Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse.

In this work Leps examines criminology texts, newspapers and popular fiction to study the discourse of criminality in late nineteenth century France and Great Britain. She begins with two primary hypotheses: "The truth of a period corresponds not to the closest perception of a primary reality, but rather to the sets of information which, having been legitimized by institutions, organize the mode of being, the social arrangement, the historic reality of people and products." Her second hypothesis deals with the connections among the institutions which produce knowledge: "power does not originate in a specific locus ... but in the web of reciprocal validation and authentication existing between these various institutions."

To test these hypotheses Leps takes as her basic premise that "a new conception came about" during the late nineteenth century: "A general acceptance of crime and criminals as normal, inevitable occurrences to be faced with rational methods of control." Leps argues that criminology texts created the notion of criminal man as the very essence of the other and thereby made it "rhetorically ineffective to be for criminals." The press reinforced these views by enforcing the notion of the public as a united entity threatened by and fighting against crime. But there was nothing new about the concept of the criminal as other. The ancient concept of outlawry which long pre-dates the Norman Conquest implies the recognition of deviance as a constant. In arguing that these texts transformed "crime and the existence of criminals into 'simple facts of life'" Leps overlooks the examples of Jonathan Wild, the vagabonds of Elizabethan England and the fur-collar criminals of the late middle ages who were also acknowledged as facts of life.

According to Leps the presuppositions of criminologists and journalists were that "Reality is a given; truth is absolute and cumulative; language is transparent." After analyzing several French novels, the Sherlock Holmes stories and finally Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Leps concludes that literature challenged these presuppositions: "Deriving both from the imaginary, and from political, economic and social structures of production and distribution ... Literature is distinguished by its capacity to reproduce the very process of knowledge production from the unthinkable or unsayable." In Jekyll and Hyde "reality is grasped through knowledge; truth is ever evolving; language is transparent ... Discourse is praxis."

Leps clearly has no doubt that discourse theory is the path to enlightenment and chose only those examples which illustrate its validity overlooking those which might point to a lack of hegemony. For example she points out the The Times for September 1881 devoted exactly the same amount of space to a miners' strike in France as it did to the victory of an English football team playing in New Zealand. Leps says this strategy "has the triple advantage of reducing the importance of a threat to the social order, avoiding commentary on a sensitive issue, and giving the readers the lovely feeling of belonging to a solid, stable, winning nation." In fact both items are only two and a half lines long. It seems at least plausible that a miners' strike in France was not a particular threat to the social order in England, that the absence of commentary in a news report was balanced with a lively editorial page and that few readers would feel lovely and solid based on a one sentence report of a football match. Leps fails to consider that The Times was a distinctive newspaper for a particular readership and that the balance and the tone of other London newspapers not to mention the reporting of the miners' strike in the French press might have been quite different. The hegemonic unity which Leps decries was in fact undermined by the enormous variety of newspapers available in late nineteenth-century Britain. There were a variety of "truths" appearing in the late nineteenth-century British press and the lively debates among criminologists also point to a diversity which must have undermined hegemonic tendencies.

Leps also appears to deny the reality of criminality. In examining the coverage of the Ripper case in the French press Leps moralizes that "had the events been apprehended dialectically as part of broader social, economic, and political conflicts taking place in industrial societies, French readers could have been implicated in rather than diverted by, the crimes." Leps fails however to explain how "political, social and economic conflicts" inspired the Ripper murders nor does she explain how the French public was implicated in them. Presumably any resident of a capitalist society was automatically guilty and only the unenlightened need further edification.

As a contribution to historical knowledge this book offers little that is new. Certainly the jargon is different and largely impenetrable but that criminology was enmeshed in attempts to define criminal man in some readily identifiable and quantifiable way, that the press tried to present just the facts in an interesting and inoffensive manner and that fiction, by its very nature, is freer to explore are not groundbreaking findings. Nor does the overlap among the three types of sources seem particularly noteworthy. Leps concludes that discourse theory can successfully be employed to analyze other institution and "could work to disable century-old alibis, and devise altering strategies of power-knowledge relations." However Leps does not suggest any of these strategies; indeed given her basic assumption that non-fiction discourse on crime and criminals was based on alibis, Leps is oddly reticent about the truth behind these alibis. This book is not so much history as an attempt to validate discourse theory and the ideas of Foucault. Leps is a true believer but this book does little to persuade the agnostic.

Carolyn A. Conley University of Alabama at Birmingham