Janet Weston. Medicine, The Penal System and Sexual Crimes in England, 1919–1960s

Janet Weston’s new book explores the medicalization of sexual crime in English criminal justice in the half century between the close of World War I and the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Her work carefully teases out how medical researchers and practitioners claimed expertise over that subset of male sexual offenders whose crimes they understood to proceed from psychological abnormality. The arc of her narrative covers a “modest golden age” in research and practice (p.4), beginning with these claims and a rehabilitationist optimism in the prospect of long-term cures for such offenders. By the end of that period, optimism had waned, and attention and resources moved elsewhere. This golden age nonetheless fundamentally reshaped how medicine and criminal justice dealt with sex offenders, and Weston’s lucid and important treatment of this history is essential reading for anyone interested in the intersections between medicine, the law, and sexual crime. This book will also be of interest to a wide variety of readers seeking to learn about topics like criminal justice and criminology, penology and carceral institutions, forensics, sexology, psychiatry and psychology, and “deviance.”

Art · Criminal justice · Criminology · Human sexuality · Medicalization · Narrative · Penology · Political science · Prison · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Sexology · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Psychology