ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A State-Socialist Forensic Science of Risk? Probability, Prevention, and “Deviance” in Czechoslovak Psychiatry and Criminology

• In Event: Forensic Science in Transtemporal Perspective

English Abstract

How did the introduction of computer technology, statistics, and risk-related language transform forensic psychiatry and criminology under state socialism? And what does it say about changing nature of crime and control and the state-socialist governance in its later phase? This paper explores these questions by examining forensic psychiatric and criminological research in late socialist Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 1980s. It suggests that a new rationality of crime and control began to emerge, one grounded in statistical and probabilistic reasoning. This shift moved attention away from the individual subject and toward population-based perspective, while simultaneously reinforcing preventive and biologically oriented explanations of criminal and deviant behavior. Rather than understanding the computerisation and quantification merely as technical improvements, the paper shows how punched tapes, predictive scoring tables, and crime forecasting reshaped the definition of „deviancy“. Unlike in liberal democracies, where this type of thinking and acting developed alongside the shift toward community care and market-driven policies, in socialist Czechoslovakia, it emerged not despite, but precisely through the institutional, welfare, and coercive structures of communist dictatorship. The paper draws on a diverse range of sources, from statistical departments of the Public Security Service and other repressive institutions, to contemporary expert literature produced by psychiatrists and criminologists.

Author

• Jakub Střelec, Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Berlin