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Michele Pifferi, Reinventing Punishment: A Comparative History of Criminology and Penology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 320. $105.00 cloth (ISBN 9780198743217).
The history of criminology has been a subject of fascination, and often revulsion, for many years. The development of biological theories from Lombroso into the age of Buck v. Bell and Nazism has captured the attention of a long list of fine scholars. So has the rise and spread of what David Garland dubbed “penal modernism,” which rejected classic liberal theories of punishment in favor of the practice of individualization. Individualization, pioneered by American Zebulon Brockway at Elmira and touted by leading European figures including Franz von Liszt and Raymond Saleilles, was a movement that sometimes promoted the humane aim of rehabilitationism. At other times, however, it pressed for more sinister measures such as preventive detention of dangerous offenders, in the name of “social defense.”
It is a commonplace among scholars that these criminological and penological movements were international in character. That is not to say that there were no divergences. Individualization, in particular, took divergent institutional forms on either side of the Atlantic. In the United States, it involved relatively open-ended “indeterminate sentencing,” which left room both for rehabilitationism and for preventive detention. Offenders were turned over to the administrative apparatus of a “correctional”...