The genesis of the episteme of crime: notes around Beccaria, Ferri and Foucault

Abstract

The fundamental principles of the classical utilitarian school (free will, the proportion between offences and penalties, the uniformity of penalties) characterize this trend as an administrative and legal criminology. This had two implications. On the one hand, the motives, and ultimate causes of the behavior and the unequal consequences of an arbitrary rule were ignored. On the other hand, the role of the judge was reduced to enforcing the law, while it was up to the judge to set a penalty for each offence. At the end of the nineteenth century, these principles saw the gradual emergence of another punitive episteme that had emerged as a result of the colonization of the legal space by the positive sciences (medical and social) and etiological action programs. This was not a planned and pre-established course, but the confluence of a series of theories and programs for penal prevention that Michel Foucault summarized as the realization that the law was increasingly functioning as a norm. Now, criminality, besides being the object of scientific interest, also constitutes the indicator of a social problem and therefore its insertion in an economy of changing power.