The history of criminology has been a subject of fascination, and often revulsion, for many years. The development of biological theories from Lombroso into the age of Buck v. Bell and Nazism has captured the attention of a long list of fine scholars. So has the rise and spread of what David Garland dubbed “penal modernism,” which rejected classic liberal theories of punishment in favor of the practice of individualization. Individualization, pioneered by American Zebulon Brockway at Elmira and touted by leading European figures including Franz von Liszt and Raymond Saleilles, was a movement that sometimes promoted the humane aim of rehabilitationism. At other times, however, it pressed for more sinister measures such as preventive detention of dangerous offenders, in the name of “social defense.”

It is a commonplace among scholars that these criminological and penological movements were international in character. That is not to say that there were no divergences. Individualization, in particular, took divergent institutional forms on either side of the Atlantic. In the United States, it involved relatively open-ended “indeterminate sentencing,” which left room both for rehabilitationism and for preventive detention. Offenders were turned over to the administrative apparatus of a “correctional” system that determined both the extent of their progress toward resocialization and their degree of dangerousness. Continental Europeans, by contrast, adopted, with many variations, a “dual track” approach, which rested on a procedural separation between judgments of rehabilitation and judgments of dangerousness. Rather than embracing indeterminate sentencing, continental judges imposed nominally fixed sentences. At the same time, the continental system approach permitted the flexibility necessary for rehabilitationism through measures such as probation and parole. Preventive detention was considered on a separate track in continental Europe. After continental offenders had completed their formal sentence, they were to be held only if judged dangerous. Different though these American and continental approaches to individualization were, it was perfectly possible to view them as functional equivalents. Roscoe Pound, for example, in his introduction to Saleilles’ masterpiece The Individualization of Punishment, proclaimed that Americans and Europeans alike, despite their contrasting institutional strategies, were joint warriors in a “general reaction against the administration of justice solely by abstract formula.”

In this important and provocative book, Pifferi offers a rebuke to Pound, and to all scholars who have regarded the rise of criminology primarily as an international phenomenon. Despite the undoubted resemblances between the movements on the two sides of the Atlantic, he demonstrates that the American and European campaigns rested on fundamentally divergent conceptions of the demands of the rule of law.

As Pifferi shows, the different institutional strategies across the Atlantic were not simply functional equivalents. They were the products of a clash between two visions of justice. Continental thinkers were unable to shake their attachment to norms of the rule of law that they associated with the advances of the French Revolution. In 1789, principles of legality were established that limited the exercise of power by rejecting the “arbitrary” exercise of judicial sentencing power. Continental reformers, no matter how eager for “modernist” change, could not bring themselves to overthrow that tradition entirely; it is for this reason that they embraced the dual track approach. Americans, the inheritors of a very different, much more democratic, revolutionary tradition, displayed none of the same attachment to Enlightenment ideas of legality. It was this detachment that allowed them to opt for indeterminate sentencing. Meanwhile, the bifurcation of the common law trial into guilt and sentencing phases made it easy for Americans to adopt another strategy that seemed unacceptable to continentals. They entrusted the sentencing power to administrative bodies, rather than leaving it in the hands of judges. In an exhaustive and sensitive trans-Atlantic study of sources, Pifferi traces the history of this clash from the late nineteenth century into the crisis of liberalism of the fascist era.

The result is more than just a contribution to our understanding of the history of criminology. It is powerful contribution to our understanding of the comparative shakiness of the American commitment to principles of the rule of law. Of course, “rule of law” can be defined in a notoriously wide variety of ways. Nevertheless, in an age when the American rule of law seems endangered by almost any definition, Pifferi's book offers a healthy reminder of how far back into the past the American dilemma extends.

It is the job of the reviewer to register at least a few complaints. Pifferi has restricted himself to the intellectual history of criminology without venturing more deeply into the biographies of the figures he discusses. His book might have made for a livelier read if he had paused to say more about the lives of characters such as Maurice Parmelee, not only a pioneer of American criminology but also a leading nudist and eventual target of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He ascribes the differences he traces to a “cultural divide” between Americans and Europeans (10). It is hard to quarrel with that. At the same time, the term “culture” seems a bit too broad and vague to do justice to the claims of his book. It is not just that American culture is different. This book is not just about the distinctive folkways of the land of Coca-Cola. It is, more disturbingly, about an American commitment to Enlightenment values of legality that once proved, and is again proving, weak.