Social movement

Since the nineteenth century psychiatry has become increasingly involved in the problem of crime. This article attempts to explain what is distinctive about the way psychiatry conceptualizes and manages delinquents and delinquent conduct. It points to the inadequacies in existing accounts of this development and proposes an alternative way of looking at psychiatric penality; exploring its links, not with the principles of medical rationality, but with moral treatment, a complex mode of intervening into psychological problems that was practiced in early nineteenth century medical psychology. The argument is illustrated by studies of psychiatric interventions into the problems of psychopathic and alcoholic offenders.