Introduction

This book maps the tensions, overlaps, and contradictions within and between social and biological understandings of disease and crime, tracking the discursive formation of the ‘diseased’ criminal from the mid-nineteenth century to the rise of biocriminology and the new biology of deviance and control in the twenty-first century. The aim is to not to rehearse oft-repeated social constructionist arguments, but to consider the continuities and discontinuities between biological and socio-cultural explanations of crime. ¹ In so doing, the volume seeks to contribute to ongoing discussions about the extent to which contemporary biocriminological discourses remain rooted in a nineteenth-century determinism, even though the taxonomies of Victorian criminal anthropology (discussed in Chapter 2 of this volume by Chiara Beccalossi) may appear outlandish today. Expressed differently, Disease and Crime investigates, across different pathological sites, the shifting assumptions that have informed debates about where ‘crime’ is located, what factors produce it, and how it is managed. The book considers how and why disease—and, in particular, infectious disease—has come, reciprocally, to be framed as ‘criminal.’