Impurity of Blood by Joshua Goode

Author:Joshua Goode [Goode, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2009-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Crime as a Product of National Evolution: Criminal Anthropology between 1885 and 1895

A supporter of criminal anthropology entered the Spanish government in 1885 with the appointment of Manuel Alonso Martínez, a lawyer, to be minister of grace and justice. As a minister, Alonso Martínez worked to modernize the Spanish penal code by expanding the uses of science in the jurisprudence and penology of Spain. In 1886, he introduced to the Cortes a series of amendments to the penal code that allowed for greater discretion for magistrates and judges in sentencing criminals. The reforms called for expanding the list of extenuating circumstances to be taken into account for sentencing. Judges, for example, needed to accept that the causes of crime were natural and to allow for treatment of criminals in hospitals or asylums rather than placing them into prisons.59 Interestingly, the debates in the Cortes focused more on the implicit reduction of the power of lawyers in these reforms by allowing for greater sway of medical testimony and doctors over the court system. Opponents tended not to concern themselves with the scientific ideas that underlay the reforms.60

Although the amendments failed to pass, the effort of the minister emboldened Spanish criminologists to argue more publicly for the penal reform. In the same issue of the newspaper that announced these reforms, an official in the Ministry of Grace and Justice working specifically in the Section on Prisons and Asylums (Dirección General de Establecimientos Penales) decried the piecemeal nature of the 1883 penal reforms and the present efforts of the minister.61 The official, Rafael Salillas y Panzano, argued that debates about the power of lawyers over doctors were more political bluster than conscientious efforts at actual reform. Such debate denied the public a more complete hearing of the recent developments in criminal anthropology and legal medicine. Instead, the public was fed generous portions of confusing, fear-inducing scientific discussion of the incorrigibility of born criminals and the “insane who did not appear to be.”62

Attention should be paid instead, Salillas argued, to “recent scientific discoveries” that pointed to differences between the “insane” who represent the “degenerative path” of evolution, symbolized by Lombroso’s born criminal, and those who were curable.63 Salillas wrote that too many scientists were misreading foreign ideas, leaving the impression that criminals were not treatable, and that the threats they posed to society were endemic. He suggested instead that “mental medicine and criminal anthropology were doing quite the opposite, . . . reducing considerably the limits of our definition of evil, metaphysically speaking.64 Salillas’s article had greater salience because, unlike his predecessors, Salillas had trained both as a lawyer and as a doctor. As a result, he came to be an important voice in the formal development of criminal anthropology in Spain. His interest in criminal anthropology began precisely during the 1886 penal code reform debates.65 Though he has remained associated with the introduction of Lombrosian ideas in Spain, Salillas himself, as he expressed in this article, attempted to bridge a variety of approaches in the application of criminal anthropology in Spanish society.

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