This chapter examines the emergence of a medical approach to the crime problem among German legal reformers between 1880 and 1914, and seeks to explain why the medical rather than the sociological approach came to exert such extraordinary influence on their reform proposals. It begins by outlining the reform proposals of a new generation of criminal law reformers who argued that the primary purpose of criminal justice should consist not in retribution but in the protection of society. After showing that the reformers' focus on prevention sparked a new interest in the causes of crime, the chapter goes on to examine the origins of German criminal anthropology, its theory of degeneration, and the ensuing medicalization of the criminal law reform movement.

In the early 1880s Franz von Liszt, a young professor of criminal law, initiated a legal reform movement that challenged all the major strands of nineteenth-century penal philosophy and practice. Pointing to the rising proportion of repeat offenders as evidence that the existing criminal justice system was ineffective, Liszt insisted that the purpose of punishment should lie not in satisfying the moral ideal of retributive justice but in protecting society against crime. Punishment, in short, was to serve not a moral but a social purpose. This same point had been made by late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century reformers such as Cesare Beccaria and Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach, but Liszt disagreed with them over how the goal of protecting society should be achieved.