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17 GLOSSAE: Eur. J. Legal Hist. 120 (2020)
About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual' in Turn-of-the-Century Penal Reform: Debates on Recidivism, Etat Dangereux, Indeterminate Sentencing, and Civil Liberty in the International Union of Penal Law, 1889-1914

handle is hein.journals/glosse17 and id is 120 raw text is: About the concept of the 'dangerous individual' in turn-of-the-century penal reform: Debates on recidivism, itat dangereux, indeterminate sentencing, and civil liberty in the International Union of Penal Law, 1889-1914 Richard F. Wetzell German Historical Institute Washington Received: 28.4.2020 Accepted: 25.7.2020 Abstract Alluding to Michel Foucault's famous article on the concept of the 'dangerous individual' in 19th-century legal psychiatry in the title,1 this article provides an overview of the founding of the International Union of Penal Law (IUPL), its penal reform agenda and major activities, before turning to a detailed examination and analysis of the IUPL's debates, at its congresses from 1889 to 1913, on a central topic: special measures to be taken against so- called incorrigible habitual criminals or dangerous recidivists (the terminology varied over time). By analyzing recurring patterns of argumentation as well as their development over time, the article pursues three goals. First, it reveals the IUPL's failure to live up to its own demand that penal policy should be based on empirical criminological and penological research; second, it elucidates the role of civil liberty concerns within the IUPL by demonstrating that prominent critical voices objected to subjective criteria for dangerousness and to indeterminate sentencing as threats to individual freedom; third, by tracing the role of the three founders in these debates, it offers a fresh comparison of the penal reform agendas of Liszt, van Hamel, and Prins. Keywords International Union of Penal Law, Union Internationale de Droit Penal, Internationale Kriminalistische Vereinigung, transnational penal reform, habitual criminals, recidivism, incorrigibility, dangerousness, 6tat dangereux, indeterminate sentencing, security measures, mental deficiency, social defense, modern school, positivism, Franz von Liszt, Adolphe Prins, and Gerard Anton van Hamel Summary: 1. The founding of the IUPL. 2. The three founders: Liszt, van Hamel, and Prins. 3. The IUPL's reform agenda. 4. The first phase (1889-1894): IUPL debates on recidivism, habitual criminality, indeterminate sentencing, and civil liberty. 5. The second phase (1905-1913): IUPL debates on tat dangereux, security measures, and individual liberty. 6. Conclusions. Bibliographical References * This work has been undertaken in the context of the International GERN Seminar (Groupe Europ~en de Recherches sur les Normativites) organized by Yves Cartuyvels (University of Saint-Louis - Bruxelles, Belgium) and Aniceto Masferrer (University of Valencia, Spain), and of the research project entitled Las influencias extranjeras en la Codificaci6n penal espanola: su concreto alcance en la Parte Especial de los C6digos decimon6nicos (ref. DER2016-78388-P), funded by the Spanish 'Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad' (2017-2020) and by the Groupe Europ~en de Recherches sur les Normativites (GERN) Interlabo (2019-2020). 1 Foucault, M., About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual' in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1 (1978), pp. 1-18.

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