Contagious Crimes: Three Historical Conceptions of Crime as Contagion

• In Event: Corruption, values and contagion

Abstract

From a historical perspective, the use of disease contagion as both a metaphor and an explanatory model for the spread of crime has always accompanied the idea of crime prevention. However, evolving conceptions of social relations, “social body,” and contagious diseases over time have led to different understandings of criminal contagion. This presentation will examine three historical examples at the intersection of sociology, epidemiology, and criminology, each reflecting a distinct way of conceptualizing crime as a contagious phenomenon. The first example is the debates surrounding “preventive police” in England. In this model, crime is perceived as a “moral problem” spreading primarily along the permeable boundary between the “labouring poor” and the “indigent population”, which is conceived as the epicentre of all kinds of societal threats and the role of crime prevention is to contain this contamination, thereby fostering moral transformation. The second example comes from the 19th century when biological explanations of social phenomena gained prominence, influenced by disciplines such as medicine, evolutionary biology, and microbiology. In this model, crime is no longer the result of interpersonal moral relations but rather the outcome of intergenerational hereditary transmission, evolutionary processes, and environmental influences. Finally, the third and most contemporary model will be explored through the example of “Predictive Policing”. This model closely parallels contemporary medical discourses centred on risk, in which pathology is no longer an exceptional condition but rather a set of risk factors that are always implicitly present within normality. Crime, therefore, is neither a moral nor a hereditary biological issue but rather the result of the interaction of dispersed risk factors embedded in everyday life. These three examples provide insight into the long history of the social and scientific discourse that conceptualizes crime as a contagious phenomenon and how this perspective has evolved in response to broader societal transformations.

Author

• Abdullah Enes Özel, Yalova University