosis of the individual criminal
and the etiology of his or her offending behaviour was in turn linked to a
definite programme of practical action, quite at odds with the legal principles
which had previously underpinned criminal justice practice. The notion of the
offender’s free will was attacked as a metaphysical abstraction, as was the
concept of legal responsibility. Uniformity of sentencing was viewed as a
failure to differentiate between different types of offender, and the principle of
proportionate, retrospective punishment was rejected in favour of a flexible
system of penal sanctions adapted to the reformabilily or dangerousness of
the specific individual. Criminal justice was to cease being a punitive, reactive
system and was to become instead a scientifically informed apparatus for the
prevention, treatment, and elimination of criminality. It was to be a system run
by criminological experts, concerned to maximize social defence, individual
reform, and measures of security rather than to uphold some outdated legalis
tic conception of justice.
That such a radical programme of research and reform could be developed
and become influential is testimony to the extent to which the new criminology
resonated with the concerns and preoccupations of the political and cultural
milieux in which it emerged.24 The popularity of Lombroso’s work is probably
explicable in terms of the extent to which his conception of the criminal type
chimed with deep-rooted cultural prejudices and offered scientific respectability
to middle class perceptions of ‘criminal classes’ forming in the growing cities
(see Sennett 1977). But the viability of the criminological movement, and the
fact that it so quickly became an international phenomenon, are indications
that it was a programme of thought and action which successfully meshed with
the social politics and institutional practices which were becoming established
at the time. The increasing involvement of experts and scientists in the admin
istration of social problems in the late nineteenth century, and the related
development of statistical data as a resource for governing, is one background
circumstance. So too is the developing concern on the part of governments.
24 For a detailed account of the British cultural milieu in which the new criminological science
took hold, see Wiener 1990.
Poor Law administrators, police, and local authorities to classify and differ
entiate the populations they dealt with, seeking to identify and separate out
dangerous elements while shoring up the social attachments of the ‘deserving
poor’ and the ‘respectable’ working classes. In this specific context, the crimi
nological programme offered certain regulatory and legitimatory possibilities
which made it attractive to late nineteenth-century governments and adminis
trators.
The regulatory advantages of the new criminology lay in its rejection of
the formal egalitarianism that had previously shaped the practices of criminal
law and its enforcement. Against the principle that everyone should be
treated equally, criminology offered to differentiate between constitutional and
accidental criminality, thus identifying the real sources of social danger and
marking out the contours of the criminal class in a scientific rather than a
moralistic way. Criminology also promised to provide a more extensive and
a more effective form of intervention and regulation. Concerned to diagnose
an individual’s level of dangerousness rather than to judge whether or not he
or she had yet broken the law, criminology offered the prospect of a system
of control in which official measures need not wait for an offence to occur, or
be limited by any principle of proportionality. At the same time, this more
interventionist system could also claim to be more humane, in so far as its
rationale was the promotion of individual and social welfare and not merely
the infliction of retributive punishment (see Garland 1985a; Wiener 1990).
Finally, as is by now well documented, the new criminology met with
extensive interest and social support because it was closely linked to the new
prisons which had, by the late nineteenth century, become a prominent feature
of all Western societies. As Michel Foucault (1977) has shown, the disciplinary,
reformative practices of the penitentiary prison acted as a practical ‘surface of
emergence’ for the individualizing, differentiating discourse of criminology.
What Lombroso invented was a science of individual differences; but the data
and social arrangements necessary for the production of this science, as well
as the practical context in which such a knowledge would be practically useful,
were already inscribed in the architecture and regimes of the disciplinary
prison. In the prison setting inmates were arranged in individual cells, and
subjected to constant, individual surveillance for long periods of time, their
behaviour and characteristics being continually monitored in order that
disciplinary measures could be adjusted to deal with individual reactions and
peculiarities. The systematic and differentiating knowledge of offenders to
which this gave rise formed the basis for the new science of criminology, which
slowly fed back into the practices of imprisonment, refining the prison’s
classifications and techniques, and enhancing the authorities’ understanding of
the individuals that were held in custody (see Garland 1985a). The widespread
use of disciplinary imprisonment in late nineteenth-century Europe anc
America thus provided a ready-made setting through which criminology couk
emerge and establish itself as a useful form of knowledge. As Sir Evelyn
Ruggles-Brise (1924) put it, la science penitentiaire develops gradually into the
34 David Garland
science of the discovery of the causes of crime—the science of criminology’.25

Lombroso’s project was thus propelled not just by its own scientific logic but
by a combination of institutional and cultural dynamics, a set of forces which
were to sustain this form of inquiry long after Lombroso’s own reputation was
utterly destroyed.
The Development of Criminology in Britain

As was often pointed out at the time, British intellectuals and penal officials
played very little part in the early development of this new criminological
movement. Most of the relevant research and publication took place in Italy,
France, and Germany, and the British were notable absentees at the inter
national congresses held to debate the claims and counter-claims of the various
schools. It was not until the Geneva Congress of Criminal Anthropology in
1896 that Britain first sent an official delegate—the prison inspector Major
Arthur Griffiths—and Griffiths returned with a sceptical report (see Griffiths
1904) which confirmed the attitude of British officials to the claims of the new
criminologists. Griffiths was later to write the first entry to appear on
‘Criminology’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-11) in which he attacked
the theory of criminal types, but went on to show a cautious interest in the
penological ideas which were by then emerging from the movement.
The arm’s-length attitude of the British penal establishment to the new
criminology was something of a surprise to individual enthusiasts such as
Havelock Ellis and William Douglas Morrison, both of whom did much to
introduce continental ideas into this country. Ellis published a book entitled
The Criminal in 1890 which was, in effect, a summary of the major ideas of
criminal anthropology, and regularly reviewed foreign criminological pub
lications for the Journal of Mental Science from 1890 to 1919; Morrison
established and edited ‘The Criminology Series’ which published translations
of works by Lombroso (1895), Ferri (1895) and Proal (1898), as well as
publishing a number of his own works, including Juvenile Offenders (1896).
One cause of this surprise was that many of the new criminologists, including
Lombroso himself, pointed to earlier work published in Britain which
appeared to contain the kinds of ideas which would later become central to the
movement. Thus, in the 1860s the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley and the prison
medical officer J. Bruce Thomson had written about ‘the genuine criminal’ and
‘the criminal class’, describing these individuals as ‘morally insane’, ‘degenerate’,
‘defective in physical organisation . . . from hereditary causes’ and ‘incurable’
in a way which appeared to be altogether ‘Lombrosian’ before Lombroso.26
25 On the prison as a ‘surface of emergence’ for criminological knowledge, see Foucault 1977:
also Garland 1992.
26 Maudsley (1863: 73) refers to ‘the criminal’ as a ‘fact in nature’ and criminals as ‘if not strictly
a degenerate species, certainly ... a degenerate variety of the species’. Thomson (1867: 341) states
that ‘all who have seen much of criminals agree that they have a singular family likeness or caste
. . . Their physique is coarse and repulsive; their complexion dingy, almost atrabilious; their face,
figure and mien, disagreeable. The women are painfully ugly; and the men look stolid, and many
But to describe Maudsley and Thomson as criminologists before the fact

was misleading. Maudsley was engaged in a distinctively psychiatric endeavour
(the development and application of typologies dealing with various mental
disorders and pathologies) and Thomson’s concern was to assess the impact of
prison discipline upon the bodies and minds of prisoners (see Thomson 1867).
Neither of them for a moment imagined that there was any justification for a
distinctive scientific specialism centered upon the criminal. More importantly,
during the 1870s and 1880s British medical and psychiatric opinion had shifted
away from earlier attempts to characterize ‘criminals’ in such indiscriminating,
pathological terms. From the 1870s onwards, prison doctors such as David
Nicolson and John Baker set about redefining ‘the morbid psychology of
criminals’, so as to differentiate a range of conditions rather than a single type.
Nicolson (1878-9) emphasized that professional observation made it plain that
only a minority of criminals were in any sense mentally abnormal, and he
forcibly rejected any suggestion that offenders were generally ‘incurable’ or
beyond the reach of prison reformation. During the same years, the nascent
British psychiatric profession was learning that criminal courts would not
tolerate psychiatric evidence which contradicted basic legal axioms about
individual free will and responsibility, and it gradually developed a modus
vivendi which aimed to minimize conflict between psychiatry and law. By the
1880s, leading figures of the new profession such as Needham, Hack Tuke,
Nicolson, and Maudsley were taking pains to distance themselves from the
embarrassing claims made by psychiatrists (Maudsley among them) in earlier
years—claims which were now being taken up again by criminologists with
their talk of ‘born criminals’, ‘the criminal type’, atavism, and so on (see
Nicolson 1878-9; Maudsley 1889; Tuke 1889; Needham 1889; Baker 1892;
Nicolson 1895; Garland 1988).
The relationship between the new continental movement and the studies of
criminals carried out in Britain by prison doctors and psychiatrists is a
complex one, and the assumption (made by Ellis and others) that the two were
continuous is a simplification which glosses over important differences. Unlike
Lombroso’s anthropology, British psychiatry was not concerned to isolate
discrete human ‘types’ and classify them by means of racial and constitutional
differences. Instead, it was a therapeutically orientated practice based upon a
system of classifying mental disorders which, like the disease model of nine
teenth-century medicine, discussed the condition separately from the individ
ual in whom it might be manifested. Within the classification schemes of
morbid psychology there was a variety of conditions which criminals were said
to exhibit, including insanity, moral insanity, degeneracy, and feebleminded
ness (among others). But generally speaking, the criminal was not conceived
of as a distinct psychological type.
of them brutal, indicating physical and moral deterioration. In fact there is a stamp on them in
form and expression which seems to me the heritage of the class.' For a discussion of these debates,
see Garland 1988; also Radzinowicz and Hood 1986.
36 David Garland
More important than this theoretical difference was the way in which British
psychiatry contrasted with Lombrosian anthropology in its practical commit
ments and its relationship to the institutions of criminal justice. In his early
I' publications, Lombroso claimed that his ideas had great relevance for criminal
law and penal policy, but, as his critics soon pointed out, he was not particu
larly well informed about the practical realities of crime and punishment.27 In
consequence, his penology was not just radical and at odds with current
practices; it was also naive and distorted, lacking a close familiarity with the
normal range of offenders and the institutions that dealt with them.
Lombroso’s conception of the criminal type had emerged from the theoretical
hypotheses of physical anthropology rather than extensive penological
experience, and only gradually did he modify his views to bring them more
into line with the way legal institutions worked. In contrast, the scientific
thinking about the criminal which developed in British psychiatric and medico
legal circles was closely tied into professional tasks such as the giving of
evidence before courts of law, or the decisions as to classification, diagnosis,
and regimen which prison medical officers made daily. This practical experience
was crucial in shaping the psychiatric approach to ‘criminological’ issues
because it ensured that psychiatrists and prison doctors were well acquainted
with the day-to-day realities of criminal justice and with the need to bring
psychiatric propositions into line with the demands of courts and prison
authorities.
The British tradition that was closest to the criminology developing on the
continent was thus also somewhat hostile to it. The scientific studies conducted
by British prison doctors and psychiatrists were, from an early stage, situated
within an institutional framework which shaped their purposes and constrained
their findings. In consequence, these studies were generally modest in their
claims and respectful of the requirements of institutional regimes and legal
principles. As far as most prison doctors and experienced psychiatrists were
concerned, the majority of criminals were more or less normal individuals; only
a minority required psychiatric treatment and this usually involved removing
them from the penal system and putting them into institutions for the mentally
ill or defective. And although the diagnostic and therapeutic claims of
psychiatry changed over time, from an early stage there was a recognition that,
for the majority of offenders, the normal processes of law and punishment
should apply. Compared to the sweeping claims of criminal anthropology, the
British medico-legal tradition was, by the 1890s, somewhat conservative, and
generally dismissive of Lombrosian ideas. Senior psychiatric figures such as
Maudsley and Conolly Norman referred publicly to the ‘puerilities of criminal
anthropology’ and the ‘lamentable extravagances’ of the new theories
(Norman 1895; Maudsley 1895). Sir Horatio Bryan Donkin, the first Medical
27 Sec. for instance, the review by Arthur St John (1912) of Lombroso’s work, in which he
contrasts Lombroso’s naivety to the experienced practical understanding of a prison doctor such
as James Devon.
Commissioner of Prisons, gave clear expression to the difference between the

two traditions when he defined ‘criminology’, properly so-called, as the investi
gations undertaken by ‘persons concerned in some way with the prison
authorities who strive to discover just principles on which to base their work’
and distinguished this from the newer ‘doctrine and debate on the causation
of crime’ which he condemned as ‘theories based on preconceived assumptions
regardless of fact’ (Donkin 1917).
So scientific research on individual criminals in Britain stemmed from a
rather different root than did continental criminology, and inclined towards
a more pragmatic, institutionalized approach to its subject. But, as 1 noted
earlier, the international criminological movement tended to become more
eclectic, more moderate, and more practical over time, gradually dissociating
itself from extremist claims and adapting to the basic demands of the insti
tutions it sought to influence. And as it became more respectable and more
firmly established, the initial hostility of Britain’s scientific and penological
circles tended to fade. From the mid-1890s onwards, the English and Scottish
Prison Commissions began to take an active interest in the movement, as did
the leading psychiatric periodicals. Even the influential Gladstone Committee
Report gave passing approval to the ‘learned but conflicting theories’ which
have subjected ‘crime, its causes, and treatment’ to ‘scientific inquiry’
(Gladstone Committee 1895: 8). What seems gradually to have happened in
Britain during the period leading up to the First World War is that ‘crimi
nology’ ceased to be exclusively identified with its anthropological origins
and instead became used as a general term to describe scientific research on
the subject of crime and criminals. Grudgingly at first, but more and more
frequently, prison officials, psychiatrists, and doctors began to refer to their
researches as ‘criminological’, until this became the accepted name for a new
scientific specialism. The irony is that, in Britain at least, criminology came to
be recognized as an accredited scientific specialism only when it began to rid
itself of the notion of the distinctive ‘criminal type’—the very entity which had
originally grounded the claim that a special science of the criminal was
justified.
Most of the early British work which identified itself as criminological was
actually a continuation of the older medico-legal tradition of prison research,
now opened out to engage with an expanding criminological literature
imported from Europe and North America. It is, for example, almost
exclusively within the Reports of the Medical Commissioner of Prisons and of
the various prison medical officers that one will find any official discussion
of criminological science in the first few decades of this century, and most of
the major scientific works on crime written in Britain before the 1930s were
written by doctors with psychiatric training and positions within the prison
service.28 The first university lectures in ‘criminology’ delivered in Britain—
28 See inter alia Sutherland 1908; Quinton 1910; Devon 1912; Smith 1922; Sullivan 1924; East
1927.
\ 38 David Garland
given at Birmingham by Maurice Hamblin Smith in 1921—were directed at

postgraduate medical students within a course entitled ‘Medical Aspects of
Crime and Punishment’, and long before Hermann Mannheim began teaching
at the London School of Economics in 1935 there were courses on ‘Crime and
P Insanity’ offered at London University by senior prison medical officers such
as Sullivan and East.29 In the absence of any specialist periodicals devoted to
criminology, criminological articles and reviews appeared chiefly in the Journal
of Mental Science, The British Journal of Medical Psychology, and the
Transactions of the Medico-Legal Association (from 1933 The Medico-Legal
and Criminological Review), although the Howard Journal also carried some
reviews, as did the Sociological Review.
The institutionally based, medico-legal criminology which predominated in
Britain for much of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth
was, by its nature, an evolving, adaptive tradition. The criminological texts
which it generated grew out of practical contexts which were forever changing,
since institutions continually redefined their operations and took on new
concerns, and also because new methods, theories, and techniques became
available to the professionals who administered them. Many of the crimino
logical texts written in the nineteenth century focused upon the problems of
classifying particular offenders—as psychiatric rather than criminal cases, as
morally insane, feebleminded, and so on—and of course these problems had a
direct bearing upon the practices of penal institutions. As the penal system
diversified in the early part of the twentieth century, developing specialist
institutions for the inebriate, habitual offenders, the feebleminded, and for
juveniles, and becoming more refined and differentiated in the classification of
adult prisoners, the criminological literature similarly began to address itself
to these new diagnostic and classificatory problems.30 Thus, although this
line of research came close to the concerns of the Lombrosian project in its
focus upon individuals and their differential classification, it lacked the
scientific ambition and theory-building concerns of the latter, being almost
exclusively focused upon knowledge which was useful for administrative
purposes.
In 1919, the emphasis upon individual character and specialized treatment
prompted by the Gladstone Committee report—together with concerns about
large numbers of shell-shocked and mentally disturbed men returning from
the war—led the Birmingham Justices to establish a permanent scheme for the
clinical examination of untried adult offenders. Previously such work had been
done on an occasional, ad hoc basis, and depended upon the skill and interest
of the local prison doctor. By appointing Hamblin Smith and W. A. Potts,
29 According to his own account, Cyril Burt had regularly given lectures on juvenile delinquency
at Liverpool University between 1906 and 1914, but these had occurred in the context of a
psychology class rather than one devoted to ‘criminology’. See Mannheim 1957.
30 Works on alcoholism by W. C. Sullivan (1906), on recidivism by J. F. Sutherland (1908), and
on the psychology of the criminal by M. Hamblin Smith (1922) and H. E. Field (1932) are
significant examples of research derived from the developing penal-welfare complex.
both psychiatrically trained prison doctors, and charging them with these new
duties, the Justices effectively created a new specialism of applied criminology.
Before long, Potts and Hamblin Smith were adapting the standard mental tests
for use in this area, publishing the results of their clinical studies, and writing
extensively about the need for this kind of investigation and its implications
for the treatment and prevention of crime. In The Psychology of the Criminal
(19226) and in a series of articles in the Journal of Mental Science, the Howard
Journal, and elsewhere, Smith emphasized the importance of criminological
study, though for him this meant the clinical examination of individual
offenders for the purpose of assessment and diagnosis. As Britain’s first auth
orized teacher of ‘criminology’, and as the first individual to use the title of
‘criminologist’, it is significant that Smith, like Donkin and Ruggles-Brise
before him, rejected the search for ‘general theories’ in favour of the ‘study of
the individual’. It is also significant that the centres for criminological research
and teaching which he proposed were envisaged as places where ‘young medical
graduates’ would be trained to become expert in the medico-psychological
examination and assessment of offenders (Smith 1922zz).
Hamblin Smith was also one of the first criminological workers in Britain to
profess an interest in psychoanalysis, which he used as a means to assess the
personality of offenders, as well as a technique for treating the mental conflicts
which, he claimed, lay behind the criminal act. In this respect Smith met with
much official opposition, particularly from W. Norwood East; but there were
others, outside the prisons establishment, who were more enthusiastic. In the
winter of 1922-23 Dr Grace Pailthorpe assisted Smith in the psychoanalytic
investigation of female offenders in Birmingham, and went on to complete a
five-year study at Holloway, funded by a grant from the Medical Research
Council. Her report (Pailthorpe 1932), which was completed by 1929, but held
back by the MRC until 1932, claimed that crime was generally a symptom of
mental conflict which might be psychoanalytically resolved. This radical
approach met with some consternation in official circles (see East 1936: 319),
but it excited the interest of a number of analysts and medical psychologists
who formed a group to promote the Pailthorpe report and its approach. Out
of their meetings emerged the Association for the Scientific Treatment of
Criminals (1931), which, in 1932, became the Institute for the Scientific
Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD) (see Glover 1960).
Most of the founder members of this group were involved in the new out
patient sector of psychiatric work, made possible by a developing network of
private clinics, which included the Tavistock (1921) and the Maudsley (1923),
the new child guidance centres, and, in 1933, the ISTD’s own Psychopathic
Clinic (which in 1937 was moved and renamed the Portman Clinic). This new
field of practice gave rise to its own distinctive brand of criminological theory.
The early publications of the ISTD emphasize the clinical exploration of
individual personality, and in that sense are continuous with much previous
work. But they also manifest a new preventative emphasis, which reflected
the fact that the new clinics operated outside the formal penal system, and
Il
40 David Garland
could deal with individuals before their disturbed conduct actually became
criminal.31 Eventually, the ISTD’s emphasis upon psychoanalysis, and its open
hostility to much official penal policy, ensured that it remained essentially an
outsider body, operating at arm’s length from the Home Office and the Prison
Commission. This outsider status forms an important background to the later
decision of the Home Office to establish a criminological institute at
Cambridge, rather than under 1STD auspices in London, for although ‘the
formation of such a body was one of the original aims of the ISTD’ (Glover
I960: 70), and the claims of the organization were canvassed to the Home
Secretary in 1958, the Home Office appears not to have seriously considered
such an option (see Radzinowicz 1988: 9).
Despite its subsequent neglect, the work of W. Norwood East, particularly
An Introduction to Forensic Psychiatry in the Criminal Courts (1927) and The
Medical Aspects of Crime (1936)—better represents the mainstream of British
criminology in the 1920s and 1930s. East was a psychiatrically trained prison
medical officer who became a leading figure in the 1930s as Medical Director
on the Prison Commission and President of the Medico-Legal Society, and his
views dominated official policy-making for a lengthy period. East was himself
a proponent of a psychological approach to crime, but he considered its
scope to be sharply delimited, and consistently warned against the dangers
and absurdities of exaggerating its claims. Instead of theoretical speculation
and scientific ambition he stressed the importance of ‘day-to-day adminis
tration’, and the practical impact of theoretical ideas. (Hence his criticism of
deterministic ideas, which he thought promoted ‘mental invalidism’ instead
of trying to build up a sense of social responsibility’ (East 1931-2). In 1934 he
established an extended experiment at Wormwood Scrubs prison, whereby
those offenders deemed most likely to respond to psychological therapy—
particularly sex offenders and arsonists—were subjected to a period of investi
gation and treatment. At the end of five years, East and Hubert’s Report on
The Psychological Treatment of Crime (1939) reaffirmed East’s view that while
80 per cent of offenders were psychologically normal, and would respond to
routine punishment, a minority might usefully be investigated and offered
psychological treatment. The Report proposed a special institution to deal
with such offenders—a proposal which was immediately accepted but not put
into effect until the opening of Grendon Underwood prison in 1962. East and
Hubert also recommended that this institution should function as a centre for
31 As the editors of the British Journal of Delinquency pul it in the first issue: ‘The names of
James Devon, Hamblin Smith. Norwood East and others bear witness to the honourable part
played by Prison Medical Officers in the development of scientific criminology in this country. But
the activities of the “institutional” criminologist have been rather overshadowed in recent years
by the expansion of what might be called the “ambulant” approach to delinquency, i.e. the
application of diagnostic and. where necessary or possible, therapeutic methods to early cases
attending Delinquency Clinics, Child Guidance and Psychiatric Centres, etc., with or without
probationary supervision. And to the extent that the Delinquency Clinic bridges the gap between
the “non-delinquent” and the “recidivist”, it is inevitable that the ambulant system should provide
the most fruitful field for research into causes and methods of prevention’ (’Editorial', British
Journal of Delinquency. 1/1 (1950/1): 4).
criminological research, and it is significant that when a criminological centre

is here proposed for the first time in an official report, it should be envisaged
as part of a psychiatric institution, dealing only with a small minority of patho
logical offenders.
An important departure from this British tradition of clinically based
psychiatric studies was The English Convict: A Statistical Study, published in
1913 by Dr Charles Goring under the auspices of the Home Office and the
Prison Commission. This work was made possible by institutional routines, in
so far as anthropometric methods were used in prisons for the identification of
habitual offenders during the 1890s, and in fact one of its starting points was
a desire to measure the impact of prison diet and labour upon the inmates’
physiques. But the issues addressed by the final report went far beyond these
institutional matters and engaged, for the first time in an official publication,
with the theoretical claims of scientific criminology.
The analysis and tabulation of the vast quantity of data collected by
the study was carried out in Karl Pearson’s Biometrical Laboratory at the
University of London—an unusual location for prison research but one which
was well suited to the statistical and eugenic themes which dominated the final
report. As its sponsors intended, the study gave a definitive refutation of the
old Lombrosian claim that the criminal corresponded to a particular physical
type, thus confirming the position which the British authorities had held all
along. However, the significance of Goring’s study went far beyond this
negative and somewhat out-of-date finding. In fact, Goring’s analysis began by
assuming that there was no criminal type, and although it was not much
noticed at the time, his study is chiefly notable for inventing a quite new way
of differentiating criminals from non-criminals.
In the early part of the book, Goring set out extensive theoretical and
methodological arguments which insisted that criminality should be viewed not
as a qualitative difference of type, marked by anomaly and morbidity, but
instead as a variant of normality, differentiated only by degree. Following the
arguments of Manouvrier and Topinard, he pointed out that so-called criminal
‘anomalies’ are only ‘more or less extreme degrees of character which in some
degree are present in all men’. Moreover, he made it clear that his use of
statistical method necessarily presupposed this idea of a criminal characteristic
which is a common feature of all individuals, and he went on to name this
hypothesized entity ‘the criminal diathesis’. This conception of criminality as
normal, rather than morbid or pathological, implied a new basis for crimino
logical science, which Goring vigorously set forth. From now on, criminology
could no longer depend on the clinical gaze of a Lombroso and its impression
istic identification of anomalies. (Goring had, in any case, provided a
devastating critique of this ‘anatomico-pathological method’.) Instead it must
be a matter of large populations, careful measurement, and statistical analysis,
demonstrating patterns of differentiation in the mass which would not be
visible in the individual or to the naked eye.
Goring’s own application of these methods purported to reveal a significant,
42 David Garland
but by no means universal, association between criminality and two heritable

characteristics, namely low intelligence and poor physique, and suggested than
‘family and other environmental conditions’ were not closely associated with
crime. From these findings he drew a series of practical, eugenic conclusions.,
declaring that ‘crime will continue to exist as long as we allow criminals to
propagate' and that government should therefore ‘modify opportunity for
crime by segregating the unfit’ and ‘regulate the reproduction of those consti
tutional qualities—feeblemindedness, inebriety, epilepsy, deficient social!
instinct, insanity, which conduce to the committing of crime’ (Goring 1913)-
Here. as so often in subsequent studies, we see Lombroso’s specific claims
rejected, only to find that his basic assumptions and project are being
reasserted in some new. revised form.
Although The English Convict had a considerable impact abroad, andl
especially in the USA, in Britain it received a much more muted response. On.
the one hand, Goring’s attack had been centred upon theoretical positions which
had little support in this country, other than from maverick outsiders such as
Havelock Ellis. On the other, it appeared to have policy implications—partic
ularly the possibility that inherited traits would render reformative prison
regimes impotent—which were not altogether welcome in official circles. The
Prison Commissioners, while supporting the study’s publication as a Blue Book,
refused to endorse its conclusions (see Garland 1985a), and Sir Bryan Donkin
(1919) distanced himself from the book altogether, arguing that ‘even correct
generalisations . . . concerning criminals in the mass are not likely to be of much
positive value in the study or treatment of individuals’. In much the same way
W. C. Sullivan, the medical superintendent at Broadmoor, argued in Crime and
Insanity (1924) that clinical rather than statistical methods were the only reliable
means of obtaining useful, policy-relevant knowledge.
These exchanges are revealing because they show the extent to which British
criminology up to this point was shaped by the interests and assumptions of
official policy-makers and the institutions that they served. In the years before
the First World War, the medico-legal assessment of individual offenders
played an explicit role in the trial process and in the disposition of
offenders after conviction, so the promised benefits of clinical research were
readily apparent in a way that was not true of statistical studies. Later on.
when criminal justice officials came to realize how they could use the results
of actuarial calculations—in predicting response to treatment, deploying police
resources, calculating crime rates, and so on—the balance of interest shifted
the other way. Though he did not live to see it (having died in 1919), Goring’s
argument for the importance of statistical method and mass data in crimino
logical research was the one which was ultimately most persuasive to the
British authorities. By the end of the 1930s, the Prison Commission and
the Home Office had each embarked upon large-scale, statistically based
projects, subsequently published as East (1942) and Carr-Saunders et al.
(1942), and this became a characteristic form of government-sponsored
research in the years after 1945.
k
If East’s work exemplified the mainstream British tradition of medico

psychiatric criminological research (with the ISTD’s more radical clinical
studies forming an important tributary), and Goring inaugurated a new stream
of statistical studies, there was also another significant line of inquiry which
influenced criminological work in the post-war period. This third stream is best
represented by the eclectic, multifactorial, social-psychological research of
Cyril Burt. When later criminologists such as Mannheim and Radzinowicz
looked back upon their predecessors, they spent little time discussing the
merits of The English Convict or The Medical Aspects of Crime. Instead, they
invariably picked out Cyril Burt’s 1925 study, The Young Delinquent, as
the first major work of modern British criminology and as an exemplar for the
discipline that they were helping to create.32 Like most criminological texts in
this period, The Young Delinquent emerged from a specific field of practice—
it was not until the 1960s that research took off from an academic base—but
in marked contrast to the work of East, Hamblin Smith, Sullivan, and co., this
field of practice was outside the penal system, rather than central to it. In his
post as educational psychologist to the London County Council, Burt was
responsible for the psychological assessment and advice of London’s school
child population, which involved him in examining thousand of individual
problem cases, many of them behavioural as well as educational, and making
recommendations for their treatment. Consequently, his criminological study
was built upon a wider than usual population, dealing mostly with 'pre
delinquents’ rather than convicted offenders, and it was not constrained by the
narrowly penal concerns that affected most contemporary studies. Rather than
inquire about specific classifications or distinctions, Burt was interested to
specify all the possible sources of individual psychological difference, and
thereby to identify the causal patterns which precipitate delinquency and non
delinquency.
The Young Delinquent was based upon the detailed clinical examination of
400 schoolchildren (a delinquent or quasi-delinquent group and a control
group), using a battery of techniques which included biometric measurement,
mental testing, temperament testing, and psychoanalytic and social inquiries,
together with the most up-to-date statistical methods of factor analysis and
correlation. Its findings were expansively eclectic, identifying some 170
causative factors which were in some way associated with delinquency, and
showing, by way of narrative case histories, how each factor might typically
operate. From his analysis, Burt concluded that certain factors, such as
defective discipline, defective family relationships, and particular types of
temperament, were highly correlated with delinquency, while the influence
of other factors, such as poverty or low intelligence, while not altogether
negligible, had been seriously overstated in the past. His major proposition was
32 See Mannheim (1949: 11): also Radzinowicz (1961: 173-6): ‘it may be said that modern
criminological research in England dates only from Sir Cyril Burt's study of The Young Delinquent,
first published in 1925. Its excellence in method and interpretation was at once recognized and it
has stood the test of rapidly advancing knowledge.'
44 David Garland
that delinquency was not the outcome of special factors operating only on
delinquents, but was rather the result of a combination of factors—typical!!}
as many as nine or ten—operating at once upon a single individual. Un
consequence, the study of criminality must be, above all, multicausal in scope,
)• while its treatment must be tailored to fit the needs of the individual case. The
influence of Burt s work, and especially its eclectic, multifactorial search for
the correlates of individual delinquency, was to become something of a
hallmark of British criminology in the mid-twentieth century, though ironically
enough (in view of Burt’s modern reputation) his most immediate impact
was to shift attention away from the purported intellectual deficiencies o>f
delinquents towards questions of temperament and emotional balance.
The scientific criminology which developed in Britain between the 1890s and
the Second World War was thus heavily dominated by a medico-psychological
approach, focused upon the individual offender and tied into a correctionalisit
penal-welfare policy. Within this approach there were a number of important
variants, and the enterprise was differently understood by different practitioners:
but compared to the subject which exists today, criminology operated within
rather narrow parameters. Sociological work, such as that developed by'
Durkheim in France at the turn of the century, or in Chicago in the 1920s and
1930s (which treated crime rates as social facts to be explained by sociological
methods), was virtually absent. Instead the ‘social dimension’ of crime was
conceived of as one factor among many others operating upon the individual—
a good example of how the criminological project transforms the elements
which it borrows’ from other disciplines. Nor was the radicalism of foreign
criminologists such as Enrico Ferri and Willem Bonger much in evidence here;
indeed, if British criminology can be said to have developed radical analyses
during this period, they were inspired by Freud rather than by Marx.33
The major topics of scientific interest were those thrown up as problems for
the courts, the prison and the Borstal system—such as the mentally abnormal
offender, recidivists, and especially juvenile delinquents—and the central
purpose of scientific research was not the construction of explanatory theory
but instead the more immediate end of aiding the policy-making process. The
governmental project dominated, almost to the point of monopolization, and
Lombroso s science of the criminal was taken up only in so far as it could be
shown to be directly relevant to the governance of crime and criminals. Such
a pragmatic, correctionalist orientation was, of course, hardly surprising when
one recalls that the authors of pre-war criminological research in Britain were,
virtually without exception, practitioners working in the state penal system or
else in the network of clinics and hospitals which had grown up around it. In
Britain, before the mid-1930s, criminology as a university-based, academic
discipline simply did not exist.
33 See for instance the works by Glover (1941, 1960), Aichhorn (1951), and Friedlander
(1947).
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A CRIMINOLOGICAL DISCIPLINE

IN BRITAIN
The transformation of British criminology from a minor scientific specialism—

the part-time activity of a few practitioners and enthusiasts—into an estab
lished academic discipline took place comparatively late, occurring some time
between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s. Even then, it was by no means an
inevitable or necessary development. Indeed, had it not been for the rise of
Nazism in Germany, and the appointment of three distinguished European
emigres, Hermann Mannheim, Max Grunhut, and Leon Radzinowicz, to
academic posts at elite British universities, British criminology might never
have developed sufficient academic impetus to become an independent
discipline. But however contingently, the process of discipline formation did
take hold in the post-war period and its symbolic culmination occurred in
October 1961 with the inauguration of a postgraduate course for the training
of criminological researchers and teachers at the new Institute of Criminology
at Cambridge. In the intervening years, the other concomitants of disciplinary
status had gradually come into being, initially as the result of private
initiatives, and then, in the late 1950s, with the support and funding of
government.
Criminology teaching in the universities began to expand from the late 1930s
onwards, catering to the needs of the fast-growing social work and probation
professions and attracting a first generation of research students (such as John
Spencer, Norval Morris, Tadeuz Grygier, and John Croft) who would go on
to become important figures in the new discipline.34 Cambridge University
established a Department of Criminal Science in 1941, which sponsored
research projects as well as a book series, and eventually formed the base upon
which the Institute of Criminology was built. In 1950 Britain’s first specialist
criminology journal, the British Journal of Delinquency (renamed the British
Journal of Criminology in 1960), was established as 'the official organ of
the ISTD’ and set about the task of moulding a coherent discipline out of the
scores of small-scale research efforts dotted around the country. Editorials by
Mannheim and his co-editors Edward Glover and Emmanuel Miller identified
key aspects of an emerging research programme and the journal carried
extensive discussions of methodology and data sources as well as acting as
a kind of bulletin board through which researchers could keep abreast of
activities in the expanding field. In 1953, the ISTD also established the
34 According to the results of a survey carried out by Mannheim in the mid-1950s, twenty-one
British universities claimed that criminology formed a part of their teaching curriculum, whether
for undergraduate students or as a part of extension courses and diplomas taken by trainee social
workers and probation officers (Mannheim 1957). From 1938 onwards, the ISTD was a centre for
the University of London four-year Diploma Course in Social Studies, an evening course, of which
the fourth year was devoted to criminology. Mannheim himself taught ‘criminology as a separate
subject in all its aspects’ at the LSE from 1935 onwards.
46 David Garland
Scientific Group for the Discussion of Delinquency Problems, which acted as

a torunt tor discussion for several years until younger members of the group
some ot them with newly created university posts in criminology—grew
dissatisfied with the clinical and psychoanalytical emphasis of leading figures
such as Glover and split off to found the more academically orientated
British Society ot Criminology. In 1956, Howard Jones published the firs*
British criminology textbook. Crime and the Penal System, a work much
influenced by the teachings of Mannheim at the LSE. In its emphasis upon
penological issues and its assumption of a reforming, welfarist stance it encap
sulated an important and continuing strand of British criminological culture.
(Such was the pace of change in this, the discipline’s take-off phase, that the
third edition ot the book, appearing only nine years later in 1965, was
described by an otherwise sympathetic reviewer as ‘sadly out of date’ (Taylor
1968).)
The Criminal Justice Act of 1948 provided for the regular allocation of
Treasury funds for the purposes of criminological research, but in the years
that followed only a tiny annual budget was actually made available. However,
the 1950s saw the emergence of an explicit and continuing commitment by the
British government to support criminological research, both as an in-house
activity and as a university-based specialism. This, in effect, marked the point
of convergence between criminology as an administrative aid and criminology
as a scientific undertaking—the consolidation of the governmental and
Lombrosian projects—-and it represents a key moment in the creation of a
viable, independent discipline of criminology in Britain. This new and closer
relationship beween government and criminological science not only endorsed
criminology s claim to be a useful form of knowledge; it also gave official and
financial backing to criminology’s claim to scientific status and university
recognition. Thus the Home Office proceeded to set up not just an infrastruc
ture for policy-led research—which it did in 1957 with the opening of the
Home Office Research Unit (see Lodge 1974)—but also an academic institute,
the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, sited in a prestigious university, with
the explicit task of undertaking scientific research and training recruits for the
newly founded discipline of criminology (see Radzinowicz 1988). As the 1959
White Paper Penal Practice in a Changing Society’ announced, ‘the institute
should be able, as no existing agency is in a position to do, to survey with
academic impartiality . . . the general problem of the criminal in society, its
causes, and its solution.’ (Home Office 1959).
This new-found compatibility between traditions which had often pulled in
different directions had a number of sources. In part it was testimony to the
degree to which the scientific strand of criminological research had modified
its ambitions and adapted its terms to fit the institutional realities and policy
concerns which so heavily influenced the marketplace of criminological ideas.
In part it was attributable to the fact that research concerned to differentiate
criminals from non-criminals, and especially those who would recidivate from
those who would not, was thought to be important for the development of
1
effective sentencing decisions (especially Borstal allocations) and decisions

regarding early release. Thus, for example, the prediction research which
claimed so much attention in the late 1950s could appear to satisfy both the
needs of administration and the ends of science, in so far as these studies
sought to identify offender characteristics which were highly correlated with
subsequent offending. (In the event, the most effective prediction tables made
little use of clinical information about the offender, and actually discredited to
some extent the whole project of etiological research.) One might also suggest,
however, that this convergence between the search for useful knowledge and
the search for scientific truth was actually more apparent than real, because,
in the event, the research agenda pursued by the Cambridge Institute, at least
in the early years, was heavily influenced by immediate policy needs. Indeed,
for the most part, it was scarcely distinguishable from the in-house research of
the Home Office—a fact that did not go uncriticized at the time.
If the emergence of a criminological discipline was the coming together of
traditions of inquiry that had once been more distinct, it was also, and more
immediately, the achievement of a few key individuals, backed by an alliance
of interested organizations. These discipline-builders had to struggle with all
sorts of resistance, but their decisive advantage was that they acted in a context
in which government ministers and officials had become receptive to the idea
that policy-making could be enhanced by the availability of systematic research
and trained expertise. The shrewd political skills and institution-building
energies of Leon Radzinowicz were particularly important (not least in
persuading the Wolfson Foundation to fund the British discipline’s first chair
and provide the Cambridge Institute with the resources to become one of
the world’s leading centres of criminological work),35 as was the influential
teaching of Hermann Mannheim and the proselytizing work that he and the
other ISTD members conducted in academic and practical circles. Similarly,
the impressive body of research publications produced by these authors and
others such as Burt, Bowlby, Grunhut, Sprott, Mays, and Ferguson created a
strong case for the value of criminology as an academic subject.
The practical and educational benefits to be derived from establishing
institutes and university departments of criminology were also canvassed by a
number of influential political figures and associations. Senior government
officials such as Alexander Paterson, Sir Lionel Fox, Sir Alexander Maxwell,
and Viscount Templewood made public declarations about the need for crimi
nology; Margery Fry and George Benson MP made representations to
the Home Office to this effect; and at various times the Howard League, the
Magistrates’ Association, the British Psychological Society, the National
35 It is worth pointing out that the standard claim made by those who canvassed the British
government to support the development of criminology—namely, that the UK was trailing far
behind other countries in the pursuit of criminological research—was subsequently shown to be
quite false. Radzinowicz’s empirical survey of the state of criminology around the world suggested
that, with the establishment of the Cambridge Institute and the Home Office Research Unit,
British criminology probably enjoyed more official support than that of any other country, with
the exception of the USA. See Radzinowicz 1961.
48 David Garland
Association for Mental Health, the Royal Medico-Psychological Association,

and the United Nations European Seminar on Crime all added their weight to»
the campaign to obtain government sponsorship and university recognition!
for the subject (see Radzinowicz 1988). In the event, criminology’s most:
influential supporter was R. A. Butler, who as Home Secretary in the late:
1950s took a personal interest in the development of the subject and was.
instrumental in extending government funding for criminological research, and
in setting up the Cambridge Institute (see Butler 1974).
The government’s interest in sponsoring the creation of a viable crimino
logical enterprise was a combination of immediate penological concerns and
broader conceptions of how the policy-making process ought to be organized.
In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, a concern about
increasing rates of juvenile offending prompted the Home Office to arrange a
series of conferences and research projects in order to estimate the extent of
the problem and identify its social and psychological roots. When, in the post
war years, the high wartime rates of delinquent behaviour failed to decline, the
problem attracted extensive political and press attention and provided a
compelling rationale for the promotion of criminological research. (It is note
worthy that henceforth, juvenile delinquency was to become a central topic in
British criminology.) Similarly, the gradual development of a penal philosophy
of treatment and training’, centred upon the Borstal system and relying for its
effectiveness upon accurate assessment and classification procedures, led to a
growing demand for criminological knowledge and advice. More generally, the
wartime experience of operational research and the utilization of expertise in
the formation of strategy, together with the growing professionalization of
administration and social work in the new welfare state, gradually convinced
post-war governments of the value of research and expertise as a basis for
social policy.36 The same governmental mentality which looked to Beveridge
and Keynes to solve the social and economic problems of the nation came to
recognize criminology as a form of knowledge which should be integrated into
the institutions of government. Criminology thus became an integral part of
the process of ‘social reconstruction’, a small element in the post-war settle
ment which sought to secure stability and capitalist growth by means of
welfare provision and social democratic management (see Mannheim 1946:
Taylor 1981).
One might add that this tendency to appeal to expert, ‘scientific’ knowledge
as a source of solutions to social and personal problems was increasingly
apparent not just in government but also in the wider culture. As the prestige
of the traditional moral and religious codes continued to wane, the new figure
of the ‘popular expert’ began to appear more regularly on the radio and in the
36 For a contemporary discussion of these developments see National Association for Mental
Health 1949. Ten years later, Barbara Wootton’s review of the social sciences and their role in
policy-making was severely critical of criminology’s achievements in this respect (Wootton 1959).
For a retrospective account, see Wiles 1976.
press, teaching a mass audience how ‘modern science’ thought about age-old
problems, including crime and delinquency.37
Once set in place, the component parts of the emergent discipline proceeded
to establish the range of issues and research questions which was to charac
terize the subject. In hindsight, this research agenda is easily regarded as
narrow and consensual, reflecting broad agreement about the importance of
correctionalist aims and positivist methods and a traditional British bias
against theoretical or sociological work (see Cohen 1981; Wiles 1976).
However, there was actually a good deal of conflict and disagreement regard
ing the appropriate research agenda for the subject, and rather more diversity
in intellectual style and policy orientation than the textbook histories have
suggested. The major institutions in the newly created discipline—the
Cambridge Institute and the Home Office Research Unit-—were each, to
differing degrees, tied into a framework of government-sponsored research
which quickly assumed a distinctive pattern, although the Institute was home
to other work as well, most notably Radzinowicz’s monumental History
(1948-86), and was careful to maintain its claim to academic independence.
Neither organization concerned itself closely with the development of clinical
studies of the causes of crime or with the task of theory-building, preferring
instead to pursue knowledge which would be more readily obtained and more
immediately accessible to the policy process. As Radzinowicz argued in 1961,
‘the attempt to elucidate the causes of crime should be put aside’ in favour of
more modest, descriptive studies which indicate the kinds of factors and
circumstances with which offending is associated. Using an interdisciplinary
approach and a diversity of methods, research was to be focused upon
‘descriptive, analytical accounts of the state of crime, of the various classes
of offenders, of the enforcement of criminal law [and] of the effectiveness of
various measures of penal treatment’ (Radzinowicz 1961: 175).
This approach, well characterized by George Void (1958) as ‘administrative
criminology’, attracted harsh criticism at the time from those more attached to
criminology’s scientific and explanatory ambitions, particularly the psycho
analysts at the ISTD and the group of sociological criminologists that was
forming around Mannheim at the LSE—just as it would later be criticized
again in the 1970s, this time by a new generation of criminologists more
attracted to critical and sociological theory. But to figures such as
Radzinowicz, trying to establish a fledgling and still precarious discipline, the
concern was to produce useful knowledge and produce it quickly, rather than
risk the failure of a more ambitious programme of etiological research, a
programme which, in any case, would depend on the production of a more
accurate and wide-ranging description of criminal phenomena (Radzinowicz
1988).
This pragmatic vision of the criminological enterprise was echoed by th
37 Sec the transcripts of the BBC radio series on the causes of crime in The Listener of 1929
and 1934, especially the broadcasts by Cyril Burt on ‘The Psychology of the Bad Child’
(6 February 1929) and on ‘The Causes of Crime’ (2 May, 1934).
48 David Garland
Association for Mental Health, the Royal Medico-Psychological Association),

and the United Nations European Seminar on Crime all added their weight to
the campaign to obtain government sponsorship and university recognition
* for the subject (see Radzinowicz 1988). In the event, criminology’s most
influential supporter was R. A. Butler, who as Home Secretary in the late
1950s took a personal interest in the development of the subject and was
instrumental in extending government funding for criminological research, and
in setting up the Cambridge Institute (see Butler 1974).
The government s interest in sponsoring the creation of a viable crimino-
logical enterprise was a combination of immediate penological concerns and
broader conceptions of how the policy-making process ought to be organized-
In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, a concern about!
increasing rates of juvenile offending prompted the Home Office to arrange ai
senes of conferences and research projects in order to estimate the extent of
the problem and identify its social and psychological roots. When, in the post
war years, the high wartime rates of delinquent behaviour failed to decline, the
problem attracted extensive political and press attention and provided a
compelling rationale for the promotion of criminological research. (It is note
worthy that henceforth, juvenile delinquency was to become a central topic in
British criminology.) Similarly, the gradual development of a penal philosophy
of treatment and training’, centred upon the Borstal system and relying for its
effectiveness upon accurate assessment and classification procedures, led to a
growing demand for criminological knowledge and advice. More generally, the
wartime experience of operational research and the utilization of expertise in
the formation of strategy, together with the growing professionalization of
administration and social work in the new welfare state, gradually convinced
post-war governments of the value of research and expertise as a basis for
social policy.36 The same governmental mentality which looked to Beveridge
and Keynes to solve the social and economic problems of the nation came to
recognize criminology as a form of knowledge which should be integrated into
the institutions of government. Criminology thus became an integral part of
the process of ‘social reconstruction’, a small element in the post-war settle
ment which sought to secure stability and capitalist growth by means of
welfare provision and social democratic management (see Mannheim 1946;
- Taylor 1981).
One might add that this tendency to appeal to expert, ‘scientific’ knowledge
as a source of solutions to social and personal problems was increasingly
apparent not just in government but also in the wider culture. As the prestige
of the traditional moral and religious codes continued to wane, the new figure
of the ‘popular expert’ began to appear more regularly on the radio and in the
36 For a contemporary discussion of these developments see National Association for Mental
Health 1949. Ten years later, Barbara Woolton’s review of the social sciences and their role in
policy-making was severely critical of criminology’s achievements in this respect (Wootton 1959).
For a retrospective account, see Wiles 1976.
press, teaching a mass audience how ‘modern science’ thought about age-old
problems, including crime and delinquency.37
Once set in place, the component parts of the emergent discipline proceeded
to establish the range of issues and research questions which was to charac
terize the subject. In hindsight, this research agenda is easily regarded as
narrow and consensual, reflecting broad agreement about the importance of
correctionalist aims and positivist methods and a traditional British bias
against theoretical or sociological work (see Cohen 1981; Wiles 1976).
However, there was actually a good deal of conflict and disagreement regard
ing the appropriate research agenda for the subject, and rather more diversity
in intellectual style and policy orientation than the textbook histories have
suggested. The major institutions in the newly created discipline—the
Cambridge Institute and the Home Office Research Unit—were each, to
differing degrees, tied into a framework of government-sponsored research
which quickly assumed a distinctive pattern, although the Institute was home
to other work as well, most notably Radzinowicz’s monumental History
(1948-86), and was careful to maintain its claim to academic independence.
Neither organization concerned itself closely with the development of clinical
studies of the causes of crime or with the task of theory-building, preferring
instead to pursue knowledge which would be more readily obtained and more
immediately accessible to the policy process. As Radzinowicz argued in 1961,
‘the attempt to elucidate the causes of crime should be put aside’ in favour of
more modest, descriptive studies which indicate the kinds of factors and
circumstances with which offending is associated. Using an interdisciplinary
approach and a diversity of methods, research was to be focused upon
‘descriptive, analytical accounts of the state of crime, of the various classes
of offenders, of the enforcement of criminal law [and] of the effectiveness of
various measures of penal treatment’ (Radzinowicz 1961: 175).
This approach, well characterized by George Void (1958) as ‘administrative
criminology’, attracted harsh criticism at the time from those more attached to
criminology’s scientific and explanatory ambitions, particularly the psycho
analysts at the ISTD and the group of sociological criminologists that was
forming around Mannheim at the LSE—just as it would later be criticized
again in the 1970s, this time by a new generation of criminologists more
attracted to critical and sociological theory. But to figures such as
Radzinowicz, trying to establish a fledgling and still precarious discipline, the
concern was to produce useful knowledge and produce it quickly, rather than
risk the failure of a more ambitious programme of etiological research, a
programme which, in any case, would depend on the production of a more
accurate and wide-ranging description of criminal phenomena (Radzinowicz
1988).
This pragmatic vision of the criminological enterprise was echoed by the
37 See the transcripts of the BBC radio series on the causes of crime in The Listener of 1929
and 1934, especially the broadcasts by Cyril Burt on ‘The Psychology of the Bad Child’
(6 February 1929) and on ‘The Causes of Crime’ (2 May, 1934).
50 David Garland
1959 White Paper, which argued that etiological research ‘is confronted with
problems which are immense both in range and complexity’, that ‘there are no
easy answers to these problems and progress is bound to be slow’, and that
consequently emphasis should be placed instead upon ‘research into the use of
various forms of treatment and the measurement of their results, since this is
concerned with matters that can be analysed more precisely’ (Home Office
1959: 5). The Home Office Research Unit began its work squarely within this
newly constructed framework of science-for-government, using the method
ologies of social science to measure and improve the effectiveness of penal
treatments and trying to harness the concepts and classifications of academic
criminology to the work of administering criminal justice institutions. Nor was
it surprising that the paradigmatic study which shaped much of the unit’s
research in the first decade of its existence should be a prediction study—
precisely the kind of work that formed a junction point between criminology’s
scientific and governmental concerns—and one, moreover, that focused on
the Borstal, the British institution which more than any other embodied the
correctionalist ideals of a scientific penology. The distinctive mixture of
advanced statistical technique, correctively orientated classificatory concerns,
and obvious policy relevance which characterized Mannheim and Wilkins’
Prediction Methods in Relation to Borstal Training (1955) came to be the
hallmark of the Research Unit’s work throughout the 1950s and 1960s (see
Clarke and Cornish 1983).
EPILOGUE
By the 1960s, then, one could say with confidence that a discipline of crim
inology had come into existence in Great Britain. Centred on the core insti
tutions at Cambridge and London, but increasingly building a significant
presence in universities and colleges throughout the country, the subject was
well placed to benefit from the rapid expansion of higher education which
occurred during this decade, and in the space of a few years criminology took
on, rather suddenly, the character of a well-established discipline (see Rock
1988b). Indeed, such was the success of the new discipline in becoming a part
of the academic scheme of things that many of its younger members seemed
not to be aware of just how recently the battle for recognition had been won.
Thus, in the critical writings which emerged in the late 1960s and 70s, in which
a new generation of criminologists mounted a radical assault on all that had
gone before, one gets the sense that what is being attacked is a very powerful
criminological establishment, rather than a parvenu and somewhat precarious
subject still in the process of constituting itself.38
38 For examples of the radically self-critical criminology of this period, sec Cohen 1971; Taylor
and Taylor 1973; Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973; Taylor et al. (1975). In the context of these
polemics—through which contemporary readers too often interpret the past—it is easy to forget
Gaining a secure place in the institutions of higher education had a major

and unanticipated impact upon the discipline, so that no sooner had it become
‘established’ than it began to transform itself in significant ways. Many of the
developments of the 1960s and 1970s—particularly the reassertion of theor
etical ambition, the emergence of a strongly critical discourse, and a wide
spread dissatisfaction with criminology’s relationship to correctionalist
policies—are explicable in terms of a discipline adjusting to its new situation,
pulled between the demands of policy relevance and the aspiration for aca
demic credibility. Thus the discipline became not only more diversified, more
specialized, more professional, and more self-critical in these years, it also
became bitterly divided between those who sought to pursue the ‘traditional’
criminological agenda (in either its etiological or its administrative variant)
and those associated with the National Deviancy Conference, founded at York
in 1968, who were deeply critical of the medico-psychological assumptions,
social democratic politics, and atheoretical pragmatism of what they termed
‘positivist criminology’ (see Cohen 1981; Wiles 1976; Young, this volume).
In those years, during which university funding seemed more secure than it
would subsequently, and academic criminology momentarily enjoyed a degree
of autonomy from government greater than at any time before or since, one
of the repeated refrains of theoretical writing was that criminology had no
epistemological warrant and that analytical considerations demanded that
the discipline be dissolved into the broader concerns of sociology or social
psychology. That such claims could be made, and made so forcefully, was
a stark reminder of just how contingent was criminology’s existence as a
scientific subject. That they altogether failed to disturb the discipline and its
continued expansion (see Rock, this volume) is perhaps a measure of the social
and institutional forces which have come to underwrite the existence of British
criminology.
Selected Further Reading
The history of criminology is probably too fissiparous and fragmented to be

captured in a single text, however compendious, but two recent collections—
The Origins and Growth of Criminology, edited by Piers Beirne (Dartmouth:
Aidershot, 1994) and The History of Criminology, edited by Paul Rock
(Dartmouth: Aidershot, 1994)—do a good job of suggesting the main lines of
descent and development. Other worthwhile collections include Paul Rock
(ed.) A History of British Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
which features essays on the formation and contemporary character of the dis
cipline; and the still useful Pioneers in Criminology, edited by H. Mannheim
(London: Stevens, 1960) which, together with solid essays on the likes of
that criminological writings had never been wholly uncritical of official practices. Most British
criminological work has been framed by an ameliorist, social democratic politics, often sharply
critical of state policies. Opposition to the death penalty was, for instance, a central concern for
many criminologists in the period up to the 1960s. On the complex relationship of criminological
knowledge to state power, see Garland 1992.
I
52 David Garland
Bentham. Lombroso, Durkheim, and Bonger, features essays on more peripheral

figures such as Alexander Maconochie, Hans Gross, and Henry Maudsley.
Piers Bierne’s Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of Homo Criminalis
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) rescues Beccaria, Quetelet,
Guerry, Tarde, and Goring from the condescension of textbook caricatures
and explores each author’s ‘criminological’ work in the context of their other
writings and concerns. Despite decades of revisionist work of this kind, Leon
I Radzinowicz’s essay Ideology and Crime: A Study of Crime and its Social and
Historical Context (London: Heinemann, 1966) remains an illuminating intro
duction to the subject for undergraduates, and of course Radzinowicz’s
History of the English Criminal Law and its Administration in five volumes
(vols. 1-4, London: Stevens; vol. 5, co-authored with Roger Hood, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986) is an indispensable source for anyone doing
■
serious research in this field.
A number of studies follow the lead of Michel Foucault’s classic work
Discipline and Punish (London: Allen Lane, 1977) in analysing criminology as
an apparatus of power/knowledge, linked into disciplinary and governmental
institutions. Pasquale Pasquino’s essay ‘The Invention of Criminology: Birth
of a Special Savior’ (in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds.) The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1991), and my article ‘The Criminal and his Science’ (British Journal of
Criminology, 25, (1985): 109-37), focus upon the emergence of the criminal
delinquent as a new object of science and administration in nineteenth-century
Europe, while my book Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies
(Aidershot: Gower, 1985) shows how a developing criminological discourse
spiralled in and out of the penal-welfare institutions that emerged in Britain at
the start of the 20th century. The Foucauldian account of criminology’s his
tory and its relation to power is reconsidered in my later article ‘Criminological
Knowledge and its Relation to Power: Foucault’s Genealogy and Criminology
Today’ (British Journal of Criminology, 32/4, (1992): 403-22) which argues for
a more differentiated account of power, of criminology, and of the various
ways in which they relate to one another.
There are several useful accounts of the institutional history of criminology
in Britain, often written by insiders who played a key part in the development
of the subject. Radzinowicz’s memoir The Cambridge Institute of Criminology:
Its Background and Scope (London: HMSO, 1988) is a well-documented
account of a formative moment in the academic discipline, as is the review of
Home Office research, Crime Control in Britain: A Review of Policy Research,
edited by R. V. G. Clarke and Derek B. Cornish (Albany: State University of
New York, 1983). Stanley Cohen, himself an important ‘insider’ in a different
strand of British criminology, offers a sociological analysis of post-war devel
opments in ‘Footprints on the Sand: A Further Report on Criminology and
the Sociology of Deviance in Britain’, in M. Fitzgerald, G. McLennan, and
J. Pawson (eds.) Crime and Society: Readings in History and Theory (London:
Routledge, 1981) and reflects upon the institutional and intellectual tensions
that structured the field in the 1960s and 1970s. The Sociology of Deviance: An
Obituary by Colin Sumner (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994) is an
extended essay on the history of‘the sociology of deviance’, a form of analysis
that bears an oblique and often critical relationship to criminology.
Finally, there are several works of social and intellectual history which, in
their own way and for their own purposes, explore particular aspects of crim
inology’s past. The most important of these are Daniel Pick’s Faces of
Degeneration: A European Disorder, C.1848-C.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), which situates Lombroso’s work in the context of a
history of the language of ‘degeneration’; Robert Nye’s Crime, Madness and
Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), which develops a social history
of the medical concept of deviance that played such a large role in the emer
gence of a scientific criminology; and Martin Wiener’s Reconstructing the
Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), which traces the relationship between
criminology, criminal policy, and broader cultural change.
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What are the two projects that the author argues criminology grew out of?

What are the two projects that the author argues criminology grew out of?

What is the author's broad historical argument about the development of modern criminology?

What is the author's broad historical argument about the development of modern criminology?

1

Of Crimes and Criminals: The

INTRODUCTION: THE CONTINGENCY OF THE

This essay presents an interpretation of the historical development of crim­

of the convergence of two quite separate enterprises—‘the governmental

extensively modified before it could be of service to policy-makers and state

misrepresents the character of these writings and forcibly assimilates them to

The Object of Inquiry

misrepresents the character of these writings and forcibly assimilates them to

The Object of Inquiry

ORIENTATIONS: A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT

I begin with the clear assumption that the phenomenon to be explained is a

theoretical and empirical knowledge, supervises the training of students, and

On scientific disciplines and their development, see Lemaine et al. 1976.

front the exertions of its discipline-forming institutions. The danger of an

This order of exposition implies a certain developmental pattern, and to

TRADITIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF CRIME

ii sx'iw more appropriate to accept that there are a variety of ways

ment, was driven to despair by poverty or simply driven to crime by avarice

THE SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS OF CRIME IN THE EIGHTEENTH

In most criminological histories, the true beginnings of modern criminological

Radzinowicz's monumental History (1948) begins in 1750, as does his historical

ized administrative state, a national economy and a population inceasingly

and to match up crime rates with other social indices—just as A. M. Guerry

human skull as an external index of character.21 By the 1830s physiognomy

appeared within the discipline of criminology, there would be other stories to

THE EMERGENCE OF A POSITIVE SCIENCE OF

From Criminal Anthropology to the Science of Criminology

interested officials in virtually every European and American state. At the

science of the discovery of the causes of crime—the science of criminology’.25

The Development of Criminology in Britain

But to describe Maudsley and Thomson as criminologists before the fact

Commissioner of Prisons, gave clear expression to the difference between the

given at Birmingham by Maurice Hamblin Smith in 1921—were directed at

criminological research, and it is significant that when a criminological centre

but by no means universal, association between criminality and two heritable

If East’s work exemplified the mainstream British tradition of medico­

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A CRIMINOLOGICAL DISCIPLINE

The transformation of British criminology from a minor scientific specialism—

Scientific Group for the Discussion of Delinquency Problems, which acted as

effective sentencing decisions (especially Borstal allocations) and decisions

Association for Mental Health, the Royal Medico-Psychological Association,

Association for Mental Health, the Royal Medico-Psychological Association),

Gaining a secure place in the institutions of higher education had a major

Selected Further Reading

The history of criminology is probably too fissiparous and fragmented to be

Bentham. Lombroso, Durkheim, and Bonger, features essays on more peripheral

Aichhorn, A. (1951), Wayward Youth. London: Institute of Criminology at Cambridge’, in

Ignatieff, M. (1978), A Just Measure of Pain: Maudsley, H. (1863), ‘Review of A Prison

Radzinowicz, L. (1961). In Search of Smith, R. (1988). ‘Does the History of

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This essay presents an interpretation of the historical development of crim

If East’s work exemplified the mainstream British tradition of medico