Recently, Curing Crime featured an article that covered French Revolutionaries misguided belief that just laws would eradicate all crimes, and how Victorian judges judged Victorian criminals against an imagined normal man.

In this post we continue to explore 19th century concerns regarding crime. In the first post, we discuss Andrew Lees’s work on German concerns about the corrupting effects of cities. The second section explores a shift in who is seeking to explain why crime persists.

These examples, along those previously discussed, suggest a trend across Europe in which urbanizing societies are seeking to solve new issues in novel ways. This post explores who and how could produce knowledge about criminals and their crimes.

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Moral Discourse and Reform in Urban Germany, 1880s-1914

Andrew Lees argues that middle-class Germans and Protestant clergy were critical of urban environments because of their allegedly corrupting effects on citizens. They substantiated their criticism with ethical and medical arguments and urged that action be taken to address a moral crisis.

Big Cities and Big Problems

Big cities and urbanisation worried thinkers, social commentators, and politicians throughout the developing world. Less argues that, in Germany, many people thought that big cities, Grossstädte, eroded morals and promoted undesired behaviours. He shows that these thinkers were not only concerned about the housing and public health problems in cities, but also with those of moral order.

According to these critics, city dwellers seemed to breach social norms and engage in depraved acts such as “drunkenness, prostitution, and homosexuality” (Lees, p.86). Adolf Stoecker, a Preacher at the Prussian Royal Court, remarked that cities can generate wealth and pride, but that they also cause pain and sorrow. He was gravely concerned that such spaces were “inhospitable” to the Christian faith (Lees, p.86-87). People across the political spectrum shared similar concerns, for example, Hans Ostwald, a left-wing commentator. Nevertheless, not all critics were pessimists. Some sustained that institutional reforms could ameliorate this moral crisis.

Protestant Clergy and Immorality of the City

Protestant Clergy denounced the alleged immorality of city dwellers. Their critiques recognised that living conditions affect how people act, but firmly argued that culture and the individual’s choice were paramount. They explicitly rejected deterministic accounts, which they claimed would wrongly absolve individuals of responsibility. Thus, their thinking was aligned with that of the French revolutionaries and British judges.

Ludwig Weber was a pastor who would lead institutional groups and lead the fight against public immorality (Lees). In 1886, he founded a journal, Korrespondenzblatt zur Bekämpfung der öffentlichen Unsittlichkeit, in which contributors denounced masturbation, prostitution, and homosexuality. The journal condemned all factors which could encourage these allegedly perverse behaviours.

Weber claimed that impurities destroy the body and endanger a person’s mental and spiritual health. He wrote, “If a man wallows in the filth of impurity, his heart cannot rise to the ideals that ought to shine as the lodestars of our lives” (p.93). This kind of language is not necessarily medical or scientific.

Weber published a book with sixteen contributors, where they decried the increase of vice in the cities. According to Lees, the essays in this volume blame individual behaviour for suffering. They denounce new secularism, and Darwinism in particular, as dangerous because of their effect on people. One essay claimed that by treating vice and violence, art makes these appear normal. While some essays did mention social and economic factors as aggravating, they emphasised each person’s choice. For these critics, cities increased sexual impropriety, crime, irreligion and thus endangered the nation (Lees).

Reform-minded Liberals Are Also Afraid of the City

Concerns about big cities are shared by a wide variety of Germans. Reform-minded liberals recognised that cities have created new problems, but believed they could be solved. Lees suggests these reformists keep some of their protestant identity while embracing change.

These thinkers sought to solve the crisis created by big cities through the creation of institutions and education. For example, Viktor Böhmert and Johannes Tews were both hopeful about the role of education and structural institutions in reducing vice and crime (Lees), Lees provides a few examples:

Böhmert argued that alcohol and impurity were more dangerous to Germany than any external threat. He sustained that normal people needed places where they could suppress their bad instincts and find better joys. Thus, he encouraged the creation of parks, coffeehouses, and libraries where people could gather. This would provide healthy outlets in contrast to bars and prostitutes. He proposed labour reforms, including worker rights and the encouragement of profit sharing. Such a belief in institutional reform was common.

Tews, who worked as a school teacher and social reformer, also believed that institutions could solve the problems cities had created. He felt that education could help people make better choices and advocated for creating such opportunities. Tews also suggested that the clergy was exaggerating the amount of crime, and that, actually, crime was going down. He criticised some sentencing practices which he felt encouraged the behaviours they were trying to dissuade.

Conclusions

Lees suggests that these efforts show an eagerness to master an ever more complicated world and the urban masses. While most of those who worried about cities were conservative, Lees highlights that such concerns were also compatible with progressives. These thinkers emphasise individuals making decisions at a time when the role of heredity was not yet dominant.

These thinkers do not explicitly discuss human nature, but their views betray assumptions about the way people are. First, there seems to be an assumption of a reasonable man who is capable of resisting urges and making choices. Second, their explanations suggest that there are no natural differences between the people who choose rightly and those who do not. Third, Webber and the collection of essays show an effort to explain crime and the danger of the city through causal mechanisms. I think that their discussions blur the line between crime and other kinds of antisocial behavior.

Seeing the Criminal Instead of the Crime

Peter Becker concludes that one of the biggest changes in the understanding of crime and criminals was the space in which such knowledge was generated. Secondly, he argues that a set of explanations came to dominate because those who espoused them employed rhetorical strategies that integrated the work of others.1

German criminologists began meeting their subjects in prisons and hospitals during the 19th century, where they studied their bodies and minds. Berker argued that these knowledge-generating spaces removed criminals from their social context, effectively hiding it from the expert’s gaze. Concurrently, Becker holds that moral ethics was losing prominence, which allowed social or biological explanations to gain importance. Becker uses Michel Foucault archeological method.

Different Approaches to Studying Crime

Becker suggests that, for a time, there were two major narratives for explaining why certain people committed crimes. Each narrative has explanatory power and different implications for reducing crime. Neither of these perspectives was staunchly deterministic.

Becker proposes dividing historical actors who studied crime into criminalists and criminologists to better understand the history of crime. This analytical category allows Becker to focus on the space and the method by which knowledge about criminals and crime was produced. He holds that both groups hoped to classify criminals and deploy technologies to reduce crime and deviance. They share concerns regarding prostitution, alcoholism, and juvenile crime.

Criminalists (mostly pre-1848) often had direct experience with crime and criminals, and were involved in law enforcement. Frequently, they wrote about their experiences. They were usually interested in the criminal’s biography and personality. They are not as interested in crimes of passion.

In contrast, Becker posits that criminologists studied crime from a distance. These included a new cadre of experts, including “doctors, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and criminal law experts” who met criminals in prisons, jails, hospitals, asylums, and morgues (Becker, p.105). Unlike criminalists, they are more intrigued by violent crimes.

Explanations for Why People Committed Crimes

• Criminalists: Criminalists alleged that alcoholism and gambling condemned people to a vicious cycle. They suggested that a person’s social environment played an important role. Consequently, they were interested in further understanding the criminal underworld. For criminalists, a person who commits a crime engages in the “willful abuse of reason” (Becker, p. 131).

• Criminologists: They think the key to understanding why an individual commits a crime is in their body. Thus, they look for clinical and psychological causes rather than social networks. They think criminals are different. They allude to both poor environment and tainted heredity as potential explanations. A monumental difficulty for them was how to identify the physical manifestations of criminals.

How to Reduce Crime

• Criminalists: Pushed for reeducation and the need to protect would-be criminals from temptation. These individuals worry about societal collapse.

• Criminologists: Becker states they offer “scientific solutions to social problems” (p. 129). These tend to be more preventative. They are worried that individuals are degenerating. At the time, these experts developed theories of degeneration that were “seemingly objective” (Becker, p.108). Advocate for segregating and separating criminals from the rest.

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An interlude on method

Becker claims to use Michel Foucault’s anthropological method to gain clarity on this complicated historical development. Becker said that Foucault argued that during the 19th century, criminals were divided into “physical, emotional, and psychological beings” (p. 108). Such a division could be either internal or external. Becker states that other times the bodies of criminals were literally divided, and certain institutions showcased parts, including skulls, skins, and tattoos.

Becker’s keenness on Foucault informs his study of this period. For example, his argument concerns who has the authority to produce knowledge about crime and criminals, and he explains the outcomes of several scientific debates through rhetoric. The argument seems cogent; however, the individuals involved would not have called themselves either criminalists or criminologists. These categories were created by Becker. A deeper study could unveil a series of complexities that the use of these categories overlooks

• Areas where criminalists and criminologists collaborated

• Debates within each camp

• Instances in which individuals from each group agree with members of the other group in some respects but not others.

Further, there are other plausible explanations for these changes, such as pragmatic needs. Sellers has demonstrated how prison medical officers were driven by pragmatic needs rather than concerns about generalized explanations.

Criminologists Incorporate the Work of Criminalists

Replacement: In this case, criminologists took a concept developed by criminalists and applied it elsewhere.

• Hans Gross, a criminologist, borrows the criminalist’s work on gauner. Gauners were seen as professional criminals. Criminalists described the underworld in which they were thought to originate. Rather than emphasising their choices, criminologists argued that there were “anthropological, physiological, and evolutionist” reasons that explained why some of them committed crimes (p. 118). Gross separated the moral and social habits of the Gauner from their skills and used them to describe gypsies. In short, he replaced the criminal underworld with an ethnicity, where children are born into “their immoral life,” and inherit their moral traits (Becker p.120).

Use parallel evidence: Criminologists drew from the work of other experts to draw parallels.

• Cesare Lombroso’s claim that criminals are atavistic was bolstered by his incorporation of ethnographic evidence. Among other themes, he discussed the language used by thieves, arguing that, like savages, they often reproduced natural sounds. He tried to draw similar parallels between the physical and mental traits of criminals and savages.

Serialisation: Criminologists broke criminalists’ work into pieces and used these as bricks to build different arguments.

• Becker states that Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s famed work, Psychopathia Sexualis, is an exemplar of serialisation as a strategy for turning evidence supporting the criminalist interpretation into evidence substantiating the criminologist’s approach.

• He sought to study degeneration through sexual deviancy. In doing so, he draws heavily and selectively from criminalists’ work, which he broke into parts. He used only what he thought was relevant. Thus, readers encountered a series of examples of sexual motives rather than a series of individual biographies in which sexual motive was part of the whole. In doing so, he was able to both incorporate the work of criminalists while obfuscating its theoretical cohesiveness.

These are interesting examples of academics using the work of others. It seems to me that serialisation is very commonly practised in the modern academy and seen as legitimate.

Becker’s essay is interesting because it raises important questions about the sites and the people involved in producing knowledge about crime and criminals. The developments he describes show that people were thinking more deeply about crime and seeking professional answers for social problems, even if his conclusions about rhetoric are questioned.

Conclusions

Both essays demonstrate that concerns about crime grew alongside urbanization and industrialization. I think Becker’s raises an interesting point by suggesting that the spaces in which such knowledge were generated mattered. On the other hand, this may miss exploring why this shift occurred. Were these experts addressing other social issues? Had professionals succeeded in other realms and were thus seen as capable? Rather, than interpreting their increased prominence as resulting from pursuing power, could we not suggest that their explanations appeared compelling to their contemporaries?

In any case changes in how societies thought about crime were happening, and they would have profound consequences in the next century.

Sources

Becker, Peter. The Criminologists’ Gaze at the Underworld: Toward an Archaeology of Criminal Writing

Lees, Andres. Moral Discourse and Reform in Urban Germany, 1880s-1914

Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective. Ed Peter Becker, and Richard F Wetzell. 2006. Cambridge University Press.

And Dissertation:

Sellers, Laura Mary. 2017. Managing Convicts, Understanding Criminals: Medicine and the Development of English Convict Prisons, c.1837-1886. PhD Dissertation. University of Leeds.

Many Western societies became increasingly concerned about crime in the 19th century. This coincides with urbanization and industrialization and fears about how cities corrupt people. Their efforts to understand crime and ensure the safety of their societies entailed a radical shift in how they explained why some people committed crimes and in how they sought to reduce crime.

Today, we will explore this shift through the French Revolution and Victorian Judges. During this time of change, there was a belief that “humans possessed free will and rationality, so [criminals] had chosen to commit crimes” (Sellers, p.32).1

In the first example, the French Revolutionaries believed that rational laws would eliminate crime, and failed. Secondly, Victorian judges used a conceptual model of a reasonable man to help them make their rulings.

Making Better People: The French Revolution and The Effort to End Crime (Marc Renneville).

One undeniable characteristic of the early French Revolution was an unwavering belief that reason would solve all of France’s problems.2 The revolution’s efforts to dethrone the church opened the space for new expert and their explanations need not be related to moral theology (Renneville).

Enlightened thinkers, at first, suggested that crime could be eradicated through the creation of new laws which would remake society (Becker and Wetzell). Marc Rennevill, a historian, argues that after the swift failure of laws intended to remake people, the State adopted laws to preserve the newly established society.

Pre-revolutionary Explanations

Before the revolution, Enlightenment thinkers argued that people committed crimes because of “badly organised secular institutions” (Renneville p. 30). They suggested that individuals could not be expected to obey the law because it was too harsh and often arbitrary. They suggested that people committed crimes because it was rational because the law did not benefit them, and thus, why would any reasonable person abide by it? Rather than appealing to differences between people, they pointed to judicial and social abuses as the causes of crime. In contrast, they posited that just laws would effectively reduce crime.

I suggest that this view implies that man is rational, and thus, that any person breaking the law has made a rational decision to do so. From this perspective, there are no meaningful differences between people who commit crimes and those who do not. Both are capable of responding reasonably to their circumstances. Both are capable of changing their behaviour.

Post Revolutionary Changes

The adoption of distinct criminal codes reflects different views regarding the aetiology of crime (Renneville). A new criminal code introduced in 1791 established fixed punishments for crimes. Other thinkers, like Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1790), claimed that prisons would be “infirmaries of crime,” after learning about a prison in Oxford County that allegedly rehabilitated criminals through work (p.35). Cabanis thought that a person’s physical traits (age, sex, and other features) could affect their sensations and, thus, their ability to think, opening the door to the future introduction of extenuating circumstances.

Renneville claims that after new laws were introduced, crime did not fade. This presented a problem because these reformers had suggested that people committed crimes because the regime was oppressive. According to their way of thinking, once the oppressive regime was gone, the persistence of crime could no longer be explained through oppressive laws.

Criminals, unlike the insane, were assumed to be capable of reasoning, and thus the question of why they committed a crime lingered. In trying to answer this question, thinkers sought to understand the nature of the criminal.

These failures to curb crime led to the enactment of new criminal codes in 1808 and 1810. Unlike the first ones, these sought to preserve society rather than recreate it (Renneville). At the time, some thinkers suggested that as society progresses, perhaps certain individual values wane. French thinkers began looking at criminals to explore why they committed crimes. In the case of France these changes happen in medical and legal settings.

Renneville’s argument is cogent and raises important questions regarding how societies address social issues. In the case of France, revolutionaries dispelled religious authorities who would have otherwise been part of the conversation. Importantly, their assumptions about human nature crept into their explanations and the solutions they devised.

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Unwilling or Unable: Victorian Judges and Criminal Responsibility

Early Victorian Judges assumed that all men were similarly capable of committing a crime and of resisting the impulse to do so (Weiner p.45). Martin Wiener argues that they established a reasonable man standard from which they judged individuals. Weiner contends that this view was eventually undermined, and the question became whether criminals were unable or unwilling to control their criminal impulses.

Weiner holds that both views make different assumptions about human nature. In the first case, the assumption is that most individuals are reasonable, whereas in the second, the assumption is that there is a difference between people who commit crimes and those who do not.

Fifteen High Court Judges adjudicated all serious criminal offenses in Victorian England. The judges sometimes spoke at Court, which was reported by newspapers. More often, they corresponded with the Home Office, which had to determine whether to carry out capital punishments or grant clemency. Using these sources, Weiner reaches some conclusions about the birth of British scientific criminology.

An Expectation of Violence

Reacting violently to certain “disgraceful behavior” was socially “expected” in the late 18th century (Weiner, p.50). Nevertheless, as England entered the 19th century, people became less tolerant of violence as the culture of honour waned and a growing interest in how passions affected behaviour emerged (Weiner). During that time, Victorian England saw drastic material and social changes, and Judges were left having to apply case law to a changing society. In doing so, they reified ideas about self-control, reason, and the perfectibility of man.

Reasonable Men

19th-century jurists believed that all people had the potential to make rational decisions in their long-term best interests. According to Weiner, this understanding of human nature led them to judge cases by considering whether a reasonable man would have acted similarly. Therefore, determining whether the act was reasonable superseded considerations about the culprit. Weiner’s claim rests on the reasonable man concept, even if it was not explicitly used by these historical actors. Such an assumption opens space for experts to contribute to defining what is reasonable. In a later post I will discuss Victorian convict prisons where pragmatic concerns about running prisons often dealt with similar questions.

According to Weiner, this standard also changed the way in which criminals were defended. Some lawyers claimed that the reasonable man standard was too broad and that a person’s actions should be judged in light of their character. For example, a person known to be hot-headed should be judged differently from someone known to be calm. This strategy mostly failed in court.

While this is interesting it is important to note that the reasonable man standard was not verbalized as such. This is an analytical category that Weiner has devised to think about the way in which these historical actors reasoned.

An Alternative Strategy: Not All Men Are Reasonable

Other lawyers claimed their clients were not reasonable because they were insane. This strategy was more successful, especially after a liberal government gained power in 1880.

Weiner concludes that this strategy was more successful because it did not challenge the underlying assumption that most men are reasonable. His research shows that, between 1860 and 1900, there was a significant increase in the number of perpetrators being found insane despite a decrease in the number of murder trials. This development required professionals to determine whether the accused was sane.

Weiner states that the shift to focusing on variation rather than commonalities marked the birth of scientific criminology (p.49). In contrast, other historians, such as Sellers, suggest that early British criminological thinking was significantly influenced by the pragmatic necessities of prison medical officers at convict prisons (2017).

Both Weiner’s and Sellers’ arguments point to the increasingly significant role of medicine and science in state efforts to reduce crime. Both also show that the line between the causes of crimes and other antisocial behavior is starting to blur.

Final Thoughts

Both historians make arguments that suggest that their respective societies saw crime as a problem to be tackled by learned men. In both cases assumptions about human nature affect explanations as to why people are committing crimes and efforts to reduce such criminal behavior.3

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Sources

Renneville, Marc. The French Revolution and the Origins of French Criminology.

Weiner, Martin J. Murderers, and Reasonable Men. The Criminology of the Victorian Judiciary.

Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective. Ed Peter Becker, and Richard F Wetzell. 2006. Cambridge University Press.

And Dissertation:

Sellers, Laura Mary. 2017. Managing Convicts, Understanding Criminals: Medicine and the Development of English Convict Prisons, c.1837-1886. PhD Dissertation. University of Leeds.

In 1934, Benito Mussolini established a national system of juvenile courts (Tribunali per i minorenni), which sought to identify youths who were “dangerous to society” and prescribe Fascist re-education programs for them.

Juvenile Reform in Mussolini’s Italy

During his first decade in power, Mussolini’s regime began introducing a juvenile justice system into penal, civil, and police legislation. These efforts allowed his regime to define and discipline what they considered dangerous boys and girls.

The newly established courts in each of Italy’s 26 appellate-court districts were given complete jurisdiction in their areas over those under 18 years of age. Unlike courts where adults were tried, these juvenile courts enjoyed “more flexible rules and informal procedures.” For example, these judges enjoyed “sweeping powers to investigate the causes of juvenile misbehaviour” and could hold private hearings without defence counsel. Their powers allowed them to “individualise corrective measures according to the child’s personality.”

This implies that State officials can assess their personalities and decide which course of treatment is more likely to transform them into healthy citizens. The appointed magistrates also decided what to do with non-criminal youth, including those who were abandoned, neglected, or wayward.

The juvenile system was designed to reach deeply into Italian society and reshape every aspect of it. The penal codes allowed intervention over crime-committing youth. One tool was civil detention, which was meant for wayward, errant, or deviant children. The creeping State also delineated a moral dimension to its intervention into Italian households, focusing on parents and guardians and their ability to educate and adequately care for their children. Simon Fraser posits that most research has focused on other aspects of Mussolini’s policies towards youth, such as promoting higher fertility rates and protecting maternity; however, little attention has been paid to the juvenile court system and its significant role.

Juvenile courts intervened in families’ private lives to a degree not seen before, and subjected thousands of minors to re-education programs. Such drastic measures were justified under the guise of protecting children, preventing crime, and ensuring racial purity. Before these efforts, there was an institution dedicated to paternal correction, which, on occasion, had detained children for unruliness or decadence, but its powers were much more limited.

Florence and the Rehabilitation of Non-Criminal Youth

Fraser has studied one of the more “fascistic” elements of these juvenile courts, which, between 1934 and 1945, ordered the “indefinite detention of non-criminal but socially dangerous minors. He wants to assess how fascist the courts were and whether they adhered to global norms concerning juvenile systems. Thus, his focus is on how the courts functioned and adjudicated cases rather than on how children were reeducated.

Fraser claims Florence is a good place to carry out such a study because the records are almost complete and include penal, civil, and administrative cases. Based on Fraser’s initial review of hundreds of files, he thinks civil detention was widely employed, allowing the state to encroach on the privacy of the home. This was made possible by viewing juvenile justice as part of the efforts to ensure public security, and it was only loosely connected to other existing civil or criminal laws. Further, the state made an effort to break families and send children far away.

The reforms of 1934 had broadly expanded who could bring a case and expanded preliminary civil detention. The courts in Florence were happy to use this from the beginning, and during the first year, they oversaw 150 cases, putting 75% of children under indefinite detention. During the 1936-39 period, the courts in Tuscany detained over 800 children. Most of those arrested were boys. Most of the cases against girls were brought by fascist party officials. Boys were committed for vagrancy or refusing to work, whereas some girls were charged with promiscuity or an appetite for luxury. These differences suggest that there was a gendered ideal for young Italians, and those who deviated from this ideal were seen as problematic.

Juvenile Courts & The Remaking of Fascist Italy

Fraser concludes that the juvenile court system in Fascist Italy owes much to fascist thinking and the state’s totalitarian ambitions. This concern fits well within the Italian Fascist agenda, which was concerned about racial fitness, demography, and social welfare. In his view, science and medicine do not appear to play as significant a role as fascist ideology in their treatment of juveniles. This post is based on preliminary research, and Fraser intends to complete this project. It will be exciting to see what comes out of his work.

Conclusions

Mussolini’s effort to reform juvenile justice and create a system in which young people could be remade shows how prevalent the idea was that people could be remade through re-education programs. Fascist totalitarian states, like Mussolini’s Italy, sought to deploy every weapon at their disposal to achieve complete control over their countries.

A few weeks ago, we published an article about Czechoslovakian work camps, which explored how Communist ideology both created and destroyed their efforts to reeducate people.

Mussolini’s program for juveniles, like the Czechoslovakian work camps, exemplifies a recurrent theme throughout the 20th century: the zeal to shape people anew through social and environmental interventions.

All such programs

• Assume that people are malleable and that they can be changed through socio-environmental interventions. Where does this belief spring from? How universal was it? To what degree were such interventions similar to what was happening in other nations?

• There is often a strong underlying ideology about what makes people good. How close a connection exists between ideology and the implementation of such programs?

Similar efforts to reshape communities were prevalent.

In some cases, these began by trying to refashion people either by changing their environment, or through some physical/physiological intervention. On the other end of the spectrum, some thought that communities could only be improved by changing their constituents, even if that required sterilisation, segregation, and restrictive immigration policies.

Come on, hit the blue button, and learn more about these programs.

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I hope you had a good start to 2026. There is lots happening in the world, and it can, at times, be overwhelming. Nevertheless, I wanted to share a few selections based on what I have read this past month.

Political Violence, Health Care and the Lunacy of Violence

This brilliant post places the killing of Brian Thompson in context. Thompson was the CEO who was shot in act of protest against health insurance companies. The team behind provides background on the victim and his killer. The post explores the health context and the public's reaction to this murder.

Cymposium

When a CEO's Death Became a Symbol: The Brian Thompson Assassination and America's Healthcare Reckoning

The Morning That Shook Manhattan…

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4 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Cymposium

We sympathise with Cymposium’s suggestions that normalising political violence is undesirable. In their post, they contrasted this killing with violence in Libya and during Apartheid in South Africa. This is a valuable comparison to think about the role of violence in our societies.

We can do better. We should do better.

I also wanted to use this space to condemn the horrific violence that some ICE agents are using against American citizens.

Unsafe in Prison

The New York Times reported that inmates were beaten to death. This article explores the death of a few prisoners. These prisoners were killed by guards. The article points out to an endemic and systemic problem, where lack of accountability coupled with authority results in tragedy.

There are legitimate debates about prisons and their role. Nevertheless, incarcerated people should not be beaten, abused, or murdered.

Mounjaro, Medicine, and Crime

This fascinating and intriguing post explores the ways in which medicines can reduce crime. describes how GLP-1 could possibly reduce crime. In his article he discussed the removal of lead from water and gasoline as a public health intervention which is widely credited with crime reduction. Unlike lead other medications, like SSRIs, have gotten little attention despite some studies showing these medications can reduce aggressive behaviors.

SSRI, Roman suggests, can help with “emotional regulation and impulse control.” Further, they can help individuals maintain other relationships which also decrease the likelihood they will engage in criminal activity.

GLP-1 drugs could lower crime because they dampen “reward driven impulsivity,” including alcohol and opioid use. These drugs affect reward mechanisms and can dampen the kinds of impulses that result in crime.

External Processing

Medicine can reduce crime

There’s a lot of debate about whether Medicaid should pay for access to GLP-1s. Most of the debate takes the shape of an informal cost-benefit analysis comparing the gains from better health to the large costs of providing coverage. One big potential benefit of widespread access to GLP-1s, lower crime rates, is almost never included among the potential benefits. It should be, and it might tip the scales in favor of broader coverage if it were…

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4 months ago · 8 likes · 6 comments · John K. Roman, PhD

This dampening of rewards is one of the reasons I was hesitant to start using GLP1s to address my obesity.

Dispatches from a Wonderer

Worries, Discoveries and Lessons From Mounjaro

I admit that I was rather skeptical about weight loss drugs; however, I have changed my mind. First, because the evidence available at this time seems to show these drugs are effective. It has been available for quite some time — as my care team explained. Second, using these substances has been transformational. This experience has been more thought-pr…

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a year ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Christian Orlic

Interviewing Subjects The Painful Reid Technique

In his latest post, delves into one of the most famous interrogations techniques. I do not ever want to experience the Reid technique or other kinds of enhanced interrogation. False confessions are a real problem.

Crime & Psychology

FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY: THE REID TECHNIQUE

It was published as long ago as 1963 but remains the famous manual in the history of interrogation. Criminal Interrogations and Confessions hit the bookstores of an expectant world more than sixty years ago. The authors were Inbau and Reid. Inbau evidently needed a better agent: every law-enforcement agent in the western world has heard of ‘The Reid Tec…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Jason Frowley PhD

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Enter Mars and the Fabulous Martians

Mars is a beautiful and advanced planet. Martians have created a modern, science-based state with excellent systems, structures, and safety. This thriving community of Martians has experienced economic prosperity and improvements in quality of life. Such success has created the need for labour, and Martians are reluctant to accept some jobs.

In contrast, Jupiter has not had such success, and Jupitarians, especially those residing in Ganymedes, one of the moons, have been emigrating in search of a better life elsewhere.

At first, Martians did not take particular note of the aliens from Ganymede, but recently, they have become concerned about the pesky Jupitarians from Ganymede.

Life on Mars is better than it has ever been. Nevertheless, Martians are increasingly anxious about safety. How are aliens from Ganymede impacting life on Mars?

The following imaginary scenario may give the impression that we are biological essentialists who think that biology determines behaviour. We are not. Behaviour is a complex phenomenon in which genes, environment, and experience interact. In this scenario, we take such a deterministic, unrealistic approach to behaviour to highlight questions about the impact a group of aliens may have on another group.

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For the sake of argument

Let us imagine that:

• Ganymedians commit 10x more robberies/assaults than local Martians.

• Imagine a population of 10 million Martians (M)

• They share Mars with 100,000 people from Ganymedes (G).

• Last year, there were 10,000 crimes committed on Mars.

In this scenario, Ganymedians would be responsible for 909 crimes out of a total of 10,000, so police initiatives targeting them could, at best, have a marginal effect on the total number of crimes. Even eliminating all Ganymedian crime would reduce crime by about 10 per cent. In contrast, an initiative that reduced Martian crime by ten per cent would reduce the same number of crimes.

The Martians worry about more aliens from Ganymedes. However, for the total number of crimes to increase by another ten per cent, over one hundred thousand new aliens would have to arrive.

These are not insignificant numbers, but they suggest that any effective crime-reduction strategy would target the majority of crimes rather than focus on a small subset.

Spending resources on a population that commits a small fraction of all crime would likely have a smaller impact on reducing crime than initiatives that target all those who commit crimes. Thinking about the effects of interventions is essential to devising policies that improve everyone’s lives.

If we keep imagining these martians… we may find that

• At the current population level, Ganymedians would need to have a crime rate 33 times that of Martians to account for 25% of all crimes.

• Alternatively, increasing the Ganymedian population by a factor of ten would still mean that Ganymedians accounted for less than half of all crimes.

In these scenarios, for every 100,000 new Ganymedians, crime would increase by 2%, but Mars would gain tens of thousands of productive workers.

You should recall that for this thought experiment, I set the Ganymedians’ crime rate to 10 times that of the Martians.

Does This Help Us Think About Real Life?

I want to raise an issue rather than answer a question. Hence, I am not going to collect extensive data for this section, but such a project could be worthwhile.

In the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage has claimed Afghans are 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape than people born in the UK, but the numbers do not support his claim. For example, between 2021 and 2023, seventy-seven Afghans were convicted of sexual offences in comparison to over fourteen thousand people born in the UK. If we look at arrests broken down by ethnicity, we find that the highest arrest rate is twice that of the lowest. Likewise, our post relying on ChatGTP found that incarceration rates for certain immigrant groups are rarely higher than five times that of locals.1

The scenario about Martians and Ganymedians should encourage us to think about our own societies and which policies can make a difference. There are no real Ganymedians, but if they were, they would not be solely products of their biology.

The New York Times published a study based on hundreds of thousands of immigration arrests and found that most of immigrants arrested have no criminal records. Less than a third have ever been convicted of a crime. These convictions include certain traffic violations. In contrast, during President Biden’s last year in office, 63% of those arrested by ICE had criminal convictions. One could ask whether these efforts are a good way to spend resources.

Last December, we published a post expressing concern that the discourse about immigration and crime tends to focus on certain kinds of crimes, and thus obfuscates other types of crime that also negatively impact everyday people.

INSERT LINK.

Conclusions

In a world with limited resources, we need to make choices about how to spend our time, money, and influence. In this week’s essay, I wanted to share a thought experiment that may help us consider crime and immigration dispassionately.

Populist leaders often blame immigrants for the problems their society faces and claim that they are primarily responsible for crimes. This fictional scenario can help shift the conversation about crime and efforts to reduce crime.

Certain crimes can be devastating to victims and can create a sense of danger even if that perspective is misaligned with reality. For example, many Americans are fearful that American cities are crime-ridden, even when data suggests crime has significantly decreased. Further, these conversations ignore a series of other crimes which could be essential to consider in crafting a more perfect union.

We should consider policies that help us build a better society. This requires engaging in dialogue and examining which interventions are more likely to succeed.

I first investigated immigration for a research methods course at Harvard Extension School, where I wrote about Italian immigrants and the most restrictive immigration act in American history.

In Old Fears, New Foes, I found that anti-immigration sentiment against Italians used science and medicine to justify pre-existing anxieties about immigration. The project turned into six articles, including one in which we summarised the rest in light of current events.

This week, we investigate how the game models its virtual trials of these perpetrators. The Darkest Files, through its friction between dialogue and gameplay, recreates the same dissonance Fritz Bauer felt attempting to bring a broader proto-human rights interpretation of Nazi crimes to the German court system. Players face this dissonance head on as they grapple with the imperfections of a strictly (and oftentimes disingenuously) positivist legal framework, attempting to secure the imprisonment of Nazi perpetrators.

The Makings of a Virtual Court

Academics have at various times pointed fingers at the Adenauer government1, the holdovers from National Socialism going soft on their colleagues, and on the yellow press to explain why so many Nazis fell through the cracks.2 All these factors certainly played a part, but when a case reached trial, it was most often the internal workings of the legal system and prevailing attitudes that prevented successful convictions. German jurist Ingo Müller detailed how, as late as 1971, postwar courts upheld wartime executions for violating the Race Laws, for making “demoralizing remarks” regarding Hitler, or even for refusal to order executions within the Wehrmacht, as essentially lawful actions at the time.3

After the war, the new German government rolled back Nazi era statutes and reintroduced an amended version of the 1871 Penal Code, a change that ironically made prosecuting certain Nazi perpetrators even more difficult.

One such example is the 1871 code’s definition of murder as requiring an individualised base motive.4 Such laws tended to see crime as an individual engaging in asocial activity against the State. What, then, was one to do when the entire state had become criminal? Bauer wished to put Nazism itself on trial, but this was impossible within the conservative legal framework. The Darkest Files attempts to model the nature of these assumptions in German law through its virtual court.

In the game, the outcomes of the trials are a culmination of the player’s detective ability, and nothing else. Nevertheless, the developers include references to active meddling by the government in cases, hiding of evidence, and Nazi judges remaining in their posts to paint a picture of these extra-legal obstacles. The nature of the game’s medium means that it must ultimately reflect a positivist, mechanistic nature of the law. It does this for good reason as well: it would hardly be fun to have played the game correctly and be rewarded with the suspect getting off scot-free.

But the compromise in the service of fun also lays bare the tension within video games between their interactive and their story elements. For a court game to function as a game, it must have enough evidence for the player to be able to reasonably assemble the case. There must be an external truth established about the nature of the case and the parties involved. Finally, the player’s actions should be judged by the computer impartially.

Accepting these precepts for The Darkest Files means implicitly accepting the notion of an apolitical positivism governing German courts. Müller forcefully argues against “the fairy tale of positivism” pushed by post-war jurists. He enumerates how the unquestionable supremacy of the Volk and its embodiment in the Führer drove jurists’ decisions, not a tragic Prussian devotion to the letter of the law. Far from a clean break with Nazism, he instead articulates how post-war judges “clung to the values of the Third Reich” in all but name, rather than implementing actual positivist thinking.5

By modelling the positivist court, the game risks only modelling its ideological biases in its text, but not in its mechanics. Implicitly, then, the game must assume an ahistorical fairness to the trial so that it can be an enjoyable product. That decision necessarily shapes what kind of Nazi crimes can reasonably be represented in a videogame format; a reader will not demand fairness from their book, nor a viewer from their movie. A player begins the game expecting it, however.

Positivism and the West German Courts

In their embrace of legal positivism, West German courts were strictly opposed to retroactivity in criminal law, even for the 1933-1945 period.6 That meant that only those who broke the law at the time had a chance to be reasonably prosecuted. It also implied that if a person did something which would now be considered criminal, but was legal at the time, they could not be punished. Thus, the player’s casework revolves around how the perpetrators violated Nazi law to commit their crimes, even if these violations were tolerated in practice.

Rebecca Wittman characterises the requirements for a successful prosecution at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials as such:

To prove each defendant guilty of murder, the prosecution had to show the presence of the subjective elements examined earlier: sadism, desire to kill, base motives, and so on. To show perpetration of murder (as opposed to the less serious aiding and abetting of murder), prosecutors had to prove individual initiative and knowledge of the illegality of the act, which went beyond the following of orders.7

The German code had stringent requirements to successfully charge someone with murder. Paragraphs 211 and 49 required the suspect to have individual initiative and the knowledge of the act’s illegality.

The German High Court subscribed to what is known as a subjective definition of what constituted a perpetrator. That meant that the perpetrator of a criminal act demonstrated personal intent or stood to gain from the action. In contrast, the objective definition holds the individual physically carrying out the act responsible. For example, during the National Socialist period, a woman drowned her friend’s baby at her request, yet was not found guilty of murder, as the killing was not meant to benefit herself.8

These requirements continually acted as fetters on Fritz Bauer and his prosecutorial team. They had to contend with outdated definitions that saw murder as an individualised, malicious act, and with a legal system that was all too happy to work with those definitions to not rock the boat. What this meant at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials was that only the most highly publicised and brutal killers were handed a murder conviction. Extra-legal murderers such as Wilhelm Boger did show individual initiative, while camp doctor Franz Lucas, who oversaw countless gassings, was only found guilty of aiding and abetting murder.9

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Court Cases in the Darkest Files

In The Darkest Files, the player finds themselves suspecting the responsible party for a criminal act from the start. Both cases revolve around the execution of civilians by uniformed men complicit in the National Socialist system. The player will immediately recognize their actions as reprehensible under our own moral framework.

The job given is to establish legal culpability, a much more demanding task than moral culpability.

The first case deals with the execution of an alleged partisan by a local NSDAP chapter. The chapter’s leader in-game was even investigated by the immediate post-war trials but found innocent, as the execution complied with Nazi-era directives. The player is only able to achieve the ‘best’ trial outcome by uncovering an individual motive that overstepped even the law at the time. Thus, success is contingent on working with the law as it is, not necessarily as it should be.

Conclusions

To engage with such an imperfect system means the player will likely make mistakes. These mistakes lead to a reduced sentence or even exoneration for the perpetrator, as has happened countless times in reality. The moral culpability is well known to every player beforehand. Still, they are forced to play with a different set of legal presumptions with which they must honestly engage, no matter their disagreement, to emulate Bauer’s search for justice. The nature of the game means that making mistakes, in fact, leads to a more historically plausible outcome.

Faced with a dearth of evidence, an uncooperative society, an unfitting legal structure, and the player’s ability, it is a true achievement to mount a successful case. By focusing on ordinary court cases in such extraordinary circumstances, the game highlights the inherently political nature surrounding trials.

At the same time, its mechanics replicate many of our societal assumptions about impartiality, even if the narrative acknowledges the hostility faced by Fritz Bauer’s prosecution. The game’s court system is faithful, in the sense that it reflects German jurists hewing to positivist principles when trying Nazis. Nevertheless, if not examined critically, the player may uncritically absorb such a narrative. British statistician George Box famously said, “all models are wrong, some are useful”.

The Darkest Files is at its most useful when its own limits are acknowledged, as a jumping-off point to further probe how post-war justice was handled and mishandled.

The Collapse of Czechoslovakian Work Camps

Shortly after the Communists took power in Czechoslovakia, they established work camps in December 1948. Such camps were common in Soviet nations, and allegedly, they were meant to re-educate or reform enemies of the people. By 1952, Czechoslovakian camps had mostly disappeared.

According to Jiri Smlsal, most historians have focused on the persecution of political opponents, but have not explained why these camps disappeared so quickly.1 Smlsal proposes that the camps vanished because the Communist elite saw the camps as a “failed experiment.”

Making Good Communists and Work Camp Population

Czechoslovakian work camps were a response to an apparent crisis, and the goal was to incarcerate and reform the bourgeoisie, landlords, and those belonging to non-socialist political parties. The camps aimed to suppress opposition and instil “ a love of work” in these supposedly troubled people.

The Government installed a council of three people who would, without trial or process, decide whom to send to these camps and how long they would be there (months to years). While it may seem easy to dismiss the rehabilitative aspect of such camps, it is vital to remember how well these efforts fit within the broader communist paradigm, in which political opposition and social deviance were viewed not as irreconcilable flaws but as products of a wicked environment.2 In this worldview, men are products of their material relations, and such defects could thus be corrected through discipline, labour, and re-education.

Long-time subscribers may recall that we wrote extensively about Crime in Cold War Berlin and the manner in which ideology affected how Soviet Germany explained why people committed crimes.

The fact that individuals were committed to such camps for varying lengths of time reaffirms the purpose behind these camps, which was to transform them into good communists. Different individuals were deemed to require different lengths of treatment to correct them. The Czechoslovakian Head of the Camps Education Department claimed,

“Just as good parents vaccinate and treat their children –even when those children are uncomfortable —so too do we treat (and often with harsh surgery) people and groups of people who would otherwise be doomed…a whole lot of people from the camps will be returned to our national community as valid members.”

Interestingly, such discourse uses a medical metaphor to explain not only why the camps were necessary, but also to suggest that they would be effective. This shows how Soviet authorities viewed such reform and how they legitimised these interventions. Further, it demonstrates just how important the language of science and medicine became.

The Camps imposed physical labour as well as moral and vocational training on their subjects. Such training included literacy, which was meant to help them understand and utilise the new discourse. Those interned were asked to prepare presentations on current topics, which they had to analyse using the Communist framework. The effort to teach and have those in camps use such frameworks seems incompatible with the idea that camps were purely about forced labour. Forced labour was surely an important part, but it was also seen as a means to transform these individuals.

A Failed Experiment

Smlsal argues that the Camps failed because they were incommensurable with Soviet ideology. A mere year after the camps opened, the Chairman of the Camps was already dissatisfied with the presence of workers in these camps, as workers were not supposed to need such rehabilitative programs.

The Chairman of the Camps did not think workers belonged in such places. By November 1949, only 25% of the camp population were deemed to be class enemies. Most of those interned were “petty offenders, vagabonds, absentee workers, and prostitutes”, who were sequestered “alongside former politicians, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals.” The camps were explicitly designed to treat a particular group of people, who made up only about a quarter of the camp population. The resulting dissonance scandalised the elites because it was anathema to their understanding of the world.

Communist leaders blamed the special commissions that determined who was sent to camps, and endeavoured to remedy the situation. Despite these efforts, the proportion of class enemies did not increase, and by 1952, only 18% of those interned were categorised as class enemies. Prostitutes comprised about half the population of the camp.

The camps were meant to instil a love for labour, and yet most of those interned were already familiar with physical labour, which the ideology portrayed as a privilege. Within two years, the Camps were closed and merged with prisons. Some of those interned came to be seen as social parasites and received longer sentences.

Smlsal provocatively argued that the main issue behind the camp’s failure was that the working classes comprised a large proportion of the camp population and that this was incompatible with Communist ideology.3 He sustained that the correctional imagination was crucial to their delegitimisation, which ideologically explained both why these individuals were flawed and the kinds of interventions that would rehabilitate them.

Failed Camps Failed Hospitals

Smlsal sustains that the correctional imagination associated with communism eventually delegitimised Czechoslovakian work camps. The camps were an ambitious project to refashion people into good communists, and are not a story about lawlessness. Instead, about how the correctional imagination tied to an ideology can affect a nation’s aspirations and efforts to remake itself. After the collapse of this system, the Soviet government needed prisons instead of political hospitals. Further, this failed experiment reveals the inherent tension between rehabilitative and punitive approaches.

Conclusions

The case of the Czechoslovakian work camps exemplifies a recurrent theme throughout the 20th century: the zeal to shape people anew through social and environmental interventions. This program assumed that such a change is possible. Where does this belief spring from? How universal was it? To what degree were such interventions similar to what was happening in other nations? This program reveals a close connection between ideology and the implementation of such programs.

In the case of Czechoslovakia, it is interesting to see the system collapse because its implementation was incongruent with the ideological framework that supported it. This suggests that worldviews can be paradigmatic and that crises need to be resolved within ideological frameworks. In the West, too, there were efforts to transform individuals into better citizens, but as Di Castri has pointed out (2024), these have largely been forgotten.

I wanted to thank you for subscribing. I am flattered that what started as a little project has matured. I am excited that Curing Crime is growing and welcoming new contributors. I have always wished this to be a collaborative enterprise.

Crime Monthly is a great way to recognise other writers and try to share their work. I really hope some of you click on these posts; they are well worth reading.

I wanted to wish you all happy holidays and a Happy New Year! A last minute root canal - stopped me from sending this earlier (and the final set of edits).

As many of you know, I had surgery last November.

Dispatches from a Wonderer

The World Madly Spins On

My Upcoming Friday Looks Like This…

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5 months ago · 3 likes · Christian Orlic

I also started an experimental treatment to try to eliminate some of my NF-related tumours. It has been a wild end of the year. Below you can read about my genetic condition and how I have used it to enrich my craft as a teacher.

Dispatches from a Wonderer

Today I will Feel Pain: Living and Teaching with NF

Today, I will feel pain…

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a year ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Christian Orlic

I had planned to post every week, but I have failed. During the year, I decided to take August off, which I think is healthy. I also missed some weeks. I will try to do better in 2026.

Both Crime Monthly and Beyond the Archives have been successful, valuable, and great fun, so I look forward to continuing with them. I am so very pleased to end the year with a post that celebrates (and hopefully drives traffic to) other writers and thinkers.

Crime, Corruption, and Drugs

shares the fascinating investigation into the activities of former Deputy Chief of the DEA’s Office of Financial Operations, Paul Campo. After retiring, Campo opened a private advisory firm. Soon thereafter, he allegedly started working for a drug cartel. Campo and Robert Sensi have been charged with “conspiracy to launder millions of dollars.”

Since then, an audit has found a series of irregularities during his tenure.

World of Crime Newsletter

He Knew Every U.S. Financial Weak Point. Prosecutors Say He Offered Them to CJNG.

A federal indictment unsealed on December 6 in the Southern District of New York has exposed a conspiracy that represents a catastrophic failure of U.S. counter-intelligence vetting. Paul Campo, the former Deputy Chief of the DEA’s Office of Financial Operations, and Robert Sensi, a career international “fixer” with a history of claiming CIA ties, have been charged with conspiring to launder millions of dollars and procure military-grade weaponry for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG…

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5 months ago · 11 likes · Chris Dalby

Recently, we published a short article arguing that, in the current political climate, too much attention is being paid to certain kinds of crimes. In this case, the very same people in charge of enforcing the law were involved in breaking it.

Deadly Delights: Poisonous Treats

A timely post for a festive time. That succinctly summarises “confectionery-related crimes”. These cases of poisoned chocolates, cakes, and treats will make you think.

The Detective's Notebook

Death by chocolate

As the festive season draws near, I’ve been thinking about confectionery-related crimes (not just overeating!). Agatha Christie uses poisoned chocolates as a murder weapon in several of her detective stories. In Partners in Crime, her second Tommy and Tuppence novel, Lois Hargreaves tells Tommy and Theodore Blunt about how she had received a box of choc…

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5 months ago · 9 likes · Dr Angela Buckley

We applaud the way in which the weaves historical detail into cogent arguments.

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Stolen Cars and International Car Trade

We are featuring a second post published at because it places a crime in an international context in an engaging and informative way.

There is a market for stolen high-end cars. The thieves use military-grade technology, violence, and threats to steal cars. The stolen vehicles reach West Africa in mere weeks. Upon arrival, they are sold and sometimes used to carry weapons.

World of Crime Newsletter

The $1 Billion Car Theft Pipeline - How Money Laundering Went Automotive

In April 2025, the NYPD raided a parking garage at 870 Jennings Street in the Bronx and found what they described as a “showroom.” Inside were row after row of gleaming cars. In pride of place, a 2025 Rolls-Royce Cullinan valued at $475,000. Next to it were Range Rovers and Mercedes G-Class cars…

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6 months ago · 8 likes · Chris Dalby

Mistakes, Extortion, Exploitation and Teen Boys

This is a harrowing read. This is the present, and not history. I am distraught, sad, and angry. We are failing our youth.

’s post describes this horrible ordeal and provides valuable advice on how to protect young adults and teens.

Tate was fifteen. By all accounts, he had a good, healthy relationship with his parents, who encouraged him to speak to them about anything.

He was baited by criminals who sought to extort money.

The scammers knew the names of people he knew and were familiar with his social network. They approached him, impersonating a girl and got him to exchange photos.

Then, they asked for money.

They threatened the young boy.

They told him that unless he paid, his life would be over.

For 143 minutes, they message.

When they realised he could not pay.

They bullied him even more.

During the last twenty minutes of his life, they messaged him every ten seconds.

They pushed Tate to kill himself.

And Tate did.

The post also mentioned a network known as 764. There, people share and celebrate (what the actual fuck!) the pain they cause others.

The Mind Detective

The 143 Minute Murder

November 6, 2025: A Timeline…

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5 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D.

I have worked as a secondary teacher, and it breaks my heart to read this. Yes, there are other tragedies, yes, there are other problems to address. But here is an instance where we can do better, but we are not doing enough. Teens, especially teenage boys, are particularly vulnerable, and it is our responsibility to provide them with the tools to thrive even when they make mistakes.

Once again, Happy New Year. I can’t wait to share with you what we got planned for next year.

The Plot Summary

The story begins when American graduate student Martin arrives in Oxford, hoping to convince the great logician, Professor Seldom, to serve as his supervisor. Seldom initially refuses him and is portrayed as being more concerned with his books and research, than with mentoring students. Seldom reluctantly joins forces with Martin when they are confronted with the murder of Martin’s landlady, Julia Eagleton, an elderly woman and longtime friend of Arthur.

Seldom finds an anonymous note left by the killer with the words “the first of a series,” followed by the elderly woman’s address and a cryptic drawing of a circle, which the professor immediately assumes must be the first of a logical series. They believe the killer is trying to provoke Seldom.

Subsequently, an apparent assisted suicide, a natural death, and a murder occur. All of which are preceded or followed by cryptic clues involving mathematical symbols, logical fallacies, and philosophical references, suggesting the killer is challenging Seldom and Martin to stop him through sheer intellect. Seldom and Martin desperately try to predict the next target based on the sequence. During their investigations, they visit a former student of Seldom, who attempted to lobotomize himself. Concurrently, the police investigate some of these and fumble.

The film ends with a plot twist, which challenges how the viewer sees these murders. What first seemed like a cryptic and murderous battle of wits between the mathematicians turned detective duo and the killer; ends up in an equally disturbing series of coincidences, tragedies, and manipulated crimes.

The Patterned History of Medicine

The killer’s logical series begins with a circle, which Seldom claims represents infinite possibilities. The second symbol is an Ichthys (the early Christian fish symbol), and the third is a triangle. Eventually, the series is linked to the tetractys, a triangular figure composed of ten points arranged in rows of one, two, three, and four, symbolising numerical harmony in the Pythagorean tradition.

Upon this discovery, Martin and Lorna, a nurse and Seldom’s former lover, connect the murders to Pythagorean symbolism. They speculate the next target will be a group of people, likely those with disabilities. Lorna explains that the Pythagoreans viewed intelligence as a form of superiority, implying that those of lower intelligence could be discarded or used as test subjects for medical advancements, such as organ transplants. They suspect Frank, a bus driver at Lorna’s hospital, whose daughter needs a transplant. They fear he intends to sacrifice a busload of children with disabilities to ensure his daughter’s survival, alluding to issues of systemic injustice2.

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Severing The Self Through Psychosurgery

The destruction of identity through neurosurgical interventions is a powerful theme in this film. The lobotomized characters are depicted as shells of their former selves. For example, Kalman, a former prodigious student of Professor Seldom, tries to lobotomize himself with a nail gun.

Kalman claims valid reasons for this drastic measure. His obsessive efforts to solve Gödel’s incompleteness theorems rendered him unstable, a condition worsened by a diagnosis of aggressive cancer. He came to view lobotomy as the ultimate escape; the only valid recourse from a world where certainty is impossible. After failing to convince Seldom to assist him in this brain-severing operation, Kalman used a nail gun on himself. Despite this self-inflicted trauma and his physical decay from cancer, he remains caught in a loop, incessantly writing the same four letters and a woman’s name.

During Martin and Seldom’s visit to Kalman, Seldom explains that a study of what comes next in a series found that a third of the answers that appeared silly were, in reality, very complex. The student wanted to test this on lobotomized patients because they are remarkably simple. Perhaps Kalman sought the lobotomy to clear his mind

Even though Kalman’s story features a physically disturbing portrayal, his lobotomy carries a metaphorical message: intellectual suicide. Kalman seeks to answer the unanswerable questions of the universe, and during his pursuit, he loses himself. This loss is also manifested by his progressive physical decay and deformity. He eventually decides to commit the severing of the mind, destroying that which makes him human.

The film appears to be criticising human ambition and the destructive nature of psychosurgery. The film depicts Kalman as grotesque, unlike other lobotomized patients. This possibly hints at the folly of trying to conquer knowledge.

Policing and Incompetence

The film portrays the police force in a decidedly negative light, depicting detectives as ignorant, misguided, and incompetent.

When Julia Eagleton is found, Seldom and Martin are disappointed to find the police do not understand the concept of a symbol or a logical series. Seldom dismissively explains that in such series, symbols must follow a specific order. While Seldom argues that “murder for intellectual reasons does not exist,” Martin insists the killer is challenging them. Martin notes that the murderer chose a victim whose death would not be surprising; the fact that the academics notice this, while the police do not, reflects poorly on the detectives.

This incompetence is reinforced through an anecdote Seldom shares about a man named Green. Green was killed by his wife in self-defense, but he had kept a diary outlining brilliant and absurd ways to kill her. The police were misled by the diary, which turned out to be a forgery written by the wife’s lover.

Throughout the film, the police continue to stumble. The police psychiatrist bizarrely suggests the killer is a repressed homosexual longing for Seldom. Later, a police plan to publish part of the series to flatter the killer’s ego fails miserably. When Martin rushes to the police believing he has solved the pattern, he is told Seldom beat him to it, implying the police are merely bystanders to the intellect of the two men. Finally, when the suspect’s bus crashes and explodes, Detective Peterson smirks, “So much for logic,” wrongly assuming the driver died while trying to escape.

The Resolution

Believing the killer to be dead, Martin decides to leave the UK with Lorna, but remains obsessed with the killer’s logical series. Briefly before boarding, he takes out his notes and, upon further inspection, realises Seldom lied about his understanding of the series. Lorna leaves, realizing Martin won’t let this go, while he heads out to confront Seldom.

They meet in a museum, where the truth is unveiled: Arthur Seldom knew the killer all along. He had been covering up the first murder when Martin unwittingly gave him the idea for the logical series to mask the crime. Seldom reveals that Beth killed her mother, Julia Eagleton, feeling enslaved by her care. She wanted to be with Martin, who had encouraged her to live freely. Seldom muses that Martin’s words were the “butterfly’s wings” that provoked a tornado, calling back to a discussion on chaos theory they shared when they first met.

Conclusion

The Oxford Murders is an interesting blend of murder mystery and plot twists wrapped in a veneer of academia. However, its critique of institutions - academic, policing, and medical - often feels superficial. The most glaring flaw is the unrealistic and poor interpretation of detective work. Conversely, the film offers a shallow yet compelling critique of medical ethics through Frank, a victim of a broken system, and Kalman, a man captivated by lobotomy regardless of the cost. Ultimately, the most profound theme explored is the pervasive power of human hubris: the search for prestige and the testing of boundaries often yield disastrous outcomes for everyone involved.

For example, President Donald Trump claimed America is becoming a

“lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare.

This week’s post is an invitation to broaden our discourse about crime.

My Phone Was Taken! Deport the Criminals?

The ongoing focus on petty crime and pickpockets takes over our conversation, and other systemic and structural issues can be ignored. There are countless cases where such robberies are linked to alleged immigrants, for example, in this video.

No one likes being robbed.

When I was eighteen, my mom and I were heading to dinner. We stopped to pick up one of her friends. I got out of the car to ring the doorbell, and out of nowhere, a group of men wielding guns appeared. One gun was pointed at the driver. Another of the men pointed a revolver at my mother. A third robber aimed his gun at me.

My mom was terrified that this was a kidnapping and not a robbery. She calmly told them she had lots to give them and offered her camera, her phone, and her jewellery. They told me to squat.

During the robbery, the thieves said “please,” and even thanked us for the stuff we surrendered. It felt long, as if every second somehow expanded, stretched, and expanded.

Then they were gone.

We suspected they were off-duty policemen because of the slang they used. Living with the fear of being robbed or being hurt in the process of being robbed is not a good way to live2.

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I do not want to lessen the pain, fear, and worry that regular crimes can cause. I’ve known several people whose houses have been robbed. Such events violate the assumed sanctity of our homes, the place where people tend to feel safer. These experiences can be difficult to overcome, which is why perceptions of crime can significantly affect how safe a community feels.

As a society, we should address and strive to mitigate these crimes, and, more importantly, ensure they do not become violent.

Such crimes can have devastating effects on a community if they reach a point where community members no longer feel safe living their everyday lives, doing everyday activities and errands. On the other hand, a small number of such crimes likely have little effect on the day-to-day life of non-victims.

I want us to keep talking about these crimes, but also consider how other crimes are affecting the societies we live in.

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Bigger Crimes?

Crimes at the highest echelons of nation-states arguably have a much greater impact and scale than other kinds of crime. Recently, President Nicholas Sarkozy of France and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil were sentenced to prison. Sarkozy seems to have convinced the courts he ought to be released, while Bolsonaro’s latest appeal was rejected. He is serving a twenty-seven-year prison term for plotting a coup. The current President of Brazil (Lula) had been sentenced to prison for corruption, but his conviction was recently overturned. Peru has impeached three Presidents in five years, amid corruption and ethical scandals. Looking at heads of state is worrying enough, and their roles and responsibilities make them profoundly impactful.3

The corrupt actions of these heads of state arguably have a bigger negative impact on their societies than a few pickpockets. When leaders have even more power, the situation appears more dire. North Korean dictators run totalitarian states, and President Putin has broken international law by invading Ukraine. Putin’s war potentially risks a big European war, which would affect millions more.

There are other cases where corrupt governments have negatively impacted their people. Mismanagement of public funds for private enrichment, or the adoption of policies driven by a political or lobbyist agenda, can hinder the development and progress of tens of thousands of people, sometimes spanning generations.

Big Firms, Big Crimes

In some cases, big companies can and do hurt people. Some big companies employ many people, comply with the law, and make efforts to have a positive impact. I do not mean to suggest that such companies are all good or all bad, but rather that, in some instances, they take actions that harm people. Some of these actions are corporate crimes.

In some cases, companies that prioritise profit over responsible operations have sometimes engaged in criminal activity. Naomi Oreskes, in her magisterial Merchants of Doubt, documented how tobacco companies knew cigarettes caused cancer, and worked on confusing the public so they could continue selling cigarettes. Similarly, big oil has also spent millions trying to combat science that suggests climate change is occurring. Numerous other ideas have caused harm, and people’s vulnerability has been exploited for profit. There is a site that collects information on the harms caused by various pseudoscientific ideas.

The modern medical establishment also has its share of criminal actors. Big pharmaceutical companies have also been accused of massaging data, even when people were suffering. Merck allegedly manipulated data to hide an increase in cardiovascular disease in people taking Vioxx, a medication to treat arthritis. Some experts have estimated that over fifty-five thousand people suffered early deaths as a result, and another study estimated this medication caused cardiac events in over 150.000 people. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma is a masterful critique of ongoing medical malpractice.

Financial crimes can have a significant impact on everyday people by harming the economy and their livelihoods. One could begin by examining Ponzi schemes like those of Bernie Madoff and the speculative investing that led to the latest financial crisis. Several significant insider trading cases have hurt investors. Many homeowners lost their homes. Sometimes companies mishandle people’s data; for example, Facebook accepted a $ 725 million settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Surprisingly, the individuals involved in these crimes are often from the very same countries that are being harmed.

Let me be clear: most kinds of crime hurt society and make life harder for everyday people. This brief detour is a reminder that other types of crime exist and can, conceivably, have a more harmful impact on communities. It is a call to broaden our conversation about crime and a reminder that focusing on certain crimes at the expense of others can be detrimental.

Do Immigrants Commit More Crimes?

In a previous post, we sought to determine crime rates per capita across different groups in Spain.

We, somewhat lazily, prompted ChatGPT to find data and then made some assumptions to calculate crime rates per capita for immigrants from various nations.4 ChatGPT collected the data, so one should be sceptical. It showed that some groups have a slightly higher per capita rate, but the difference was not very large. A fair comparison must exclude people below and above a certain age, as well as a few others who are unlikely to commit crimes, to avoid skewing your analysis.

In a later post, I want to explore the impact immigrants may have on crime rates.5

In some countries, certain immigrant groups are admittedly causing trouble. One can think of Eastern European gangs in Sweden. Are many of these individuals second-generation immigrants, and if so, what has gone awry?

Recently, the good thinkers at Cymposium published a series of articles on immigration and developing a sense of belonging. Sometimes, local populations could do more to help newcomers settle and grow.6 Would such efforts reduce the problems these people allegedly create? In another article, they engage in a thought experiment about Britain’s future to illustrate the choice ahead:

Cymposium

A Smaller Island: Britain Without Immigration, 2025–2050

It is always instructive, when considering the fate of nations, to ask a question that is never posed in the manifestos or ministerial statements: what happens if a society gets what it says it wants? The British electorate, or at least its noisier constituents, has long cried for the drawbridge to be pulled up, the shutters pulled down, and the ports closed to all but tourists and the odd Erasmus student. Imagine, then, that in January 2026, a government, say Conservative, say Reform, say whatever the populist weather demands, actually delivers. Immigration, that perennial bogeyman of the tabloids and the nightly news, is halted. Not “managed,” not “controlled,” but stopped…

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7 months ago · 13 likes · Cymposium

Often, the conversation about immigrants ignores the fact that most crimes are committed by locals, simply because there are a lot more locals. A British study between 2017 and 2020 found that about 80% of sexually assaulted women were attacked by someone they knew. In contrast, male victims are assaulted by strangers about 43% of the time.

Nation-states need to consider their long-term interests and evaluate which factors may increase the likelihood that an individual, whether a national or an immigrant, engages in criminal behaviour. Policies that effectively decrease such a likelihood should be embraced. I would urge

• Avoid making immigrants a scapegoat.

• Make evidence-based decisions.

  • Both John Shjarback and John Roman have written extensively on this issue, and their formidable substacks are a must for those interested in thinking deeply about crime.

• Evaluate the impact, including costs & benefits, of each intervention.

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I suspect most immigrants are law-abiding and contribute to our societies.

We can recognise that illegal immigration is a problem, and that several illegal immigrants are essential to our society working well. Often, illegal immigrants take jobs that locals are unwilling or uninterested in taking.

What is needed is immigration reform and deep thinking about how to ensure our societies can operate without the recourse to illegal immigrants.

We are delighted that Roman shares his analysis on Substack, and are concerned about the lack of similar discussions elsewhere. The kinds of articles examining crime reduction policies are essential in building safer communities.

Roman serves as Director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at NORC. He is a “nationally recognized expert on justice systems, firearms data, and evaluating safety and justice programs.” He has been the lead investigator in several projects related to firearms, criminal justice data, and more.

CC: What sparked your interest in studying crime? Was there anything specific?

I’m not sure! Maybe it was preordained: my formal training was 70% methods and 30% moral philosophy, my father was an investigator, and my brother is a prosecutor. When you shake that snow globe, I suppose a crime researcher is what you get. Also, there’s not a lot of opportunity for moral philosophers.

CC: Why Substack? What do you hope to achieve here? How do you balance storytelling with academic rigour when publishing?

There are very few outlets left in the social sciences to publish essays on general topics. Suppose you are interested in exploring why crime is up or down, whether crime acts like a virus (or not), how unemployment rates and the experience of being unemployed have different effects on crime, or something similar; there is nowhere to publish. The irony is that these are the questions the public, policymakers, and journalists explicitly ask. I hope to inject a bit of rigorous thinking into the questions that curious people seem most interested in, and Substack is a great way to do so.

CC: Briefly, what is the most pressing issue or the most intriguing unanswered question in your field? Why do you think it matters today?

Criminologists have few answers for why crime goes up and down—the field is focused on individual behaviors, why people commit crime, or why they desist. So there really is no policy guidance coming from the field. Suppose you ask, in a place with a lot of gun violence, should the government invest in community-based violent interventions or should it bring in the national guard? You’ll get a lot of theory, but not much in the way of empirical evidence. I think the field should have evidence-based answers to these questions.

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CC: What’s the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve learned in your research? Are there any historical cases or theories that you believe deserve more attention? Why?

Probably the most surprising finding in the field is that almost all of the credible explanations for the crime decline of the 1990s (and the decline of the last three years) have nothing to do with the criminal justice system. This should not be a surprise—if you read the conclusions of the Lyndon Johnson Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, published in 1967, you will find that about half of the recommendations are aimed at systems other than the criminal justice system. Somehow, we’ve forgotten these lessons.

CC: If the public could grasp just one key idea about crime and efforts to reduce criminal activity, what would it be and why?

I’d start by making an effort to educate people on key definitions. Crime and disorder are not the same thing. Prevention and deterrence are very different ideas. Security and policing are totally different. The big one is that the police deter crime, but they do not prevent it. Police and policing are really designed to deter crime—to raise the expected costs of committing a crime. Prevention—removing risks and building human capital—is something someone outside the police has to do. Once you understand that, it becomes easy to see how investing in schools and communities is a crime-fighting strategy.

CC: What role do you think science and medicine should play in crime prevention? Do you worry about how these can be exploited?

We do seem to be on the cusp of important and helpful medical advances. One explanation for why crime declined in the 1990s was that anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, and anti-psychotic medications became widely available.

Now, there is emerging evidence that GLP-1s can help with a range of disorders, including behavioral health and substance abuse, which is very exciting. On the technology side, I would expect policing to look almost entirely different in five years as a range of sophisticated surveillance technologies becomes widely available. This will change the deterrence calculus in material ways, and is very promising, though I do worry that this will seriously curtail civil liberties without regulation.

I can’t predict yet whether the net effect of this surveillance age will be negative or positive.

CC: You must find many dark, disturbing, and challenging materials during your career. How do you deal with this work?

It’s a challenge. I worked with a team that coded data from hundreds of hand-written records of sexual assaults and homicides. I read the excruciatingly detailed Secret Service account of what happened in the two classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary. I meet victims of terrible crimes and officers who have dealt with hugely traumatic incidents. Etc. It definitely wears on you. I think it is a big part of why I’m on Substack—academic publishing does not move the needle on policy, so I’m searching for a better way to help. It feels less challenging if you feel like you are making some contribution.

CC: We think our readers would find your work valuable. Could you recommend 2-3 of your posts?

Thanks! This article describes hundreds of evidence-based policies that could reduce crime that do not involve the justice system:

External Processing

100 Ideas for Reducing Crime in Cities—A Blueprint for Action

Crime declined rapidly in the 1990s, almost everywhere, and almost all at once. I’ve written a lot about this because there are many lessons from the crime decline that can help to reduce crime and violence today and in the future…

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3 years ago · 16 likes · 2 comments · John K. Roman, PhD

This article talks about the recent crime spike and subsequent crime decline and identifies causes that explain both:

External Processing

Explaining the COVID Violence Spike and the Roaring Crime Decline

The last five years have been a remarkable time in America for crime and justice…

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a year ago · 9 likes · 7 comments · John K. Roman, PhD

We are always looking for accounts to follow and others to feature in Beyond the Archives. Please share your recommendations in the comments.

Lawrence says a strange thing happens when you ask a police officer about the history of policing.2 He is often met with blank stares or some references to “Peelian principles.” These officers tend to shrug and say their job is to deal with the present, and “what’s happening on the streets,” rather than the past. If you insist and ask about stop and search, about trust, and the sense that the relationship between the public and the police is broken, you are inevitably talking about the past, whether you would like to or not.

Missing Archives and Hidden Stories

The British Police Force is among the few public institutions in the United Kingdom that do not need to follow the Public Records Act. Thus, most of the forty-five forces in operation across the UK have no obligation to preserve their records. A subset of these have decided to maintain informal museums, whereas others bin their archives. Only the Metropolitan Police is formally required to make its records public, but the release of these records is selective and strategic. According to Lawrence, this reveals that these forces resist historical awareness.

Lawrence works as a historian at the Open University, and he has started collaborating with police officers to change how they approach their history. He sustained that this lack of historical reflection is a structural flaw, and that current police training is narrow, ruthlessly practical, and uninterested in context. These institutions have treated history and especially the history of race and policing as dangerous. He suggests that this ongoing practice could border on negligence.

Why History Matters in Policing?

A proper police history is not meant to turn police officers into academic historians. Instead, historising policing can help police officers understand the context in which they police. Namely, their jobs involve making decisions and taking actions that are loaded with meaning.

For example, Lawrence observes that when Black and Asian communities claim that they are being over-policed and insufficiently protected, they are expressing pre-existing anxieties reflecting decades of practice. Thus, each potentially conflictual situation is interpreted through a prism tainted by previous experiences. Recent surveys substantiate these claims, with close to 58% of ethnic minority Britons thinking that the Metropolitan Police is racist and misogynistic.3 Lawrence claims that history, when done well and used appropriately, can clear everyone’s view.

Lawrence sustains that a proper police history could help with forming professional identity and culture. More importantly, such a historical analysis can provide operational insights by revealing how tactics have worked across space and time. Such a history could guide ongoing and future transformations of policing by inviting those in charge to reflect on previous efforts to change policing.

Building Impactful Historical Training

Lawrence has been collaborating with the Thames Valley Police (TVP), which operates in a socially and economically diverse area West of London. TVP reached out for help as part of the National Police Race Action Plan, which called for efforts to address institutional racism. TVP asked Lawerence to help develop a training program that included videos, materials, and real stories to which their staff could relate.

Lawrence and his team spent six months delivering sessions to close to two thousand officers. The sessions began by looking at the present and focusing on racial disparities in stop and search, deaths in custody, and use of force. The instructors did so while allowing the discomfort to fester. Then, they asked their students whether these disparities were justifiable and whether they reflected the actions of a few individual bad apples. After introducing these present-day disparities, they began speaking about the past through testimonies, archival footage, and case studies from the force’s own jurisdiction.

These historians used juxtaposition provocatively. For example, they set footage from openly racist officers in the 1980s against contemporary interviews.4 They encouraged present officers to confront the past of their jurisdiction, and while not all officers liked it, the activity was very engaging. Lawrence claims that some officers admitted they had never considered the deeper history behind their daily routines. For others, it was the first time they considered what allyship might actually look like in uniform.

The program was successful, and three-quarters of participants reported that the training shifted their understanding. More than two-thirds said they were interested in more historical context. Finally, close to 40% said they might approach their job differently because of the training.

Contested History

While these numbers are not earth-shattering, they are significant, especially in a context where change occurs slowly. Lawrence suggests that historical knowledge can impact police practices, but only if it is made digestible for officers. He suggests that academic history needs to be adapted to better meet the needs of police officers. Police officers are practical, cautious, and often politically anxious; thus, reaching them requires finding stories that connect personal pride to institutional accountability.

After this successful program, the British Transport Police reached out to the same team. This police force is responsible for railways, one of the most surveilled terrains in the country. Lawrence and his team have designed an online, interactive program that helps users view history not as a distraction, but as a valuable tool.

What Comes Next

Lawrence argues that every act of policing is also an act of memory. Memories that speak to who is dangerous, who is innocent, whose complaints matter, whose deaths are routine. Thus, the crisis of police legitimacy cannot be solely solved by adding history modules to police training, but this can help.

Lawrence aims for a more profound reckoning, where officers are taught not only the procedures of their role but also the legacies they have inherited with the badge. He hopes that history can instil honesty in institutions and individuals, which is pivotal in a profession built on trust.

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Conclusions: On the Uses of Historical Study

Academic history demands a degree of intellectual honesty and treating historical actors in terms of their own time. In contrast to many disciplines that write their history, trained historians avoid producing works of hagiography. This is much needed for institutions like the police force.

Curing Crime applauds Lawrence’s efforts in transforming academic history into practical, useful materials. Such an approach seems especially promising for institutions whose interactions with the public significantly impact the everyday lives of ordinary people.

Despite the publication posts being deeply sceptical of efforts to use scientifico-medical approaches to explain why people commit crimes and how to reduce Crime, Curing Crime strongly thinks that these tools are essential in our attempt to understand the causes of Crime and how to reduce it. Quantifying the effects of such training programs is pivotal in determining their utility.5 Such efforts to quantify should extend beyond surveys and investigate whether those who received training have changed their practice.

Lastly, we cannot emphasise how carefully such programs need to be designed. The historians in this case are making choices about which present problems to highlight, which case studies from the jurisdiction collection to utilise, and which kinds of materials to juxtapose. It is in this design that the power of the intervention lies, and such designs have, on occasion, had unintended consequences.

This week, I will undergo surgery to remove benign tumours associated with my genetic disease, which are causing pain and discomfort.

You can read more about my experience with neurofibromatosis here:

Dispatches from a Wonderer

Today I will Feel Pain: Living and Teaching with NF

Today, I will feel pain…

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a year ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Christian Orlic

Back to our newsletter. This week, I share with you a surprising and interesting set of posts. They include hoaxes, systemic prison abuse, systemic failure to care for young offenders, and a series of wonderful objects.

Hoaxes and Hate Crimes: Zip Ties, Politics, and Body Modification

Reading this piece made me both angry and sad. does a wonderful job laying out this bizarre case and exploring current explanations for such crimes.1

Natalie Greene claimed she was the victim of a politically motivated hate crime. She was severely cut and hurt. She claimed she was attacked. The police investigated. She has been charged with making false statements. It seems she planned this, and police have unveiled evidence that she allegedly legally paid a body modification expert to make those cuts.

Johnston provides an impartial account of what is known and what is at stake. For me, false accusations are wasteful — the hours and resources dedicated to this would be better dedicated to other issues. On the other hand, such alleged crimes could help work out processes. Secondly, the investigator’s ability to determine that an alleged crime was a hoax suggests that sleuthing, at least sometimes, works.

The Mind Detective

The Psychology Behind Natalie Greene's Alleged Staged Political Attack

Natalie Greene, 26, has been charged with conspiracy to commit false statements and hoaxes, and with making false statements to federal law enforcement. She has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. This analysis examines the allegations and evidence as presented in the federal criminal complaint…

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6 months ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D.

Changing Views on Crime

Recently, I have been interested in perceptions of crime.2

In my historical work, we often distinguish actor categories from analytical categories. The former refers to what historical actors thought and how they categorised the world, as opposed to how we think.3 One of the strange insights that comes from this perspective is that belief, whether warranted or not, can shape behaviour.4

The incredible has been posting about surveys that suggest Americans are concerned about crime, even if crime rates are actually decreasing. There, finally, seems to be a shift, and people are starting to change how they think about crime.

I wonder whether this shift will be attributed to those currently in power.

Jeff-alytics

Perceptions of Crime Are Shifting

Gallup released its annual poll gauging how people perceive crime — both locally and nationally. I’ve written about both perceptions of crime broadly and Gallup’s annual poll, and I created a podcast designed to discuss the perceptions issue specifically (which you should listen to), so sufficient to say that I think it’s important to try and make perce…

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6 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Jeff Asher

Failing Our Youth

, a retired Judge shares a passionate plea to reform how Georgia treats juvenile offenders. Teske argues that teenagers are not adults and thus merit carefully designed treatment that helps them and their community.

According to Teske, Georgia currently fails to live up to its promise. In contrast, Teske claims certain programs have succeeded in reducing recidivism.

Justice ReDesigned

The Parole Mirage: Georgia’s Broken Promise to Juvenile Lifers

Author’s Note…

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6 months ago · Steven Teske

Victorian Sleuthing In Ten Objects

I think objects provide an important entryway into understanding a historical period. This is a fascinating dive into the world of Victorian detectives and their sleuthing. describes ten objects that detectives used in Victorian England.

Victorian Sleuths used dogs, fingerprinting, lights and more. This is a lovely approach and allows readers to contextualise sleuthing in Victorian England.

The Detective's Notebook

Detective history in 10 objects

After two real-life murder cases on the recent pages of The Detective’s Notebook and before another even more gruesome (and famous) one, I thought I’d pause with a ‘lighter’ examination of the history of Victorian and Edwardian police detectives through the equipment they used to solve crimes, which offers a tantalising glimpse into their sleuthing work…

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6 months ago · 4 likes · Dr Angela Buckley

Systemic Abuse in An American Prison

This New York Times article discusses systemic prison abuse at an American prison in Mississippi.

For years, guards beat prisoners off camera and encourage other inmates to join in. Those who join in are often known as trusties, and they are rewarded with better living conditions and other privileges. This highlights the importance of designing good systems and structures.

My surgery will be at Johns Hopkins. I flew to the US yesterday. It also happens to be Thanksgiving here. So thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. I also wanted to thank the authors of these wonderful posts. There are many other posts that I could have chosen, but alas, here we are. Best.

Teske wrote various articles on juvenile justice and child welfare, as well as a book called Reform Juvenile Justice Now. He was an adjunct Law Professor in Atlanta and currently teaches criminal justice studies and business law at Pima Community College in Tucson.

Teske’s Substact is an accessible, thoughtful analysis of current events through the eyes of a former Judge. These articles are written with compassion, empathy, and a genuine effort to engage in dialogue. His posts connect current events to legal issues, and demonstrate the importance of taking a humane approach to these issues.

CC: What sparked your interest in being a judge? Was there anything specific? What about your interest in youth crime?

I was born in Tucson, Arizona, and after my father graduated from the University of Arizona, he accepted a position as a U.S. Public Health Advisor with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, where he remained until retiring in the late 1990s. Though my family settled in Georgia, my heart never really left the Sonoran Desert. My parents knew how much I loved Tucson, so during my high school summers, they sent me back to stay with my aunt and uncle.

My uncle had recently graduated from the University of Arizona College of Law and was working as a prosecutor in the Pima County Attorney’s Office. I would ride to work with him each morning and spend the day observing courtroom proceedings. Watching justice unfold—sometimes imperfectly, but always with purpose—captivated me. It sparked my curiosity about the law and, more importantly, the role of lawyers as advocates.

While many see the law through television dramas—prosecutors and defense attorneys battling in courtrooms—I was drawn to something deeper: the power of advocacy to protect the vulnerable. Reading about the civil rights movement and landmark cases like Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and dismantled Jim Crow segregation, showed me how the law could be a tool not just for punishment, but for progress.

I often say I didn’t plan to become a juvenile court judge—I accidentally fell into it, and I’m grateful I did.

At the time, I was a partner in a law firm and served as a trial attorney. My firm was contracted by the Georgia Attorney General’s Office to represent state employees sued for alleged civil rights violations under Section 1983—the federal statute that allows citizens to sue government employees acting “under color of law.” The irony wasn’t lost on me: I’d once dreamed of suing the government for violating civil rights, and here I was defending it.

After several years of this work, a senior assistant attorney general called with a request. The state needed someone to step in and represent the Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS) in my home county—handling child abuse and neglect cases in juvenile court. These were civil proceedings, separate from the criminal prosecutions, and involved petitions to protect children by removing them from unsafe homes. I said yes—not wanting to bite the hand that helped feed my firm—and soon found myself immersed in the world of child welfare law.

In time, I also began handling probate matters involving incapacitated adults in need of protection. The work was demanding, but it gave me a front-row seat to the human side of justice. I came to understand how poverty, trauma, and systemic failure intersect in people’s lives—and how the courtroom can be both a place of accountability and of compassion.

A few years later, the chief judge of our juvenile court invited me to lunch. She confided that she planned to retire and encouraged me to apply for her seat. I did—and in 1999, I was appointed to the bench.

What began as an unexpected detour became my life’s calling.

My interest in youth crime grew naturally from the moment I took the bench. The chief judge at the time knew my background—before becoming a lawyer, I had worked the inner-city streets of Atlanta in the 1980s as a parole officer, when the city’s housing projects were considered by HUD among the most dangerous in the country. I later served as the chief parole officer for Atlanta and then as the assistant director of field services for Georgia’s parole system, overseeing statewide offender programming.

That experience gave me a deep understanding of evidence-based practices that actually reduce recidivism. So when I joined the juvenile court, the chief judge asked me to take a hard look at our local juvenile justice system and identify areas for reform. I not only conducted my own study but also brought in a nationally recognized expert to provide an outside, objective assessment. I knew that credible, independent recommendations would strengthen the case for change.

The reforms that followed transformed our court. Over time, they became a national model for community-based alternatives and school-justice partnerships. By the time I retired, referrals of youth from police to the juvenile court had dropped by 82 percent—proof that when you treat kids as developing human beings instead of hardened offenders, both they and the community win.

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CC: Why Substack? What do you hope to achieve here? How do you balance storytelling with academic rigour when publishing?

I chose Substack because it has become a kind of refuge for serious writers—many of whom came from major news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others—who wanted to keep writing freely and thoughtfully after leaving traditional journalism. That says something powerful about Substack as a platform.

I was also drawn to the quality of the writing here. When you share space with gifted and seasoned writers, you feel a healthy pressure to raise your own bar. Substack challenges me to sharpen my thinking, refine my voice, and ensure that what I publish is not just opinion, but opinion grounded in fact, data, and lived experience.

Don’t get me wrong—Substack is a place for opinion. But it’s also a place where opinions must earn their keep. To gain traction here, ideas have to be reasoned, supported, and defensible. That’s what I value most about it—and why Justice ReDesigned found its home on this platform.

Justice ReDesigned

Justice ReDesigned is a publication and podcast by Judge Steven Teske (Ret.), focused on exposing injustices and reimagining public systems—from juvenile justice to adult criminal justice, child welfare, education, tribal sovereignty, and beyond.

By Steven Teske

My wife asked me when I launched Justice ReDesigned on Substack, what was my end goal, and I told her my goal was—and remains—to help people understand that justice is not a simple or static concept. We use the word so casually in America that I fear we’ve begun to take it for granted.

But justice, in its truest form, is complex. It’s not just about laws or verdicts—it’s about patience, sacrifice, process, mercy, and faith. It requires both courage and humility, and it demands that we look beyond ourselves to the well-being of others.

I write to remind readers that justice doesn’t live in slogans or headlines. It lives in how we govern, how we treat one another, and how we respond when power is abused.

The timing of my arrival on Substack was no accident. I began publishing shortly after Donald Trump’s second election, at a time when a flurry of executive orders began to compromise civil liberties and economic justice alike. Tariffs that hurt working families, policies that favor the powerful at the expense of the struggling—these aren’t abstractions. They’re daily injustices that reveal how fragile democracy becomes when we grow complacent. Trump’s presidency has given me no shortage of material—too much, frankly, for one writer to keep up with.

But my purpose isn’t to persuade those whose minds are closed. I write instead for those who already understand the meaning of justice and feel disheartened watching it erode. My aim is to affirm them—to tell them their frustration is legitimate, their anger righteous, and their hope still necessary. If my words can remind even a few readers that justice is worth fighting for, not as a partisan goal but as a moral one, then Justice ReDesigned will have achieved what I set out to do.

For me, the balance between storytelling and academic rigor traces back to my early education. As an Honors student in my master’s program, I took specialized courses in Argumentative Writing and Technical Writing. Argumentative writing taught me the art of persuasion through narrative—the ability to make ideas breathe and connect emotionally. Technical writing, on the other hand, instilled in me the discipline of structure, clarity, and precision. Those two worlds—heart and head—became the foundation of how I write today.

But my writing truly evolved after I married my wife, Sheryl. She’s a gifted English teacher and a natural storyteller who has an intuitive sense of rhythm and tone. Sheryl taught me how to make even the most technical ideas come alive—how to use metaphors, similes, and, when appropriate, a bit of wit or satire in the spirit of Bill Maher or Jon Stewart.

So, when readers visit Justice ReDesigned, they’ll find essays that reflect both sides of me: the academic writer who supports arguments with data, research, and legal precedent, and the storyteller who wants readers to feel the urgency of justice as much as understand it. I was a good writer before I met Sheryl, but she helped me become a better one—someone who can make complex issues not just understandable, but compelling.

CC: Briefly, what is the most pressing issue or the most intriguing unanswered question in your field. Why do you think it matters today?

One of the most intriguing unanswered questions in juvenile justice is this: Why did youth crime fall so dramatically after 1995?

During the 1980s and early 1990s, juvenile crime rose sharply across the nation. Then, almost as suddenly, it began to decline—plummeting to levels not seen since the 1950s. Despite decades of research and speculation, there’s still no definitive explanation supported by hard evidence. We can identify the forces that contributed to the earlier rise—crack cocaine, urban disinvestment, failing schools, poverty—but we don’t fully understand what caused the sudden, sustained drop.

What we do know is that our response to the rise was catastrophic. Spurred by the now-debunked “super-predator” theory advanced by political scientist John DiIulio, states across the country passed “get-tough” laws that treated children as adults. Legislatures acted on fear instead of fact—passing punitive laws even as crime rates were already starting to fall.

The consequences remain with us today: thousands of young people, now grown, are still serving adult sentences imposed during that era of panic. The lesson is sobering but vital—when we make policy based on hysteria rather than data, we create injustice in the name of preventing it. Understanding why juvenile crime fell matters, because until we do, we’ll never stop swinging between overreaction and neglect in how we respond to youth behavior.

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CC: What’s the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve learned in your research?

The most surprising—and counterintuitive—lesson I’ve learned in over two decades of juvenile justice reform is this: what looks soft on crime is what’s truly tough on crime.

Our instincts tell us that being “tough” means harsher sentences, more prisons, and treating kids like adults. But the evidence tells a very different story. When we react to crime with punishment alone, we often make things worse. In fact, the harsher we are, the more likely we are to increase recidivism.

This misunderstanding goes back to the mid-1970s, when sociologist Robert Martinson published what became known as the “Nothing Works” article. He concluded that no programs effectively reduced reoffending—a claim that sent shockwaves through criminology and corrections. Ironically, Martinson’s pessimism sparked a wave of serious research that proved the opposite. Once we began evaluating programs with scientific rigor, we discovered that many interventions do work when they are evidence-based and properly targeted.

We now know that offenders aren’t all alike. Risk assessment tools can identify who is high risk versus low risk to reoffend. That distinction matters. If we treat low-risk offenders like high-risk offenders—over-supervising or incarcerating them—we actually make them worse. Conversely, if we treat high-risk offenders like low-risk ones, we waste resources and see no improvement. The key is to match the intensity of supervision and services to each individual’s needs.

Those needs—what we call criminogenic factors—include issues like impulsivity, antisocial peers, family dysfunction, substance abuse, and poor educational engagement. By addressing these factors through targeted, evidence-based programs such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, and Multi-Systemic Therapy, we can rewire thinking patterns, heal families, and reduce crime.

When I applied these principles on the bench, we also recognized that kids can’t focus on changing their behavior if their basic needs—food, housing, transportation, safety—aren’t met. So we used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a foundation, ensuring that families had stability before asking them to engage in therapy or skill-building programs.

This approach is far more complex than simply locking someone up—but it works. In my jurisdiction, juvenile crime referrals dropped by 82%. And because every kid eventually becomes an adult, preventing delinquency today prevents adult crime tomorrow.

CC: Are there any historical cases or theories that you believe deserve more attention? Why? Are there any particular rulings?

One issue I believe deserves far more attention is the question of whether juveniles who face long-term incarceration should have the same right to a jury trial as adults.

Under current law, adults charged with offenses carrying more than six months of incarceration are entitled to a jury trial under the Sixth Amendment. Juveniles, however, are not—despite the fact that many states now allow youth to be confined for years in what are euphemistically called “Youth Development Campuses.” In reality, these facilities often resemble adult prisons, complete with razor wire and isolation units.

This discrepancy stems from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in McKeiver v. Pennsylvania, where the Court held that juveniles do not have a constitutional right to a jury trial. At the time, the juvenile system was viewed as “rehabilitative, not punitive,” and the Court feared that importing adult procedures would destroy its supposed informality and benevolence. But half a century later, the juvenile system has changed dramatically. In the wake of the “super-predator” panic of the 1990s, legislatures across the country adopted laws that blurred the line between juvenile and adult justice. Children are now routinely tried as adults or confined in conditions indistinguishable from adult prisons.

Given that reality, it’s time to reexamine McKeiver. If we are going to treat juveniles like adults in sentencing and confinement, then fundamental fairness demands they receive the same constitutional protections when determining guilt or innocence. The right to a jury trial—one of our most sacred guarantees—should not depend on age when the consequences are measured in years of lost freedom.

CC: What books, films, or documentaries would you recommend for someone looking to understand your field better?

Two works stand out for anyone who wants to truly understand the field of juvenile justice—its promise when grounded in research, and its peril when it strays from it.

A Handbook for Evidence-Based Juvenile Justice Systems

The first is A Handbook for Evidence-Based Juvenile Justice Systems by James C. Howell, John Wilson, Mark Lipsey, Megan Howell, and Nancy Hodges. This book is an essential resource for anyone interested in how data-driven practices can transform youth justice. It brings together decades of research on effective interventions, policy reform, and the use of technology to reduce recidivism. The authors emphasize the enormous payoff in identifying and treating the relatively small number of youth who become serious, violent, or chronic offenders—and they outline a comprehensive, evidence-based strategy for doing just that.

The framework they present—the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders—recognizes that early intervention, developmental understanding, and targeted treatment make communities safer than incarceration ever will. I’m honored that my School-Justice Partnership model is featured in this book as part of that evidence-based framework.

Kids for Cash

The second is Kids for Cash by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist William Ecenbarger. It’s a sobering account of how juvenile justice can go terribly wrong when ethics and evidence are ignored. The book exposes the infamous Luzerne County, Pennsylvania scandal—where two judges accepted millions in kickbacks for sending thousands of children to for-profit detention centers, often after sham hearings. It’s part true-crime thriller, part moral reckoning.

Ecenbarger’s book—and the 2014 documentary of the same name—brought national attention to one of the darkest chapters in juvenile justice. It also discusses my work and the School-Justice Partnership model as a national safeguard against the kind of abuses that occurred in Luzerne County. Following the scandal, I was invited to meet privately with Pennsylvania’s judges to discuss reform and accountability—a conversation that, while confidential, was deeply humbling for everyone involved.

Together, these two books capture both sides of the justice system: the research-based path that leads to rehabilitation—and the moral collapse that occurs when power and profit take its place.

CC: If the public could grasp just one key idea about crime and justice, what would it be and why?

For far too long, our approach to crime has been almost entirely punitive—focused solely on the offender and the punishment to be imposed. We’ve convinced ourselves that once the sentence is handed down, justice has been done. But real justice is far more complex. It requires that we look at the harm caused not only to individuals, but to relationships and communities.

Restorative justice expands the lens. It recognizes three stakeholders in every crime: the offender, the victim, and the community. It seeks to repair harm by including the victim’s voice, fostering accountability in the offender, and strengthening the fabric of the community that both share.

When done safely and voluntarily, restorative practices can bring victims and offenders together in structured dialogue—giving victims the opportunity to explain the impact of the crime, and giving offenders the chance to take meaningful responsibility. Even in cases involving serious or violent crimes, research shows the power of restorative communication.

A remarkable study presented in a TED Talk by neuroscientist Dan Reisel found that violent offenders who engaged in restorative justice programs showed measurable changes in brain activity—specifically, reduced volatility and increased empathy after months of mediated interaction with victims.

Restorative justice doesn’t mean being “soft” on crime—it means being smart on healing. It reminds us that justice isn’t complete until the harm has been addressed for everyone involved.

CC: Your articles often show you to be a deeply empathetic person who thinks that an individual’s context significantly affects their life. How has your career as a judge influenced your thinking, specifically as it relates to people who commit crimes?

There’s a reason we hold hearings: to see the person and to hear the person. What’s written on paper is never enough. I’ve read countless reports recommending harsh sentences—some of which seemed justified—until I met the individual behind the file.

One case I’ll never forget is Will Lewis, a 15-year-old lieutenant in a gang involved in a series of robberies. The report recommended sending him to a youth prison for five years, and based on what I read, he probably deserved it. But when I met him in person, I saw something different. He was articulate, intelligent, and genuinely remorseful. More importantly, I saw potential.

I continued the hearing and dug deeper. Will had seven siblings, no father at home, and a mother who was evicted every few months. After their last eviction, they moved across the county, where Will reconnected with an old school friend who had joined a gang. When Will confided that he was tired of being homeless, his friend told him that if he joined, he’d never be evicted again—they’d make sure the rent was paid. To a 15-year-old boy desperate to protect his family, that sounded like salvation. And for a while, it was—they had food, a roof, and stability.

That’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in real life. Will wasn’t chasing crime; he was chasing security. Once we helped his mother secure housing assistance, SNAP, and Medicaid, I placed Will in our accountability court—the Second Chance Program for high-risk youth. He not only completed the program but graduated high school, earned a bachelor’s degree, and went on to complete a master’s in cybersecurity. Today, he has a successful career and is a taxpayer, not a defendant.

My years on the bench taught me that we can’t sentence people from a distance. Context matters. Every life has a story, and until we take the time to understand it, justice will always fall short. My mother used to tell me, “Steve, if it’s easy, it’s probably not the right thing to do.” She was right. True justice requires effort—and empathy.

CC: What are the biggest challenges judges face when ruling on youth crimes? Do you think the current options for convicted youth are enough?

One of the greatest challenges judges face in youth crime cases is convincing the public—and sometimes even fellow policymakers—that incarceration should not be our default response. This is especially difficult in communities that equate “tough on crime” with being harsh, when in reality the evidence shows that what looks soft is what truly works.

For judges who understand evidence-based practices, the challenge is not the courtroom—it’s public perception. Community-based programs, restorative approaches, and treatment models don’t always look like justice to the public. They require patience, resources, and faith in data, which is a hard sell in a world accustomed to immediate punishment and nightly crime headlines.

I was fortunate. In more than two decades on the bench, I never had a high-profile case that triggered a media frenzy questioning my approach. But my district attorney once reminded me that I had often said it was only a matter of time before a tragedy would test our resolve—a rare case where a youth in one of our programs might reoffend in a serious way. And when it happened, she told me, “Judge, we’re ready for it.”

She was right. We had the data. We could show that while about 65% of youth released from secure confinement reoffend within three years, only 17% of those in our Second Chance accountability program did. So yes, one case drew painful attention—but the broader truth remained: the old punitive model would have produced more crime, not less.

That’s the paradox judges face every day. The public demands certainty, but justice deals in probabilities. My job was to make choices that gave kids the highest probability of success, even if it meant accepting the smallest chance of failure. Because real leadership—especially in judging—means doing what’s right, not what’s easy.

CC: What role do you think science and medicine should play in the courtroom? Do you worry about how these can be exploited?

Science and medicine now play a vital role in the courtroom, especially since we began asking a fundamental question: what actually works to reduce crime?

Decades ago, sociologist Robert Martinson published what became known as the “Nothing Works” article, claiming that no program effectively reduced recidivism. Ironically, that article changed everything. It sparked a wave of legitimate research into correctional and therapeutic practices, leading to the evidence-based revolution we rely on today.

Now we have data—much of it accessible through the U.S. Department of Justice’s website, crimesolutions.gov—that categorizes which programs are proven effective, which show promise, and which do not. From cognitive behavioral therapy to family-based interventions, science gives judges the tools to make informed decisions rather than intuitive ones.

But with progress comes risk. The term “evidence-based” has become a marketing label, and there’s a real danger of exploitation by entrepreneurs who see opportunity more than obligation. Too many programs claim scientific credibility without implementing their methods with fidelity—the rigorous adherence to the structure, dosage, and evaluation that make them evidence-based in the first place.

Courts and correctional systems must therefore be discerning consumers of science. It’s not enough to adopt a program with a good name; we must ensure it’s delivered with integrity. When science is respected and implemented faithfully, it becomes justice’s strongest ally. When it’s misused or commercialized, it becomes another form of injustice—disguised as innovation.

CC: You must find many dark, disturbing, and challenging materials during your legal career. How do you deal with this work?

The hardest part of my career has never been the law—it’s been the suffering I’ve had to witness. Over the years, I’ve presided over cases that no human being should ever have to hear: a six-month-old child raped by a mother’s boyfriend; a mother with schizophrenia who, believing voices that told her her infant was possessed by a demon, placed her baby in scalding water to “drive the demon out.” These images never leave you. Even now, as I talk about them, I feel the same tears I did the day I heard the testimony.

What I’ve come to understand is that judges, social workers, and police officers often carry secondary trauma. We absorb the pain we encounter, and it leaves an imprint. For me, the only way through it has been family—my wife, Sheryl, most of all. She is my refuge. When I’ve had a brutal day, I can break down in her arms and cry, and she just holds me until the world feels safe again.

But I also know there are so many people—victims, parents, even professionals—who carry their trauma alone. Remembering them keeps me humble and grateful. It reminds me that empathy isn’t just a professional asset; it’s a moral responsibility.

CC: We think our readers would find your work valuable. Could you recommend 2-3 of your posts?

Thank you — I’d be honored to share a few pieces that capture the spirit of my work on Justice ReDesigned.

If your readers are interested in juvenile justice reform, I’d recommend starting with “The Cost of Cruelty: Why the ‘Get Tough’ Approach to Juvenile Crime Fails Everyone.”

Justice ReDesigned

The Cost of Cruelty: Why the “Get Tough” Approach to Juvenile Crime Fails Everyone

In response to pockets of crime and sensational media coverage, the White House has escalated its rhetoric and policy push to “get tough” on juvenile offenders, particularly in Washington, D.C. This includes calls to prosecute children as young as 14 as adults and efforts to repeal successful “second look” laws that allow incarcerated youth to prove the…

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7 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Steven Teske

In this essay, I unpack decades of data showing that harsh sentencing and “adult time for adult crime” rhetoric do more harm than good—creating more victims, not fewer. It’s both a moral and fiscal argument for replacing retribution with evidence-based rehabilitation.

A second piece I’d suggest is “When Lawmakers Lock the Gate and Throw Away the Key: Why Maryland—and My Own State—Must Let Judges Judge.” This article looks at the dangers of mandatory minimums and legislative overreach that strip discretion from judges. It’s a call to restore judicial judgment and human context to a system that too often values politics over people.

Justice ReDesigned

When Lawmakers Lock the Gate and Throw Away the Key: Why Maryland—and My Own State—Must Let Judges Judge

Part one of this series pulled back the curtain on the political takedown of Maryland’s Secretary of Juvenile Services—Vincent Schiraldi. That part doesn’t need repeating. The facts speak loud enough…

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10 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Steven Teske

Both essays reflect what Justice ReDesigned is all about: reimagining justice as something deeper than punishment—something rooted in fairness, data, and humanity.

It was a real pleasure to collaborate with Judge Teske, and I hope you Subscribe to his wonderful Substack.

In this issue, we explore exciting research on crime-related topics, including sentencing, justice, and gender1. Drawing on recently presented work, this post discusses whether women were treated more leniently in the courts, the difficulties in inquests examining infanticide, and how political considerations affected decisions to grant mercy to death row inmates.

We begin with two different studies that investigate whether crimes committed by women are treated differently. Both and Brown find that what initially appears to be a case of gendered justice is actually a product of different factors. Brown found that the women perpetrators were not treated differently by the courts and that narratives in the press were not gendered. Similarly, Michell unveils that inquests involving infanticide faced challenges beyond the gender of the accused, such that determining whether a homicide had occurred was especially hard. Finally, the third researcher, Neale, found that the UK’s government decisions to forgo the death penalty in some instances were motivated by a series of reasons.

It’s All Moonshine: Sex, Social Class, and the Stereotypes at the 19th-century England Inquest.

19th-century Victorian Coroner Courts have been accused of being unjustifiably lenient when determining whether to indict women suspected of killing their neonatal children. While the scholarly work in this subject is scarce, there are some suggestions that women could get away with infanticide. In contrast, Sophie Michell argues that this ignores how complex these inquests were.

Michell proposes that these complications can account for statistics that suggest that women could get away with it. For example, in Peterborough, out of thirty-three cases, only six were ruled homicides. Before we explore these complications, we need to contextualise these inquests.2

At that time, alleged homicides were first publicly examined by a coroner’s court that decided whether “the deceased was a victim of homicide, and whether they could name a suspect.” If they answered both questions positively, then it became an indictment that bound the suspect to trial. The first question required them to answer:

• Was this death natural?

• Was there anyone to blame?

• Was the death inflicted?

• Was the suspect insane?

Coroner courts would meet very suddenly after there was suspicion of homicide. These courts were composed of a coroner and a jury, comprising twelve to twenty-four people. In contrast to criminal proceedings, which had stringent requirements, coroner juries were made up of shopkeepers, artisans, and others.

These courts faced extreme difficulties when determining whether a mother had killed their neonatal child. In cases of infanticide, they had to determine whether the baby was alive, whether its death was natural, and who may have killed them. Moreover, coroner’s juries were tasked with being convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that a murder had occurred before issuing a homicide verdict.

The first difficulty was that others rarely witnessed these murders. These homicides could be carried out in total privacy, leaving no one to testify.

Another potential problem was that the victim needed to have been alive for their murder to be considered homicide. For these Victorians, it was difficult to determine whether the child had been alive, especially if the victim’s body had been concealed. In this context, babies were not considered to be alive until they were entirely outside; thus, a baby that was not wholly born could not be killed, even if it were strangled3.

Jury composition was a third complication because these were made up of local men whose decision-making was complicated by their feelings towards the suspect. Did they bear sympathy or hostility towards the accused?

Murderous Mother?

In 1857, Elizabeth Wigginton (41 years old) was investigated for infanticide in Glinton. She had four legitimate children and had been recently widowed. Wigginton ran a 200-acre farm and was part of a well-connected family. She was a secret alcoholic and addicted to opium. In late April 1857, she locked herself in a room with booze and locked her newborn in a cabinet. She had not told anyone about the pregnancy. Eventually, one of her daughters found the deceased baby, and a Doctor was called. Later, when questioned, Elizabeth claimed, “It’s all moonshine! There was nothing at all! I do not know why you were sent for.”

Elizabeth’s Inquest

Wigginton’s inquest was held at a pub whose landlord was her brother. Glinton had a population of about four hundred people. The proceedings were unusual for two events: first, Elizabeth did not speak, and secondly, her servants did. One of her servants said she realised Elizabeth was pregnant, but had not discussed it. During the inquest, the doctor claimed that the child was born prematurely and had been strangled; however, he did not discuss whether the baby was born alive.

Despite this question being unanswered, she was held responsible partly because she had concealed the baby’s birth. Her case was unusual because locals knew she was an alcoholic and thought that if she had been sober, she could have perhaps successfully hidden the baby. The jury implied she should know better. Her substance abuse and sexual activity were not aligned with her role and social class.

Michell’s investigation into Victorian England

This historical investigation of infanticide in Victorian England reveals that

• Science and medicine played a significant role in determining whether babies were alive and, hence, whether homicide was a possibility.

• Local ideas about gender and social class affected coroner juries’ judgments.

• Inquests were not necessarily more lenient with mothers who had allegedly murdered their children; instead, such cases were especially challenging.

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  Justice is not so blind as she is painted, Gender-based leniency in Welsh homicide trials, 1850-1900 by Stephanie Brown at U Hull

Did a perpetrator’s gender affect courtroom proceedings during Welsh homicide trials between 1850 and 1900? Stephanie Brown concludes that gender’s role during these proceedings has been exaggerated.

Brown’s investigation challenges the historiographical record, which states that women accused of murder were treated more leniently both in the courtroom and after trial. These claims often rely on data about executions and are less concerned with innocence and guilt. Rather than exploring whether sentences were commuted, Brown sought to enter the courtroom and investigate whether there was systematic leniency towards female defendants during their proceedings. Thus, she looked at criminal registers (1837-1892) across Welsh counties and also examined Welsh Newspapers4.

In her analysis, Brown found that about forty percent of men tried for homicide were found guilty5. In the case of women tried for murder, about 30% were found guilty. During this time, fifty-two women were acquitted, and twelve were killed. If one excludes infanticide, only four women were executed during that time.

In this context, violence was often linked with masculinity, and writers discussed why women kill. Frequently, they concluded that such women must be mad, bad, or sad. In some cases, the defence insisted that a violent woman deserved mercy because their hormones made them do it. However, in many instances, like the one about two women who killed a servant, the media narrative and court documents do not show much consideration of their gender.

The discourse about some women accused of murder is that they are bad. For example, Mary Ann Phillips was described as drunk and violent in Cardiff in 1888. She had often beaten her husband and had previously spent six months in prison for assaulting him. A neighbour is said to have remarked, “Next time it will be the rope.” However, there is no evidence to suggest she was convicted because she was a woman, and not as a result of her husband’s injuries (broken bones and fractured wrists). Nonetheless, the jury did recommend mercy on account of her age (59) and gender. The discourse surrounding other women suspected of murder is that they were acting out of victimhood or sadness.

In other cases, women were exonerated for several reasons. For example, Sara Matthews was accused of murdering her husband. He was found with a head wound, which the police thought was caused by a poker they found. She denied killing him, and the press around the case had not portrayed her as sad or bad. She was found not guilty due to insufficient evidence.

In contrast, Elizabeth Jane Thomas was sentenced to death in 1889. She was found to have killed Agnes Lewis, who had allegedly come to her for an abortion. The press was more focused on the deceased than on Thomas, who denied participating in the abortion.

Brown concludes that gender did not play a significant role in these decisions and that the narratives about these cases were not gendered. Nevertheless, answering whether gender played a role in post-trial decisions was beyond the scope of her work.

Gendered Mercy vs Global Politics

The Home Office in England and Wales reviewed every death sentence for capital murder in 20th-century England and Wales to assess whether mercy was warranted. They decide to imprison rather than hang 640 out of 1486 individuals. Alexa Neale argues that mercy was “applied secretively and unequally,” and that petitions, judges’ advice, and jury’s recommendations were relatively unimportant despite being explicitly mentioned by these bureaucrats as crucial.

In one case, the Home Office privately placed political concerns above all else, and concurrently gave other public justifications to defend their decision. In 1914, a Portuguese man shot his wife twice while sailing on a British-registered ship. The man was 32, and when taken, claimed he had no memory of shooting his wife. He argued he went mad—a fact a British doctor disputed after examining him.

The jury had to first decide whether this thirty-two-year-old non-English-speaking man was insane. They determined that he was not, and had been sane, and was thus guilty of murder and condemned to be hanged. He was reprieved. At the time, the reasons a person was offered mercy were rarely made public. This lack of transparency makes it hard to unveil the obscure reasons why some people were allowed to live, and why other narratives were allowed to be perpetuated. One of these narratives blamed the victim, as it was argued that the victim did not conform to gender roles, that she was bad, and thus deserved it. In several instances, men murdered their wives. In cases where men murdered their wives, defence lawyers would often invoke failed gender expectations, especially when intersecting with issues of race and citizenship.

In this case, the narrative transformed the victim into a whore. The Portuguese man called her a temptress, claiming she was only interested in his money. Every detail about the case was twisted to make her look bad, to make her behaviour unwifely. The office discovered he was the one with the shoddy sexual past and that he had suffered from syphilis twice. There are letters from 1914 where diplomats racialise this man and the Portuguese people. These also discuss the risk to British diplomats in Brazil and Portugal if this man were executed.

The man’s death sentence caused considerable agitation in Portugal, where capital punishment had been recently banned. Private records show that the Home Office felt they needed Portugal as an ally, and they were concerned about how the Portuguese press was covering the case. In 1916, he was given early release. At that point, and after it was clear, they added political considerations as a reason.

Neal examined their black books, which are key to understanding procedure, precedent, and micro narratives. She found several reasons for interference, including judicial legal reasons, offender demographics, psychological factors, public reactions, and political considerations.

In the case of the Portuguese man, the real reasons remained hidden, allowing other narratives to gain popularity. Such an outcome can perpetuate the idea that murdering women is acceptable, and this case reminds us to pay attention to the context of these narratives: who is telling them and why. Neal also prompts us to consider what is at stake and the legal frameworks with which these narratives interact.

There are other cases where a murderer may have been released, not because the victim was seen as bad, but because there were other considerations. In some of the files, the bureaucrats listed a potential factor, but it was not thoroughly considered. Some of these were used as outward justifications, but privately, these bureaucrats made other considerations.

In the case of the Portuguese murdered, they felt that England needed Portugal as an ally. Some letters mention this alliance. The British office considered that the Portuguese Royals were in England, that the death penalty had been abolished in Portugal, and that if this Portuguese murderer was put to death, the resulting agitation might also endanger British ministers in Portugal. Further, before the ship reached the UK, it made some stops where the man could have been taken and extradited.

In short, Neale’s investigation reveals that the Home Office decided who to grant mercy through varied criteria. Further, she documented significant differences between this office’s public and private justifications for their decisions.

Conclusions

All these cases demonstrate how vital it is to examine history in detail and consider alternative explanations. Historians in training are often warned about “whiggish history,” which is a narrative that reflects a particular purpose. They are also warned of the dangers of presentism, which is when the analysis imposes present concerns or categories into the past. These histories demonstrate that analytical categories can be useful, but also highlight the need to understand history in its own terms.

In particular, Michell and Brown’s research reveals complexities about the past that could be easily overlooked without a thorough investigation. They both made cogent arguments as to why gender was less important than other factors. This is not to say that these societies weren’t patriarchal, but rather that in the context they studied, other factors were more significant.

For our purposes, it is key to note the role played by authorities in determining whether deceased infants had been born alive or not. We were unaware of this distinction and were surprised to learn about it. In these cases, discerning whether a death had been natural was pivotal. Thus, creating a space for experts to play a determinant role in such investigations. This is a possible research area, where a scholar should explore how these determinations were made, who made them, and document the growing authority science and medicine played in these matters.

The world revealed by such histories is more intricate, logical, and alien. These wonderful case studies indicate that the past is as fascinating and sophisticated as the present and that understanding it demands thorough investigation.

The time has come to share some excellent articles and posts about crime. Today’s newsletter features articles from Substack and the Atlantic.

We enjoyed these articles and felt that you would too. First, we jump into current practices regarding the investigation of murder and overkill. Secondly, we explore how Malaysia tried to cheat its way to the World Cup. Thirdly, we explore the effect of crime on the use of pubic transportation. The fourth article is about crime reduction and the importance of considering how impactful certain interventions can be. Our fifth article this month raises questions about personhood and how it affects criminal investigations and the commission of crimes by analysing a case where a father killed their son in Victorian England.

We hope you enjoy them!

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Overkill: When Murderous Violence Exceeds What is Necessary

In this post, discusses overkill. This term seeks to distinguish murders where the victim was killed from instances in which the violence far exceeds what would be needed to end a life.

This is an insightful post on how overkill gets studied, interpreted, and how it should drive investigations. The post also documents how assumptions about the kinds of people who overkill have driven investigators astray.

The Mind Detective

Violence Beyond Murder

Barbara Butcher stood in a Bronx elevator, reconstructing a horrific murder. The victim, an ordinary woman heading out for the day, never made it past the lobby. First came the gun pressed under her chin, fired point-blank. Then a shot to the chest. Then her throat was slashed deep enough to sever the carotid artery. Finally, the coup de grâce: three mo…

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7 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D.

At CuringCrime, we find the effort to study, define, and quantify these acts is interesting and shows an underlying belief that this approach is beneficial and fruitful1.

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Forged Ancestry and Cheating in Sport

Crime is a term that covers a diverse range of activities, and we find that is doing a wonderful job raising awareness about crime in sport. We urge you to check it out.

In this instance, the Malaysian Football Association forged documents to claim foreign players had Malaysian heritage and thus could play for their national team. After some investigations, the players were banned for twelve months, and the football association was fined. I admittedly enjoy football, and I am troubled by these acts and deeply concerned about how betting is affecting sport.

Sports and Crime Briefing

How Malaysia Faked Grandparent Birth Records for Foreign Players

In early October 2025, FIFA severely punished Malaysia’s football association (FAM), concluding that it had submitted forged documents to misrepresent seven foreign-born players as having Malaysian heritage. But the conspiracy may have gone far beyond the federation…

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7 months ago · 14 likes · Chris Dalby

Why Will No One Ride The Metro?

Ok, this headline is a bit misleading, but hey… I need to get your attention somehow.

We are also making an effort to include articles from other publications that we think may be relevant to those who subscribe to CuringCrime.

Before moving to Europe, I spent ten years living in the United States. One striking difference between these diverse and heterogeneous places is the use of public transportation. The article cites data on whether people use public transport.

In general, European countries have better infrastructure to support people’s travel.2 Presumably, you would expect Americans to use public transportation if the infrastructure were there.

If only the world were so simple. After investing millions in developing such infrastructure, an American city saw little uptake in the number of people using public transport. Lehman cogently argues that there is more to such disparity. He argued that a reason why Americans avoid public transport is the perception that these spaces aren’t safe. There is, Lehman contends, some evidence that many crimes do take place in such spaces.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/subway-safety/684566/

The actual amount of crime and the perception of crime both affect whether people use public transport. Thus, any strategy aimed at increasing people's use of public transport needs to assess the actual level of crimes taking place there and work to dispel any unfounded fears people may have.

How to Reduce Crime?

The fantastic, , has written a most informative post on how we should think about crime and efforts to cut crime. Roman urges that kind of approach that CuringCrime wholeheartedly endorses. In short, Roman asks policymakers to consider the impact of initiatives and assess whether other initiatives may be more effective.

It has been documented that increasing the number of police can reduce crime in certain areas. Nevertheless, Roman wants decision makers to answer the following question:

External Processing

The Sacred and the Profane

Here’s a little thought experiment…

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7 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · John K. Roman, PhD

This kind of analysis is essential. Nevertheless, we also think that there are factors that are not easily quantifiable, and that these can be important too. CuringCrime also urges caution in the degree to which quantification is embraced. Any decision made that is based on data is based on how that data was collected, processed, and analysed. The collecting, processing, and analysis of data remains one of the areas where assumptions can creep in unseen.

Dead Children and Guilty Parents

We enthusiastically ask you to subscribe to , which explores crime in Victorian England.3 This post is about a parent murdering a child. Michell shares:

“If you study murder in any era, you soon find out that parents murdering their children is the most common type of homicide…..Children like little John never had the chance to do anything with their lives. They were born, they learned to walk and talk, to feed themselves, they played, they overheard their parents argue and, in bewildered innocence, they died.”

One of the biggest changes in the past century is how we see children. Michell suggests that Victorians struggled with the personhood of children. Such big shifts in thinking should make us question our own assumptions and reflect on our own practices.

I end today’s post with this moving passage,

“Children like little John never had the chance to do anything with their lives. They were born, they learned to walk and talk, to feed themselves, they played, they overheard their parents argue and, in bewildered innocence, they died.”

The Darkest Files is a detective game where players take the role of an investigator in Fritz Bauer's anti-Nazi team. Their goal is to prosecute fictionalized Nazi crimes in post-war West Germany. It explores the violence of the ‘small men’ of the regime, rather than the more well-known projects of mass murder and forced labor. One of the game’s strengths is that it makes modern players reconsider responsibility for these crimes by putting them in the shoes of these unsung anti-Nazi prosecutors. Throughout, they deal with the disinterest, obstructions, and outright hostility of the general public in post-war Germany. 

We wanted to thank @Jovan, who interviewed the game developers and who has collaborated with Curing Crime before.

CC: How did the initial idea for the game come about? At what point did Paintbucket settle on Fritz Bauer’s team?

The idea came when we were developing the final chapter of Through the Darkest of Times, which ends with the end of the war. We were wondering: what happened after? Where did all the bystanders, perpetrators, surviving victims and the few who had resisted go? 

The original concept was very different to what The Darkest Files (TDF) is today: it was a strategy game similar to Through the Darkest of Times, clues appeared on a map and you sent out investigators to chase perpetrators. Yet, when we started to prototype this concept, we realized the game mechanics would require lots of cases, leaving only very little room to tell about each one, and since we always wanted to use real cases, this didn’t feel appropriate. So we decided to go back to the drawing board and try another design: the result was the concept of a first person detective game, with only very few cases but giving each of them a lot more room. Of course we always knew about Fritz Bauer but he wouldn’t have fitted in the original concept. In the new one he did, so we changed everything to tailor it around this idea of the player being part of Fritz Bauer‘s team.

CC: What was your research process and what were your sources when designing the historically-inspired aspects of the game? Was the type of research different from your previous projects?

Especially in the beginning, we got advice from Gregor Holzinger, a historian from Vienna, specialized in NS perpetrator stories. 

We also talked to a lawyer who gave us advice on the procedures and laws that applied. I am not sure when and how but we found pretty early a Dutch online archive where all murder trials against NS perpetrators from 1949 - 1960 can be read - that was the main source for our research.

CC: How did you go about building a picture of the real-life Fritz Bauer, and what role did you envision him playing in the overall game’s narrative?

That was on me. I read everything by and about the man, watched and listened to every interview that could be found. The more I learned, the more fascinated I was: Bauer was so far ahead of his time, so progressive and despite his biography, he never seemed bitter or out for revenge but always trying to improve the German society while staying realistic and pragmatic. He saw the law and how it is applied not as a something standing for its own and always must be followed by the letter, but as a human made set of rules with the purpose of allowing everyone to live a life in peace and dignity and that laws that defy this must not be followed. (in a nutshell).

So for me, it was important that his perspective was conveyed in the game - rather than making up stuff about his private life. From all what we know, he was someone who never put himself in front but the cause - so that’s how we portrayed him in the game. 

There were ideas on having him tell more about himself, his time in a concentration camp, etc., but we decided against it because we thought that he would never have done this. He wasn’t doing what he did because he was in a concentration camp, he was doing what he did because he thought it would increase chances that no one ever had to be in a concentration camp again.

CC: Beyond Bauer, the main cast of characters is fictional (or fictionalized), yet their personal backgrounds and interactions expand the historical texture of the game. What was your approach to adding fictional elements to the story?

Luca: If I were to answer that in a word, I’d say ‘careful'. It was very much a balancing act between providing our players with an immersive and entertaining experience, while ensuring it remained believable and respectful to the historical reality.

That last word is particularly important – realism and plausibility were a big focus with such additions. We wanted our fictional characters and events to be someone or something that could have actually lived, happened back then.

When written this way, their presence serves to bring that reality, that world, closer. Add that ‘historical texture’ you mentioned. It makes it more vivid, more lived in. Ironically, I’d say it makes it feel more real. Human.

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The game puts a lot of effort into immersing the player—from thumbing through file cabinets, to building your case, to chatting with your coworkers over a cup of coffee—how do you approach the topic of building historical immersion and what ends does it serve?

Jörg: People should feel emotionally attached. We wanted to zoom in, to make you feel at home in the game and immerse in the game's world, relate to its characters.

Luca: It’s been 80 years since the war, 70 since the time of the game. For many, if not most people, that’s practically an eternity. A distant, different world you read about in books – or, quite often, lie about having read in books. It’s history, and history has the sad tendency to seem less ‘real’ than, say, whatever your plans are for Tuesday after work.

That’s where immersion comes in – making it feel more real, more personal. The cabinets, casefiles, coffee cups, all those little details that add texture, interactivity, involvement. The everyday tasks, problems, small-talk-filled conversations, they tie the player to the game’s world, making that history appear less... distant. Easier to understand, easier to feel.

CC: Fritz Bauer is most well known for the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. What motivated your decision behind exploring the lesser known cases taken on by his team?

It is much easier to distance oneself from one of the main perpetrators—a camp commander who has thousands on his conscience, or a doctor who performs experiments on people. We wanted to show crimes that are not so easy to distance oneself from – crimes where it is easier to imagine knowing someone who could commit them, or even finding oneself in a situation where one would act similarly. I am convinced that we can only prevent something like this from happening again if we understand the all-too-human characteristics that ultimately led to Auschwitz.

Fritz Bauer himself once said "The Auschwitz problem doesn't begin at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Someone had to bring people there. That means there were many, many perpetrators." We wanted to explore this - to show how the machinery of genocide was built through countless "smaller" crimes that were enabled by the same spirit that made Auschwitz possible.  

CC: The game depicts the popular apathy, or even pushback regarding Nazi trials in post-war West Germany—some of it even hampers your ability to pursue your cases in-game. How do you think The Darkest Files strives to depict all of this context outside of the courtroom, and how it affects the way the law is handled and interpreted?

Fritz Bauer and his team not only fought legal battles in court, but also against a society that largely did not want these cases to be solved. You encounter witnesses who refuse to cooperate, acquaintances who ask you why you are “stirring up the past,” and institutional resistance that makes the search for evidence considerably more difficult. We wanted to show how many perpetrators had successfully reintegrated themselves into respectable society—they were judges, teachers, police officers—and how this network of complicity at all levels created obstacles to a genuine investigation.

In addition, the principle of “nulla poena sine lege” (no punishment without law) or the “prohibition of retroactive effect” or “prohibition of retroactive punishment” also applies to Nazi crimes.

It states that no one can be punished for an act that was not punishable at the time it was committed.

In the game, this is referred to primarily in the first case. It had to be proven to the perpetrators that their actions were wrong, even under Nazi law. This was surprisingly often the case—the Nazi state often motivated wrongdoing by not prosecuting it, but when it came to murder, they were particularly reluctant to put it into law—but it was difficult to prove, and prosecutors, who often had a Nazi past themselves, were not particularly motivated to initiate such complicated, time-consuming, and unpopular investigations.

CC: Post-war trials were quite unusual in that there was rarely evidence from the scene of the crime one could collect ten to twenty years after the fact. When building the cases and trials themselves, how did you go about deciding what to include as evidence, and to determine whether to weigh, for example, witness testimony or documents more heavily?

According to our research, such accusations had to be based almost exclusively on statements and files. Occasionally, crime scenes were visited to determine whether location X was visible from location Y or similar, but this remained the exception.

As in reality, a single statement is not sufficient for a conviction in the game; it must be corroborated by further evidence, whether in the form of documents or additional statements confirming the same.

Since we were able to read the court records but only had access to a few of the documents that had actually been used as evidence, and also for gameplay reasons, we came up with most of the documents used in the game ourselves.

In doing so, we allowed ourselves greater freedom to ensure that the whole thing worked in terms of gameplay and drama.

One exception to this are the pre-printed documents on the “shootings during escape,” which actually existed and we only modified slightly. 

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CC: You depict real historical dilemmas—like the failure of West German courts to convict unless “base motives” could be shown, or the need to prove guilt even under National Socialist-era legislation. At the same time, through the witness and defendant interrogations, we see wider ideological, psychological and social motivators come into play, but ones that are not necessarily prosecutable. What, in your words, was the driving philosophy behind understanding and depicting Nazi era crimes in The Darkest Files? What understanding do you wish the player to take with them after finishing the game?

Let me answer with two quotes:

Former Auschwitz prisoner Primo Levi:

“It happened, and therefore it can happen again: that is the core of what we have to say. It can happen anywhere.”

Fritz Bauer:

“We cannot make heaven out of earth, but each of us can do something to prevent it from becoming hell.”

To put it in my words: Humans are capable of turning the worst imaginable scenarios into reality, but they are also capable of recognizing when this is happening and stopping it. And the latter is what we must do.

CC: The game covers a topic where many perpetrators were able to slip through the cracks of the legal system. How do you approach balancing a historical depiction of the court system and its limitations with creating an enjoyable game for the player?

By allowing success and impact within these limits.

In doing so, we allow players in the game to make “better” judgments than those made in reality.

CC: The in-game Bauer insists that his team’s project is “to see justice done. To uphold the law”. At the same time, he believed that trials must provoke political and ethical reflection, not merely punishment. How does your game invite players to reflect while pursuing the game’s victory-state of a successful sentencing?

I don't want to spoil too much of the story, but I hope that's what it does.  

CC: Paintbucket Games has already explored the effects of National Socialism from a variety of perspectives in your previous titles. What is one aspect you still wish to explore?

I could imagine a political simulation of right before the Nazis take power could be interesting - especially, when, different from reality, you might be able to save democracy.

The Darkest Files offers a new perspective on what historical games can be. It is uncompromising and clear with the message it wants to deliver to its playerbase, who might never pick up a trial transcript or a scholarly history of post-war justice. Yet, it trusts them enough to shoulder them with a responsibility, not only as the player in achieving the game’s goal, but as a person reflecting on the real beating heart of National Socialism: the familiar resentments beyond the shocking and alienating brutality of the camps.

The game makes the player engage with the historian’s craft, in digging through archives and files, much as the developers did for their research. It also makes gamers confront the two purposes of law: whether it should be an internally logical, closed system to resolve concrete questions, or an expression of certain fundamental rights and dignities afforded to all.

The interview makes even clearer Bauer’s role as the emotional and moral crux of the game. It was, in fact, explicitly built around this idea. Through him, the game can foreground the uncomfortable truth that trials are never purely legal exercises. They are also political, social, and cultural events that leave a mark on society long after a verdict has been reached.

Games like The Darkest Files are vital because they bother to ask “how the machinery of genocide was built through countless 'smaller' crimes that were enabled by the same spirit that made Auschwitz possible”. Such a lesson may be valuable in a time like ours, where “never again” is allegedly used to justify rather than prevent a genocide. The game helps us remember that the horror of the death camps was the final step in a long process.

White Dog (1982) is a screen adaptation of a psychological horror novel by the same name, published in the 1970s. The book’s author, Romain Gary, claimed true events inspired the story, and he would commit suicide while the film was being made. Samuel Fuller joined as director and co-writer1. Previously, other directors, like Polanski, tried to adapt this book into a movie but failed (Thomas, 1983). The production takes significant departures from the book and takes a “far less pessimistic view of race relations.”2 Both Fuller and Paramount thought it should be shot as a straight thriller; however, Fuller insisted on keeping some of the “strong symbolism for which he is known” (Kasum, 1982)3. Samuel Fuller's White Dog is a bizarre work that explores psychological conditioning, racism, and instinct. 

White Dog’s Plot

The White Dog tells the story of an aspiring young actress, Julie Sawyer, who accidentally runs over a white German shepherd and decides to take care of him while looking for the owner. She soon finds out it is no ordinary dog, as it violently attacks black people on sight. After an incident with a black female coworker during a production, she decides to retrain the dog. 

Julie reaches out to renowned exotic animal trainer, Mr. Carruthers, who assures her that there is no solution for the dog, and urges her to sacrifice it. Mr. Keys, however, an associate trainer of Carruthers and a black man himself, steps in, determined to cure the White Dog. He tells Julie that he has twice come close to curing similar cases.

Mr. Keys' program goes with great difficulty, endangering those involved; yet, after some weeks, it appears to be working. Tragically, during a storm, the dog escapes and goes on the prowl for an innocent black person. The dog mauls a person near a church, and when Mr. Keys finds the victim’s body, he laments the death of another innocent black man. He now believes that curing this dog is even more critical. 

After some arduous weeks of training and hopeful signs of change in the animal’s behavior, Mr Keys puts his program to the test. He places the dog, himself, and an assistant of his inside a cage, and waits to see the dog’s reaction with a pistol in hand. The dog approaches the black man aggressively, but stops a few meters away. Relieved, they all start to celebrate because the program appears to have worked. Then, the dog turns and jumps to attack Julie. In a split second, Mr. Keys shoots the dog, and it falls to the ground, where it gives out its final breaths. 

Using the Knife to Solve Social Problems 

White Dog offers an interesting perspective on lobotomy or psychosurgery, even though these are not central to the plot. The film strives to promote human tolerance and addresses a question at the center of the CuringCrime project: how has science-medicine affected how society tries to solve social issues? In this particular case, it contrasts social and surgical solutions. In the real world, some professionals thought psychosurgical interventions would help eliminate undesired behaviors in individuals. 

One of the most ghastly medical interventions of the twentieth century is said to have been inspired by an experiment on chimpanzees. Egas Moniz, who won a Nobel Prize, is said to have developed the lobotomy after hearing about the results of an experiment presented by Yale researchers John Fulton and Carlyle Jacobsen at the Second International Congress of Neurology in 1935. 

Fulton’s and Jacobsen’s experiment involved removing a significant portion of the frontal lobes of two aggressive chimpanzees. While it is often said that both chimpanzees became much calmer, in reality, only one of the two animals became much calmer. Impressed by these results, Moniz thought a similar operation could help some people. He operated on some of his patients and reported positive results, which inspired Walter Freeman to import this intervention into the United States. 

Psychosurgery assumes that behaviors can be localized in specific parts of the brain and that operating on these parts can produce the desired change. This notion played a significant role in the development of shock therapies during much of the 20th century, and to some extent, contrasted with the environmental explanation for mental diseases. This environmental explanation emphasised the brain’s interaction with its environment and experiences. 

Psychosurgery in the White Dog: Immoral Yet Powerful?

The feature introduced psychosurgery as a potential solution to the dog’s aggressive behavior towards black people. While Mr. Keys is describing what a White Dog is, and Julie listens with a mixture of shock and disgust, she asks him if it would be possible to remove this behavior from him, like cancer, using psychosurgery. This horror prompts viewers to consider how such interventions simplify and dehumanize people. 

Mr Keys replies that he finds lobotomies to be inhumane, which is why he seeks to develop an alternative method to deal with this problem. Despite this objection, Mr Keys does not comment on whether the intervention would succeed. He believes the operation to be unpalatable, but he never suggests that it would not improve the dog’s condition.

 Mr Keys' opposition to psychosurgery is moral rather than scientific and medical. This becomes clearer when Mr Keys is explaining his method while denouncing psychosurgery. He describes these surgeries as  a “barbaric recourse.” He adds, “you see, Judy, I would like to develop a method, [and] within a matter of weeks, I will be able to erase that racist poison from him, permanently.” He later adds, “Twice I’ve gotten into the brain of a White Dog, and twice I’ve gotten close to cutting out that savagery without using a knife, and both times the experiment failed.” 

This description, specifically the use of the knife analogy, as well as the expression of getting “into the brain,” highlights an understanding of the types of solutions that could work in these situations. Therefore, even if discussing and advocating for an alternative to a surgical intervention, the character's mental framework is one where psychosurgery can produce behavioral change.

In the real world, Dr. Percival Bailey, Director of the Illinois State Psychopathic Institute, had argued, in 1956,  that lobotomy left “hecatombs of mutilated frontal lobes.” Both of these criticisms of psychosurgery also probe at a deeper question: what does it mean for a solution to work.4 Are these interventions intended to address the source of the problems or merely ameliorate their symptoms? Does it matter? 

Lobotomy, Freeman sustained, “made patients into 'rather good citizens' even if they were less creative” (Kleining, 1985). He had argued that the most important criterion was whether patients could return to work. In the case of the film, then success could be measured by determining if the dog stopped attacking black people. Similarly, in A Clockwork Orange, Alex is shown to start an undesired behavior only for the conditioning to kick in and prevent him from carrying it out. Mr. Keys' reluctance to operate then suggests that there is something fundamentally wrong with merely treating symptoms, rather than the underlying causes.  

How to Solve Social Issues: Conditioning & Behavior 

The description of the White Dog also reveals a prevalent view in the character’s understanding of the world, emphasising the impact of the environment on the dog’s behavior. Contrast this worldview with more deterministic ones, whereby behavior is immutable, and thus solutions to social problems include the elimination or sterilisation of undesirables. 

The description of how the environment influences the dog’s violent and racist behavior suggests that an organism’s environment can have a profound impact on its behavior. Mr Keys provides a possible explanation for why the dog behaves this way. He says, “find a black junkie who would do anything for a fix and pay them to beat that dog of yours since he was a puppy”, Mr Keys explains, “the younger the better, and as the dog grew up, those methodical beatings by blacks, planted the seed of fear in him, and that fear became hate, and that hate conditioned him to attack the color black before a black can attack him.” 

This explanation highlights the idea of conditioning, meaning that it is due to impositions by the owners, that he develops a violent and aggressive personality inclined to attack people of color, as opposed to suffering from an inherent tendency to violence. The underlying argument is that racism is learned rather than innate, which implies we can resolve this problem.

Interestingly, the movie suggests that the fact that the cause was environmental does not mean that the cure has to be. Many experts recognized that experiences could cause mental disease (for example, shell shock) and that other conditions like schizophrenia could have environmental triggers. Yet, they still localized these experiences in particular parts of the brain and sustained that surgery would cure these patients. 

White Dog suggests that racism is a learnt prejudice. In the film, black characters accept the existence of such animals as a brute fact, whereas white characters seem surprised. Mr Keys' insistence that the dog should be treated humanely encourages viewers to feel pity for people indoctrinated to be prejudiced rather than revengeful. 

Conclusion

The White Dog offers two contrasting views of the origins of undesirable behaviors, perhaps even mental illnesses, through the existence of a racist dog. The movie suggests that these undesirable behaviors are learned, implying that racism and prejudice are indoctrinated rather than innate. It contrasts two possible solutions to such problems: psychosurgery and reconditioning or reeducation. 

This production never questions the effectiveness of the surgical interventions, and the reconditioning of the dog is mostly unsuccessful. The dog’s treatment stops him from attacking black people, but the dog is killed while trying to attack a white woman, suggesting that the reconditioning did not fully work. It may have eliminated the dog’s fixation on black people, but it did not eliminate its violent tendencies. 

The opposition to surgical interventions is communicated in moral terms, suggesting that they see the dog as a victim of its upbringing. Thus, even if such treatments were more effective, the story hints that they are inhumane and barbaric. The movie condemns psychosurgical interventions, which fits in with a series of other media that strongly criticize psychiatric interventions. The implications for human society are problematic, as it may mean that some people cannot be made to abandon their prejudices. Hence, change must come through changing children’s environments.  

Secondly, in the movie, it is a member of the victimized group who not only recognizes that such perpetrators exist but also calls for them to be treated humanely. This preference for softer interventions by those victimized by the dog is meant to give emotional force to the argument that surgical interventions are barbaric. 

If you are interested in learning more about the role of film and media in the history of science and medicine, check out our multiple posts on the topic at Curing Crime. Also, subscribe to receive all our latest posts.

Sources

Kasum, Eric. 1982. “White Dog” No Lassie Movie This. The Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1982. Calendar, p.18. https://www.newspapers.com/image/388304541/?terms=white%20dog

Thomas, Kevin. 1983. White Dog to Make a Belated Bow. The Los Angeles Times, Dec 30, 1983. Calendar, p. 1. https://www.newspapers.com/image/633580813/

This time, we feature four articles on crime that are distinctly different from one another. The first two touch on contemporary issues: the dissonance between the frequency of crime & its perception, as well as President Trump’s efforts to merge the war on drugs with the war on terror.

The other two posts are about Victorian England. The first is a shocking case of medical negligence (or murder), and the second is about an impressive sleuth. The degree to which medicine has changed over the past hundred years is astounding, and this case reveals just how quickly medicine has, arguably, improved. Jerome Caminada was an impressive detective, and I am keen on learning more about his investigative techniques.

Are There Monsters Under My Bed?

This exceptional post by seeks to explain why people are more concerned about crime even though most metrics suggest there is less crime. Studies and surveys indicate that people perceive there is more crime. Furthermore, the public often wrongly assumes that strangers commit most crimes.

This reminded me of Barry Glassner’s book Culture of Fear, where he argued that many public fears are unwarranted. From shark attacks to airplanes, our ability to distinguish real threats from perceived ones is abysmal. This post emphasizes the significance of data in determining what, if anything, we should be concerned about.

Merging the War on Drugs with the War on Terror

The attacks on 9/11 caused massive changes in the United States, including the passage of the Patriot Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Among these changes and as part of the war on terror, the Americans expanded their military power and gave the Presidential Office greater flexibility. President Barack Obama increased the use of drones and controversially ordered the killing of a US-Yemeni citizen.

In addition, Obama’s administration passed a rule that required the US Government to report on civilian casualties as a result of drone strikes. During his first term, President Donald Trump revoked it.

Recently, President Trump has begun sharing videos of missile attacks on vessels on social media. He claimed that these vessels were carrying drugs. In taking this step, Trump has sought to merge the war on drugs with the war on terror1. In this provocative and informative post, cogently argues the dangers of this approach. Dalby questions the Government’s claim that those in the vessel were part of Venezuelan drug cartel “Tren de Aragua”. These actions have been taken without a conviction or trial.

World of Crime Newsletter

Why President Trump is Turning the War on Drugs into the War on Terror

Well, this was clearly coming. From the moment President Donald Trump ordered a US strike force into the Caribbean in August, it seemed likely he would make use of it…

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8 months ago · 3 likes · Chris Dalby

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Murderous Malpractice

shares a story about a surgeon whose incompetence, or malice, killed a mother during childbirth. During this time, patients died from all kinds of complications, and the only way to charge a doctor with negligence was to accuse them of murder. This is truly a horrific tale.

The Friday Murder Club

Medical Malpractice

A couple of days ago, I went to London to talk about public health and policing in history with my delightful crime/histmed colleagues at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I spoke about the police as the first real emergency service, but also about how inquests can highlight police failure from their earliest inception. It was a great day and hopefully something cool will come out of it…

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8 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Sophie Michell

A Brilliant Sleuth and The Manches Cab Mystery

shares one of the cases that cemented Jerome Caminada’s reputation as a brilliant sleuth. Caminada was in many ways a “real-life Sherlock Holmes,” who cunningly investigated and solved crimes in Victorian England. Dr. Buckley has written a book about Detective Caminada, which I received earlier this week.

This case showcases nascent detective and forensic practices such as determining the presence of substances in a victim’s body, infiltrating, and collecting evidence. I am especially keen to share this one, given my exchange with Dr. Buckley in the comments, where we explore the role of science in identifying substances in murder investigations and the importance of witness testimony in those times.

The Detective's Notebook

The Manchester cab mystery

My favourite Victorian detective is Jerome Caminada of the Manchester City Police, a super-sleuth and a real-life Sherlock Holmes. In 1889, he faced his greatest challenge; the Manchester Cab Mystery, for which he would need all the brilliant powers of deduction of his iconic fictional counterpart…

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2 years ago · 6 likes · 7 comments · Dr Angela Buckley

One of the remarkable lessons from historical study is how recognizable and alien the past appears. We swim in the waters of our world, and take for granted that life has mostly been the same. Perhaps, this forgetting is what makes it so easy for people to grow incredulous about vaccines and other public health successes. What I find most perplexing to consider is what parts of our present will seem odd to our descendants? Which of our assumptions will seem just plain weird?

Heck, some of our present seems inexplicable to me, including a deep and pernicious scepticism of expertise, and an effort to eschew conversation. One of the posts about current affairs gives me hope, as violence and crime seem to be decreasing. However, our inability to recognize this is concerning. The other post invites fearful speculation about the direction in which democracies may be heading.

Cecil’s page offers a variety of insightful articles ranging from analysing true crime shows and narratives to curated playlists featuring songs about crime. We encourage you to subscribe.

CC: What sparked your interest in your field of study? Was there anything specific?

I actually started college as a business major. I took a criminal justice class as a general elective and was hooked. My professor had worked in a prison for many years. Inspired by her and the class, I knew I wanted to be a professor or work in a prison, so I changed my major. My interest specially in media representations of crime and justice did not emerge until I became an assistant professor. I created a class on crime, media, and popular culture. The class itself inspired me to merge my interest in prisons with this interest in media representations and to study how prisons are represented in the media. I laugh now when I think about that fact that one of my earliest research pieces looked at how newspapers covered Martha Stewart’s incarceration and the lessons it provided about women’s prisons (It was called “Doing Time in Camp Cupcake”!).

CC: Why Substack? What do you hope to achieve here? How do you balance storytelling with academic rigor when publishing?

For the past two decades I have lived in the world of publish or perish. In criminology this means peer-reviewed pieces that for the most part fit a specific formula. It is a process that I respect, but creatively speaking it is limiting. I kept talking about wanting to write (not just research). My husband repeatedly said “you need to start a Substack.” I resisted as I did not think I had anything to write about. Yet, people are obsessed with crime shows of all kinds. Probably a year after he first suggested it, I was inspired and took the plunge. Ultimately for me, Substack is a creative outlet, as well as a way for me to share my observations in a more accessible way.

In terms of balancing storytelling with academic rigor, I write different types of pieces with this in mind. Sometimes I just want to share something I personally like or my crime mixtapes. I might add some background information in these pieces but the intent is not to be analytical. For other pieces, I draw from my research and the literature to write more informative pieces; it is in these where I use the same guiding principles that I use when writing for peer-reviewed journals.

CC: Briefly, tell us what you study and, in your opinion, what is the most pressing issue or the most intriguing unanswered question in your field. Why do you think it matters today?

My main research, at this point in time, focuses on prison stories and the possibility of narrative change. In other words, how can stories, such as the podcast Ear Hustle, generate empathy and a better understanding of crime and justice?

We live in a media culture that is divisive (in many ways). Many crime-related representations create a gap between us and them, thereby stifling empathy. Yet, to transform the criminal legal system we need empathy.

CC: What’s the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve learned in your research?

I don’t really have an answer for this question, so this may not fit.

I was invited to write a piece for an edited collection on literary journalism in prison. It was curated by two journalism professors. Being trained in criminology, my focus was on the content and messaging in order to understand how the imagery shapes people’s perceptions. I proposed a chapter on Ear Hustle, a podcast produced in a prison. Their feedback allowed me to dive into the impact of stories and, in particular, the impact of podcasts. This experience has taken my research to a different level. It has broadened my interest in storytelling as a tool to develop empathy, critical thinking, and potentially, shifts in commonly held beliefs

CC: Are there any historical cases or theories that you believe deserve more attention? Why?

A case that I think more people should know about is that of Curtis Flowers. Flowers spent more than two decades incarcerated in Mississippi while battling to establish his innocence and gain freedom.

It is an extreme miscarriage of justice (he was tried six times for the same crimes). This case demonstrates the unbridled power of a prosecutor and the impact of racism. The second season of the podcast In the Dark did an incredible job investigating this case.

CC: What books, films, or documentaries would you recommend for someone looking to understand your field better?

Given my interest in stories, this could be a really long list! There is one book that, in my opinion, everyone interested in the criminal legal system should read—Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson.

If they want to understand incarceration, they should begin with the podcast Ear Hustle (at the end of July I will be putting a Spotify Playlist with a variety of prison podcast episodes on FRAMED to coincide with a talk I am giving on the power of these stories).

CC: If the public could grasp just one key idea about crime and justice, what would it be and why?

Whether you realize it or not each and every one of us is “one beer away from jail!” In other words, just one different decision in our lives can completely change the path we are on. When thinking about crime and justice, I think it is important to remember this.

CC: Do you think true crime as a genre helps or harms public understanding of crime? Are there ethical concerns in how it’s presented?

Like many things in life, there is no simple answer to this question. True crime is problematic and damaging in many ways—overrepresentation of violence, especially serial killers, fixation with missing white women, and impact on victims to name a few.

Yet, there are also examples of impactful true stories that open our eyes up to miscarriages of justice and some even provide comfort to people who have been victims of crime. Since true crime stories will never cease to provide entertainment to people, I think the key is to help people consume it more responsibly—through a critical lens.

CC: What is one way in which you think the media can do better at discussing crime?

Selecting one thing is challenging. To keep in line with the things I am focusing on now, it is to give voice to the voiceless. Supporting people with lived experiences in the creation of crime stories.

CC: Our readers would find your work valuable. Could you recommend 2-3 of your posts?

The following post relates to your question on true crime:

FRAMED

Healing? Harmful? Or Something In-Between?

Since I started FRAMED after watching Baby Reindeer, before moving on to other topics, I wanted to use the series as an example of the complexity of true crime as a form of entertainment…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · Dawn K. Cecil

Here is the first part of a two part piece on popular images of jail:

FRAMED

Unlocked

Images of jails and prisons are part of the cultural narrative surrounding incarceration. Most people will never experience it firsthand, instead we rely on highly edited, at times fabricated, experiences provided by popular culture. We watch prison films, as well as shows like…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · Dawn K. Cecil

Finally, I try to publish a quarterly crime mixtape. This one contains songs about women who commit crime.

FRAMED

Murderesses, Prostitutes, & Thieves

I was so excited to share FRAMED’s second quarterly crime mixtape that I decided to post it earlier than originally scheduled. When the first one was released, I posted a reader poll to help pick a theme for the second mix. While voter turnout was low, the end result was “women outlaws.” I spent the last couple of months curating songs about women who c…

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2 years ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Dawn K. Cecil