Book contents
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION
- PART ONE HOSPITALS AND ASYLUMS
- PART TWO PRISONS
- 9 Michel Foucault's Impact on the German Historiography of Criminal Justice, Social Discipline, and Medicalization
- 10 The History of Ideas and Its Significance for the Prison System
- 11 The Prerogatives of Confinement in Germany, 1933-1945
- 12 “Comparing Apples and Oranges?” The History of Early Prisons in Germany and the United States, 1800-1860
- 13 Reformers United: The American and the German Juvenile Court, 1882-1923
- 14 The Medicalization of Criminal Law Reform in Imperial Germany
- 15 Prison Reform in France and Other European Countries in the Nineteenth Century
- 16 Surveillance and Redemption: The Casa di Correzione of San Michele a Ripa in Rome
- 17 “Policing the Bachelor Subculture”: The Demographics of Summary Misdemeanants, Allegheny County Jail, 1892-1923
- 18 Beyond Confinement?: Notes on the History and Possible Future of Solitary Confinement in Germany
- Index
14 - The Medicalization of Criminal Law Reform in Imperial Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION
- PART ONE HOSPITALS AND ASYLUMS
- PART TWO PRISONS
- 9 Michel Foucault's Impact on the German Historiography of Criminal Justice, Social Discipline, and Medicalization
- 10 The History of Ideas and Its Significance for the Prison System
- 11 The Prerogatives of Confinement in Germany, 1933-1945
- 12 “Comparing Apples and Oranges?” The History of Early Prisons in Germany and the United States, 1800-1860
- 13 Reformers United: The American and the German Juvenile Court, 1882-1923
- 14 The Medicalization of Criminal Law Reform in Imperial Germany
- 15 Prison Reform in France and Other European Countries in the Nineteenth Century
- 16 Surveillance and Redemption: The Casa di Correzione of San Michele a Ripa in Rome
- 17 “Policing the Bachelor Subculture”: The Demographics of Summary Misdemeanants, Allegheny County Jail, 1892-1923
- 18 Beyond Confinement?: Notes on the History and Possible Future of Solitary Confinement in Germany
- Index
Summary
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Institutions of ConfinementHospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500–1950, pp. 275 - 284Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997