18 - Criminology in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Summary

the emergence of german criminology as a recognized scientific field in the late nineteenth century

Modern German criminology originated from a conjunction of two developments: the formation, in the 1880s, of the so-called modern school of criminal law under the leadership of Franz von Liszt, and the influence of Cesare Lombroso's famous work on the “born criminal.”

Liszt and his fellow legal reformers argued that the purpose of punishment did not lie in retribution or general deterrence but in preventing each individual criminal from offending again in the future. To achieve this purpose, they proposed that an offender's punishment should no longer depend on the offense committed, but on the individual's future dangerousness. Having decided that punishments ought to be individualized in form and preventive in function, the penal reformers became interested in the person of the criminal and in the causes of criminal behavior, that is, in criminological research, which they hoped would provide answers to two questions. First, how could one assess an offender's dangerousness and corrigibility? And second, which kind of treatment would be most effective in preventing a particular criminal from offending again? Although the practical questions that motivated the reformers' interest in criminology revolved around the personality of the criminal, the reformers did not assume that the criminal's personality was a more important cause of crime than the social environment.