Courtney E. Thompson, An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211063876 |
| Author | Chase Burton |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
and it is high time criminology and criminal justice acknowledge what they want to see at the
centre of youth justice. Youth Justice and Penality in Comparative Context will surely inspire
criminologists to embark on such comparative, theoretical, and methodological journeys.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research
Council (grant number ES/V011766/1).
ORCID iD
Jasmina Arnez https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8887-1668
References
Baldry E, , Briggs D, and Goldson B, et al. (2018) Cruel and unusual punishment: An inter-
jurisdictional study of the criminalisation of young people with complex support needs.
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Fisher M (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative?. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
McAra L and and McVie S (2005) The usual suspects?: Street-life, young people and the
police. Criminal Justice 5(1): 5–36.
Jasmina Arnez
Keele University
Courtney E. Thompson, An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and
Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America. Rutgers University Press: New
Brunswick, 2021; 278 pp. ISBN 9781978813083, $28.95
Courtney Thompson’sAn Organ of Murder joins the body of research that prompts us to
think seriously about phrenology. Contra the easy temptation to dismiss phrenology as a
quackish pseudoscientific fad, historians has shown that it constituted a serious and
respectable attempt at progressive and reform-minded explanation of human behavior.
Phrenology, uncomfortably, is a forerunner of significant portions of the contemporary
human sciences. However, its precise relationship to the history of criminology has
remained obscured. Does phrenology’s status as one of the first systematic and putatively
scientific frameworks for explaining crime mean that criminology is in some way
indebted to or influenced by it? Or did criminologists successfully rationalize away
these outdated beliefs about skulls and disordered mental organs.
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