ABSTRACT

Today’s criminologists have come to focus on a hard core of repeat offenders, the small group that seems to be responsible for a large proportion of street crime. Similarly, nineteenth-century criminologists came to focus on habitual criminals, the repeaters who seemed to be incorrigible and whose behavior, some thought, might be explained by Lombroso’s theory of the born or hereditary criminal (Chapter 39). Throughout Western Europe and the United States, attention turned to understanding habitual criminals (Chapters 37 and 38) and identifying them. Alphonse Bertillon, a Frenchman, devised a complex means of detecting repeat offenders when they were rearrested (Chapter 40); meanwhile the Englishman Francis Galton investigated the possibilities of fingerprinting (Chapter 41), pioneering the development of the system that eventually replaced bertillonage.