Criminal Anthropology and Belgian Prisons in the Early 20th Century. A Re-reading of the Lombrosian Legacy

In the last quarter of the 19th century in Belgium, Lombrosian theories are known but also criticized and adapted by jurists and doctors. A Belgian school of criminal anthropology develops which enshrines the concept of degeneration, preferred over biological determinism of Lombroso. After intense debates between lawyers and doctors, criminal anthropology starts to lose its appeal in early 1900 : experts agree to consider Lombroso and his methods as unreliable and inefficient. But criminal anthropology in Belgium will experience a second wind shortly before 1910. The Belgian State and the Ministry of Justice seek effective methods and programs to manage and evaluate the criminals. The practice of Dr. Louis Vervaeck, doctor at the ‘Minimes prison’ (Brussels), was then officially recognized and supported. Criminal anthropology laboratories are created in some Belgian prisons, where Dr Vervaeck and his followers examine detainees. His studies and their results will initially lead to the creation of psychiatric annexes in Belgian prisons (1920) and secondly to a new legislation directly devoted to abnormal criminals and their treatment (Social Defense Law of 1930). The prison appears to be an ideal laboratory to examine and to treat offenders individually. A new vision of the role of the penitentiary institution arises at that time, which marks a substantial shift within the long advocated moral and educational goals. Judged as ill-adapted, the solitary confinement suffers several attacks in the interwar period. But the opposition is not long in coming. It emanates above all from penitentiary officers, united behind the emblematic figure of Ernest Bertrand, director of the prison of Louvain. Behind the eloquent attacks on the “anthropological triumvirate” (Vervaeck, Meeuws, Héger-Gilbert), targeted by Bertrand, lies a furious struggle between two visions on the penitentiary institution. This opposition of some “practitioners” allows us to re-evaluate the successes and failures of the Belgian criminal anthropology in the early twentieth-century, and to investigate its real implementation in practice. If the published writings of Vervaeck have been thoroughly studied by Raf De Bont (CHTP, 9, 2001), availability of archives from the administration of the Ministry of Justice and records of detainees from criminal anthropology laboratories and psychiatric annexes allows us to complete the analysis. How has criminal anthropology been able to prevail in Belgium even as it fell into disuse? What can we learn about medical/anthropological practices carried out in Belgian prisons?