Human Sciences Expertise Solving the Problem of Youth Criminality in State-Socialist Czechoslovakia

• In Event: Falling by the Wayside: Expertise on Unwanted Children, Youth Criminals, and Sadistic Women in Socialist Czechoslovakia and Poland

Abstract

After the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the state’s narrative often attributed many persisting societal problems, such as criminality, to the remaining effects of the previous regime. While this rhetoric was quite effectively used in the 1950s, many experts in the following decades pointed out that explaining criminality as a relic of bourgeois mentality is no longer convincing.
This paper contributes to the current debate on the role of experts in socialist societies by unearthing and analysing the expert discourse on youth criminality in socialist Czechoslovakia. Criminology, psychiatry, psychology and defectology were all trying to solve the problem of youth criminality. While most experts saw youth criminality as a nationwide problem caused by an error in the development of the youth, there were some disagreements on what to do about it. Although only a minority of experts proposed repressive measures as opposed to prevention, the amount of arrested young adults was on the rise during the early 1970s, which the police officers explained as a way to combat the results of the “crisis development” of the 1960s.
Criminologists and experts from other fields, such as psychiatrists frequently worked together during the investigations and cooperated with the state on policy changes, especially concerning the question of youth correctional facilities. Drawing on sources as expert journals, party and government documents, I will show how the relationships between different expert groups and the state evolved and how the proposed solutions to the problem of youth criminality have changed throughout the decades.

Author

• Vjačeslav Glazov, Institute of History CAS (Czech Republic)