ABSTRACT
Positive criminology surrounded itself with a meta-narrative of reason, progress, and humanitarian reform. From the late 19th century until the advent of labelling theory in the 1970s, major text books claimed modern criminal justice institutions were an orderly, functional and rational evolutionary advance over the pre-modern (for example Barnes and Teeters, 1951). While the pre-modern person was viewed as born into a locality of status and custom, constrained by ritual and barbaric punishments, the modern individual inhabited the practices of a rationalised and knowledge-led, bureaucratic modernity.
