History of Criminology

Thorsten Sellin’s definition of crime

• Behavior that violates conduct norms or socially acceptable rules of behavior

• Focuses on morals and not what’s legal

The Mayflower Compact

• Pilgrims arrived in 1620 to depopulated coastal villages (Indigenous people died of disease from other travelers)

• Purpose: Set ground rules, relying mostly on majority rule

• Formally chartered an English colony in 1630

  • Self-governance

The Salem Witch Trials

• 1692-1693

• Scale of the event

  • Quickly picked up steam and quickly died out

  • 160 accused and 25 died

  • Represent just over one year of the witch-hunting craze

• Accusations

  • Focused on women because of: dead babies, food scarcity, widows (who gained their husbands’ property and wealth), and enslaved indigenous influence on children

• Interrogations

• Trials

  • People who confessed were seen as purifying themselves and the community

The Malleus Maleficarum

• History of the text

  • “Hammer of Witches” was published in 1486

  • Was enabled and encouraged by the Catholic Church

  • Before the Salem Witch Trials → witch-hunting started in Europe

• Purpose and Impact

  • Encouraged the witch-hunting craze by giving “evidence” of witches

Tituba and Rebecca Nurse

• Tituba

  • Claimed the devil came to her and told her that she needed to serve him

  • Told the examiners that she saw 2 other women hurting children

  • She apologized and confessed but put the blame on the devil

  • Was seen as a better response

• Rebecca Nurse

  • Maintained her innocence and mentioned God

  • She said that she had no control over what the devil did

  • Was seen as lying and was hanged for it

“Devil Marks”

• Visible impairments or indications that a person was not blessed by God

• Stemmed from early protestant beliefs about the visibility of God’s “saved” or “chosen” people

• Affected people with visible disabilities

• Were targeted in the 16th and 17th century as people who may be possessed

17th Century Logics

• Possession

  • Wrongdoing stems from a supernatural place, either through someone’s active rejection of God, pursuit of the satanic, or their unagential “possession” by the devil

    • People could either seek out the devil or the devil sought them out

  • Justified odd/deviant behavior

• Scapegoating

  • Got you out of trouble

  • When on trial, one person would blame either someone or the devil for possessing them, and they would be freed for confessing and purifying themselves

• Public Shaming

  • Was seen to be “corrective” and also used for entertainment

  • Public humiliation, public abuse, and even public killings

  • Everyone in the community played a part in public punishment

• Spectral Evidence

  • The common belief that, when a person had made a covenant with the devil, he was given permission to assume that person’s appearance in spectral form in order to recruit others and to otherwise carry out nefarious deeds

  • It was believed that if you opened yourself to the devil, the devil could use you as a puppet

Jeremy Bentham

• Panopticon Designer

• Prison reformer

• Enlightenment Beliefs

The Panopticon

• A move away from public punishment and towards private incarceration

• Impact: jails transition from a holding place to a correctional place

  • First idea of “serving time”

• Design: central watchtower, but prisoners don’t know if they’re being watched

  • Solitary confinement → prison without bars on the cells (self-policing)

Enlightenment Ideals

• Rationalism

  • Citizens act from free and logical will

• Independence

• Correctional/Penitential Incarceration reform

• Utilitarian Calculus

• How they influence 18th century criminology:

  • Transition from deviance as “possession” to deviance as a rational, punishable choice

    • Still heavily Christian, but good choices are seen as godly

  • Early nation building = deviance codified in law

    • Becomes permanent in places like the judicial system

Prison Reform Efforts

• 18th century

• Goals: to “correct” and rehabilitate inmates

• Pennsylvania System vs. NY

  • Pennsylvania: solitary

  • NY: silent

Eastern State Penitentiary

• Significance: America's first true penitentiary using solitary confinement and reform

• Influences in design: Jeremy Bentham and the Panopticon

18th Century Logics

• Rationalism

  • Citizens act from free and logical will

• Utilitarian Calculus

  • Citizens orient to deviant behavior by weighing possible risks against possible rewards

  • How many days in jail = punishment for specific crimes

• Correctional/Penitential Incarceration

  • The possibility of incarceration as a punishment (not a holding place) can deter crime

Virginia Slave Codes of 1705

• Transitioned “servants” to “slaves” based on origin from “Non-Christian Lands”

• Said that people from “Christian Lands” (Europeans) were not legally allowed to be enslaved

• Christian adult indentured servants would serve until 24

• Servants bought from “Non-Christian Lands” could be bought and sold as slaves

• Conversion to Christianity would not grant freedom

• Free Africans, Natives, Jews, and Muslims could not own slaves

• Any child of a white woman/black or mixed man relationship would serve until 31

• Established rewards for “slave catching”

• Impact: Started slavery based on race

The Stono Rebellion (Cato’s Rebellion)

• Cato and 12 men stole guns and ammunition while enslavers were at church (with their weapons) and raided the church → became an armed conflict

• Impact: Caused paranoia in white people

• Influences: The Spanish started a rumor that if any slave could come to Florida and claim that they were Catholic, they’d be freed

  • Jemmy Cato and his people were likely from Angola and spoke Spanish

• Backlash: Criminalization of literacy and fugitivity

The 1739 Security Act

• Mandated that white men bring firearms to church

• Sunday was the day that the slaves gathered and formed a plan while everyone was at church, and whites knew this and wanted to be armed if anything were to happen

• Prior to the Stono Rebellion

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793

• Post-Revolution

• Created from Somerset v. Stewart

  • Ruling: Enslavers could capture any person who had run away → no need for a trial by jury, only oral testimony

  • Anyone

• How it was different from Virginia Slave Codes: The Fugitive Slave Act was a federal law governing interstate recapture of escaped slaves, whereas the Virginia Slave Codes were local colonial and state laws regulating the daily control, rights, and restrictions of enslaved people within Virginia

19th Century Logics

• Phrenology

  • Pseudoscience of attaching moral traits to physical features

  • Used to identify people of bad character

  • Some faces or bodies were considered bad or even animalistic

  • Different moral traits live in different areas of the body

  • Interested in whether a person was going to be violent

• Atavism

  • The belief that some individuals and groups are more evolutionarily “primitive” than others, based on phrenological traits

  • Scientific racism

  • Justified that Anglican people were more civilized evolutionarily and less animalistic

• Eugenics

  • The targeted, systematic sterilization of a group deemed unfit for parenting or physiologically inferior

  • Forced/controlled breeding out of undesirable traits or systemic/forced sterilization of people who have undesirable traits

“Empirical” Ideals that influenced 19th-Century Criminology

• Older influences from the Scientific Revolution

  • Shifting the focus of justice from the spiritual nature of the sin to the physical nature of the criminal

• Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)

  • Cranioscopy is influenced by this (the measurement and shaping of the skull)

  • Ties into evolutionary advantage

Drapetomania

• Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 pseudoscience “diagnosis” characterizing slave fugitivity as a mental illness

• Cartwright cites biblical texts as justification for racial superiority and suggests violence to “cure” the disease

• Use & Abuse as “diagnostic”

PT Barnum’s Museums

• Pop culture obsession with “abnormal” bodies and “oddity” spectacles

• Abuses of “freak show” industry

Franz Anton Mesmer

• Role in shaping “animal magnetism” and “mesmerism”

• Accidentally kind of invents hypnosis (a precursor to it)

Mesmer’s “Baquets” and Hypnosis Performances

• A wooden treatment tub filled with magnetized water and iron filings, designed to channel "animal magnetism" during dramatic group therapy performances

• Wealthy people went to his baquets

Animal Magnetism/Mesmerism

• Manipulates the electricity of the body to soothe a person

• Attempts to debunk: Alarmed by Mesmer's massive popularity and theatrical séances in Paris, King Louis XVI appointed a scientific task force to investigate his claims. The committee, known as the Franklin Commission, was chaired by Benjamin Franklin and ran placebo-controlled blind trials

• Influence on medicine and entertainment: Toward modern hypnotism and the placebo effect

James Braid

• Father of hypnosis

• Scottish surgeon who was involved in mesmerism

  • Studied Mesmer’s writing, ultimately bringing Mesmer’s influence to an end by producing a theory of hypnotism

• Ideas less about the body and more about the mind

• Focuses on the simplicity of hypnosis

  • Early ideas of unconsciousness and dreams

• Didn’t know if hypnosis would be entertainment or medical treatment

• Neurypnology (Ratiinale of Nervous Sleep) - 1843

  • People are prime for suggestions and hypnosis during sleep

Paul Briquet’s re-popularization of Hysteria

• Study of 430 patients with hysteria, determining roots in the mind (not the uterus)

  • Before our understanding of the nervous system and the unconscious mind

• Attributes that they focused on: youth, female sex, “affective” and “impressionable” temperament, family history of the disorder, low social class, migration, sexual licentiousness, situational difficulties, and poor physical health

  • Doubles down on how it only affects women

Philippe Pinel

• “Memoir on Madness”

• “Moral therapy”

• Prison reform

• The idea of a psychotic break and the insanity plea emerges

Cesare Lombroso

• Grandfather of Criminology

• Racist

• Wanted to see if they could predict whether someone was a deviant before they did anything deviant

• Influenced by phrenology and atavism

• L’homme Criminel (The Criminal Man)

  • Criminals are born, not made

  • Motivated people to incarcerate others based on their physical features and not their actions

Timeline/Dates to Know

• 1480s

  • Publication of the Malleus Maleficarum

• 1630s

  • First Trial jury in the American Colonies

• 1690s

  • First Newspaper distribution in Boston

  • First Witch Trial in Salem

• 1700s

  • Witch Trials deemed unlawful

  • Virginia Slave Code

• 1730s

  • Cato’s Rebellion

• 1770s

  • Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery

  • American Revolution

  • Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal

• 1780s

  • Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism (France)

• 1790s

  • Panopticon Designed

  • Fugitive Slave Acts

• 1800s

  • Laws Banning the African Slave Trade

• 1830s

  • Opening of Eastern State Penitentiary

  • James Cowles Prichard’s “Moral Insanity”

• 1840s

  • PT Barnum opens his Exhibits

  • People v. William Freeman

• 1850s

  • Drapetomania “diagnosis” invented

  • Briquet repopularized Hysteria

• 1860s

  • Civil War Begins

  • Abolition of Slavery - 13th Amendment

• 1870s

  • Jim Crow Laws

  • Criminal Man (Cesare Lombroso)

• 1890s

  • Plessy v. Ferguson