Epidemics, Crime, and Justice
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- Épidémies, crimes et justice [fr]
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Crédits : M-24-011, École nationale d'administration pénitentiaire. Fichier original
- 1 Dominique Kalifa, Les bas-fonds. Histoire d’un imaginaire, Paris, Seuil, coll. “L’Univers historiqu (...)
1The global health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 disease outbreak was the latest in a series of major epidemics and pandemics that have punctuated the entire history of humanity, forcing it to make radical adjustments to adapt and survive each episode. Whether it be the plague, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, leprosy, influenza, etc., outbreaks often led to the establishment of exceptional legal regimes, granting the police and the judiciary added powers to enforce otherwise unthinkable prerogatives. Typically in such a case, they suddenly find themselves able to quarantine people, impose drastic restrictions on basic liberties, implement close police surveillance strategies, violate labor laws, enforce a cordon sanitaire, harsher sanctions, mandatory testing, vaccine passes, etc. “Cesspools” (les “bas-fonds”, used metonymically to designate certain areas and their residents) – are privileged targets for these policies, in both their preventive and curative dimensions1. Epidemics often serve to further accentuate social segregation, reinforcing ancient, deep-rooted representations in the collective imagination. From the plague-ridden Middle-Age town to the coronavirus-stricken locked-down city of the 21st century, States took steps to strengthen their repressive apparatus in order to protect their populations against a faceless enemy.
- 2 Françoise Briegel, Michel Porret, « Récidive, récidivistes et droit de punir », in Françoise Briege (...)
2This special issue focuses on the history of justice as seen through the lens of epidemics. Contributions are organized along two main avenues: the notion of “crime contagion” and the fight against epidemics in the judicial field. As applied to the history of justice, the meaning of the term “epidemic” is twofold: one is medical, and the other analogically leads to the notion of crime contagion. The image of a contagious crime, which must therefore be contained, stems from the literary and judicial repertoires of Ancient Rome. This notion remained at the forefront of 19th-century crime sciences which, by naturalizing their object, led scientists to consider criminals and delinquents as affected by a diathesis whereby their deviant behavior was interpreted as a phenomenon. Such was in particular the case for 19th-century vagrants, who were accused of spreading all kinds of contagious diseases all over France. Behind this medicalization and criminalization of wandering, Antony Kitts attempts to deconstruct the depreciative set of representations that has led to conflating the marginality of vagrants with crime. Young people – perceived to be easily corrupted by deleterious examples and likely to cross the line of delinquency – do trigger social fears as well. The function of the École de préservation Théophile Roussel, in Montesson, near Paris, analyzed by Dominique de Messineo, was to subject the children entrusted to its care to a medical and psychological treatment intended to reform them in a prophylactic way. Prisons and penal colonies were also places designed to cut off certain elements from the social body, isolating criminals, neutralizing them in order to preserve society from potential damage to property and persons, but also containing their “contagiousness”2. In the same spirit, the UK’s Contagious Diseases Acts, studied by Audrey Rousseau, aimed to contain the late 19th century outbreak of venereal diseases by means of a penal economy of the body of prostitutes.
3However, piling up people in overcrowded, hygienically suspicious facilities only resulted in further epidemics, such as the cholera outbreak of 1832, whose management at the local and national levels by the various authorities in charge of prisons is analyzed by Céline Delétang. As a prevention measure against the risk of contagion, the French penitentiary apparatus designed and implemented a screening and quarantine policy which, however, proved unable to contain the HIV epidemic of the 1980s, as shown by Jean-Lucien Sanchez.
4Nineteenth-century prisons were meant not only to help ensure public safety, but also, theoretically, to cure the “souls” of inmates. Aline Martinet shows, however, based on the example of the penitentiaries of the Alpes-Maritimes department, that in practice, inmates and convicts constituted a public health hazard to be circumscribed. Far from cleansing society by removing corrupt individuals being given a new lease on life thanks to the life-saving intervention of the penal institution, prisons were perceived as potential contagions clusters, likely to spread diseases to the rest of society. The history of the fight against epidemics in France and its colonial empire can also be inferred from the actions of the highest Court, the Cour de cassation. Christophe Bouvier presents a number of court decisions, offering insights into the many interventions of the State and its agents in the context of an epidemic.
Notes
1 Dominique Kalifa, Les bas-fonds. Histoire d’un imaginaire, Paris, Seuil, coll. “L’Univers historique,” 2013.
2 Françoise Briegel, Michel Porret, « Récidive, récidivistes et droit de punir », in Françoise Briegel, Michel Porret (dir.), Le criminel endurci : récidive et récidivistes du Moyen Age au XXe siècle, Genève, Droz, coll. « Recherches et rencontres ; 23 », 2006, p. 10.
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Référence électronique
Marie Houllemare, Hélène Ménard, Jean-Lucien Sanchez et Samuel Tracol, « Epidemics, Crime, and Justice », Criminocorpus [En ligne], Épidémies, crimes et justice, mis en ligne le 20 mai 2022, consulté le 20 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/12138 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/criminocorpus.12138
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