Crimetheory.com’s Full-text Archive Project aims to provide a convenient, centralized location for the collection and dissemination of early criminological and penological texts written or translated into English. Our emphasis is on providing texts that can be usefully integrated into classroom use and that are often difficult for students and educators to gain access to. In addition to our resident version of Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments, we have chosen to inaugurate the project two essays by America’s first professional penologist, Zebulon Reed Brockway. These texts, chosen both to illustrate positivism, the birth of the reformatory movement in the United States, and the development of the idea of the incurable or "born criminal" in Brockway's thought, are usefully studied in conjunction with Nicole Hahn Rafter’s study Creating Born Criminals, particularly chapter five on Brockway's Elmira Reformatory. Buck versus Bell—the 1927 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court deeming sterilization of the epileptic and "feebleminded" as not only Constitutional, but desirable—has also been included among our initial texts.
1. Beccaria, Cesare.
On Crimes and Punishments
1764
2. Brockway, Zebulon Reed.
"The Ideal of a True Prison System for a State"
1877
3. Brockway, Zebulon Reed.
"Prevention of Crime"
1901
4. Buck v. Bell, Superintendent,
U.S. Supreme Court
1927
In the coming months, we plan to prioritize the following texts:
1. European influences on early twentieth-century American criminologists and penologists. This includes, of course, works by Cesare Lomboso, as well as Enrico Ferri's lectures on The Positivist School. Ferri's lectures, themselves designed for students, are perhaps the best introduction to positivism's philosophical foundations and its social and legal implications.
2. Special attention will be given to texts that influenced thinkers of the Chicago School of Sociology. These include works by Georg Simmel on conflict, selections of theorists from Park and Burgess' primer of sociology (the so-called "Green Bible"), and contemporaneous writings, such as G. H. Mead's "The Psychology of Punitive Justice" and Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House.
3. In conjunction with our World Prison Project... John Howard's State of the Prisons, and Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville's On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France.
If you wish to become involved or suggest works for inclusion, please contact Bruce Hoffman, project coordinator.