ABSTRACT
Historically, the development of a “scientific criminology” corresponds to a shift in emphasis away from the deviant act and towards the deviant individual (Mercer and Mason 1998). Since the nineteenth century, criminal law has been highly influenced by the emergence of the criminal as an object of investigation and a focal point in the determination of punishments (Foucault 1978). Somehow, this movement from the crime to the criminal has generated a conceptual gap—that is, establishing “the criminal as existing before the crime and even outside of it” (Foucault 1978: 252)—a gap with which experts in the field of law continue to struggle. Precisely at the moment when the criminal’s actions cannot be explained or understood rationally, the judicial machine ceases to function and the penal system must turn to psychiatry for answers (Chauvaud 2009). In a complex analysis of what transpires between the act of reasoning (or lack thereof) and the action itself, medico-legal expertise has developed a technical-knowledge system considered to be scientifically accurate in the identification of mad or bad individuals (Federman, Holmes and Jacob 2009). In other words, criminal acts have become the responsibility of experts (such as psychiatrists and nurses) who can determine the sense beneath the act, measure the danger of an individual and establish the necessary intervention (i.e., indefinite hospitalization) to counter potential dangers (Foucault 1978). The work of Rose (1998), who problematizes the new associations established between public risk and the priority of public safety, echoes the introduction of psychiatry into the field of law. Forensic psychiatry now holds the authority to evaluate “those who are thought to pose a risk to society on the basis not so much of what they have done, but of what they might do” (Rose: 184). As the introductory quote would suggest, if Charles Manson (the leader of a U.S. cult responsible for serial murders, including that of actress Sharon Tate) had been identified as an “at risk individual,” and had been indefinitely hospitalized under the potential risk that he embodied, history might have been different.
