Book Review: Inventing Criminology
| Author | John Pratt |
| Published date | 01 June 1995 |
| Date | 01 June 1995 |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486589502800207 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book
Reviews
Inventing Criminology, Piers Beirne, State University of New York Press
(1993), 274 pp, paperback $18.94, hardback $57.50.
This is an erudite, well written and interesting book, if a little frustrating and
puzzling at times. The author sets out to chart the intellectual history of
criminology, in such a way that the book occupies something of a middle
ground between the usual poles of criminological history: ie histories of 'great
men' on the one hand, as in Mannheim's Pioneers in Criminology and on the
other, the more recent post structuralist accounts of the conditions of existence
of the discipline itself - most notably, Foucault's Discipline and Punish.
As such, Beirne takes us through the work of some familiar (Beccaria,
Quetelet), less familiar (Goring), and comparatively little known (Guerry,
Tarde) 'founding fathers' of criminology. In this way, an easily digestible and
comprehensible account of its intellectual origins is provided here; an account
which immediately demonstrates how deeply political the study of crime has
always been. Remarkable though it may seem, the book which started it all off,
Beccaria's Dei De/itti e Delle Pene (1764) was on the papal Index
Prohibitorum for almost 200 years. This is one of the many antiquarian gems
to be found in this book. My own favourite was the reference to (the hitherto
unheard of?) Thomas Plint's Crime in England: 'perhaps the best and most
certainly the most polemical work to come out of [the social cartography]
school at mid [19th] century': p 132.
More analytically, the discussion of Quetelet reveals how the initial
production of the criminal statistics was infused with a political imperative -
the control of the 'dangerous classes'; and from this time, the information so
produced was inextricably linked to the art of government. The way in which
the distribution of crime was also problematised is to be found in the chapter
on Guerry, as was the uncertain relationship between crime, education,
poverty and wealth - matters for criminologists today.
Some readers might find the absence of a chapter on Lombroso (who, of all
the 'founding fathers' must feature most prominently on Introduction to
Criminology courses) rather strange. However, his L'Uomo Delinquente
receives appropriate critical analysis in the chapters on Tarde and Goring. As
such Beirne shows how the impact and deterministic overtones ofthe work of
criminology's most famous Italian Count were mediated through the work
of
these two writers. In France, Tarde, worried about the threat to the concept of
criminal responsibility that this implied, designed a neo-classical system
of
punishment as a response. In England, Goring, refuting some but not all
of
Lombroso's initial claims, cemented the link between criminology and
eugenics.
If the style of the book helps to make it interesting and readable, I think it
also leads to one or two shortcomings. The most notable, perhaps is the
author's claim that Beccaria was not simply interested in relating punishment
to crime, but also considered 'the causes of crime': p 46-7. This little known
information really needs more expansion, rather than left as a bald statement
at the end of the chapter and from there, there should surely have been some
discussion of what it was about European society in the late 18th and early
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