The definition and treatment of criminals reveal much about the inner functioning and sociocultural norms of a society. Greg Eghigian's ambitious “history of the correctional imagination”(10) in Nazi and postwar Germany thus amounts to much more than a history of the prison system under three different political regimes: it unveils hitherto unknown continuities between the ways in which fascism, state socialism, and liberal democracy defined the convict and hence also articulated their respective ideals of personhood. All three systems, Eghigian argues convincingly, eventually distinguished between the “corrigible” and the “incorrigible,” even though they defined this distinction differently and developed different policies toward crime and criminals. The author develops his argument with respect to criminals more generally, but then focuses especially on the treatment of sex offenders under all three regimes. Following Michel Foucault, Eghigian also highlights the central role of the human sciences—especially medicine, psychiatry, and psychology—in defining the “convict” and hence in managing changing conceptions of subjectivity in twentieth-century Germany.

Eghigian places the Nazi period at the beginning of the history of clinical correction, and this represents one of his most interesting findings. Rather than treating the penal system during the Nazi period exclusively as one of brutal persecution and arbitrary violence, Eghigian shows how the Nazi correctional imagination was part and parcel of a series of international trends in penology. The Nazis continued and expanded on an earlier shift in the Weimar period from a focus on the individual crime to the subjectivity of the criminal. They also continued to believe in the possibility of transforming at least some corrigible criminals into functioning members of the Volksgemeinschaft. Brutality and rehabilitation, Eghigian argues, were not mutually exclusive but rather compatible—as 2,400 castrations of alleged sex offenders during the Third Reich demonstrated.

The East German criminal system exhibited numerous continuities with the Nazi period on the normative level, e.g., in its exclusion of alleged “asocials” or in its ongoing use of the diagnosis of “feeblemindedness” (65). But the ideological goal of the correctional imagination now shifted to furthering the ideal of the “socialist” personality. East German communists were initially skeptical about the ideological reliability of experts in the human sciences, yet, they nevertheless allowed an older tradition of forensic psychiatry to continue. The aim of the correctional imagination was now to bring the individual as a “biopsychosocial creature” (124) into sync with the developments of the collective. Criminals and especially sex offenders appeared as vestiges of a more primitive period that would eventually disappear in a fully developed socialist society. Eghigian's close analysis of hundreds of case files of sex crimes from the Charité Hospital in East Berlin provides impressive evidence of how the actual treatment of sex offenders differed from the lofty ideals of socialist criminology that sought to align the personality of the convict with his or her socialist surroundings. Psychiatric evaluators adopted a conservative view of sex and often exhibited a distinct gender bias vis-à-vis female victims of sex crimes. Only during the 1980s did East German criminology open up and partly incorporate broader international developments. By the late 1970s and 1980s, the GDR also drew on the methods of the human sciences to develop its own vision of correctional rehabilitation, and created specific therapeutic facilities to put this vision into practice.

On the level of personnel, continuity in West Germany was more pronounced than in the East. Yet, as in the East, where Soviet influences were prominent, penology in the West came under the influence of the United States as occupying power. In the context of the reform of the West German criminal code that began in the 1950s and was completed in 1976, psychological and eventually psychoanalytic perspectives gained new significance. The focus increasingly shifted to developing a reliable social prognosis, as well as plans for the rehabilitation of criminals. Eghigian shows how such liberalizing tendencies were very much a product of reform from above and were initially not shared by West Germans at large, a majority of whom continued to advocate more traditional ideals of deterrence and incarceration. Unique to West Germany was the development of a victim-oriented justice system. As in the other chapters on fascist and Socialist criminology, Eghigian brings out the specifically West German approach by analyzing the treatment of sex offenders. To a greater extent than in the East, expert opinion mattered in the West when it came to evaluating and categorizing sex offenders. Thanks to the insights of psychology, sex offenders were increasingly defined as patients in need of therapy, and they were now treated in specific social therapeutic facilities. Castration was applied in approximately four hundred cases as a treatment, though through medication rather than through surgery. Ultimately, however, the definition of sex offenders as patients also entailed an exclusionary function because only those convicts who were able to manipulate therapeutic language for their own purposes, and who had a positive prognosis, were admitted to these facilities.

The West German example also underlines Eghigian's nuanced positioning of correctional rehabilitation between the pessimistic view of Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception (2005)—that it represented, as the title suggests, a “state of exception”—and the view of Nikolas Rose in his The Politics of Life Itself (2007), namely, that it was a movement toward a more liberal, tolerant, and pluralistic order. Moreover, the correctional imagination under all three regimes fell short of actually accomplishing its idealistic goals—a fact that Foucault, who equated the aspirations of the human sciences with social reality, tended to ignore. In reality, the correctional practice in all three regimes simply needed to be, as the author writes, “good enough” (205), i.e., administrators were able to make flexible use of the various visions of correctional rehabilitation without ever fully living up to their respective ideological programs.

Eghigian has mastered a complex and vast literature and written an engaging history of the correctional imagination that allows us to see new continuities and discontinuities in twentieth-century Germany. It combines an analysis of shifting normative regimes with empirically sound forays into correctional practices under fascism, state socialism, and liberal democracy. Few studies have attempted to analyze changing configurations of one problem under all three political regimes, and Eghigian has mastered the conceptual and empirical challenges of such a broad approach. This broad perspective inevitably entails making choices, however, which forces the author to treat some important themes in a cursory fashion. Future studies might thus offer a more detailed investigation of social realities in prisons and other correctional institution, or try to capture more fully the perspective of the convicts and/or the patients themselves. Still, Eghigian's study will be an essential starting point for anybody seeking to understand how different political regimes defined and imagined ideal personhood in and through the figure of the convict. The book also offers a reliable history of the role of the human sciences in envisioning the rehabilitation of corrigibles as well as in excluding—and often condemning—incorrigibles. As such, Eghigian's history powerfully illustrates the workings of what Foucault identified as the nexus of power and knowledge under different political regimes in twentieth-century Germany.