Warren Rosenblum's Beyond the Prison Gates is an excellent study that positions itself at the intersection of two bodies of literature that have each been aware of the other's existence, but whose actual relationship has until now never been the object of systematic study: the voluminous literature on the German welfare system, on the one hand, and the equally vast historiography of German criminology and penology, on the other. His topic is the rise of “criminal policy,” which built upon the insights of the modernist school into the social nature of crime and then sought to devise new methods of support and supervision to facilitate the resocialization and reintegration of former offenders.
Rosenblum's aim is to challenge those (Paul Weindling, Christian Müller, Peter Becker) who have argued that the history of German penology and welfare has to be written in terms of the displacement of social, reformist, and rehabilitative concerns by eugenic and biomedical modes of thought, and his most important achievement is to show that the penal question continued to be seen primarily as a social question through the 1920s and beyond.
The book begins with an account of the theoretical limitations of a liberal justice system that was obstinately wedded to the principle of retribution and the practical limitations of a system of police surveillance that often served to marginalize further former offenders, rather than to resocialize them and reintegrate them into society, and the first half of the book shows in detail how prisoner benevolent associations, worker colonies, rescue associations for wayward girls and loose women, early innovations in youth welfare, and modernist fantasies of rehabilitation and reintegration through overseas colonization were all engaged in a common search for a form of protective supervision that could achieve this goal. For Rosenblum, the turning point in the socialization of law and the justice system was the establishment during World War I of the Bielefeld system, which permitted judges to suspend sentences if offenders agreed to submit to “welfare supervision.” The judge's decision was to be based on the investigation of the factors influencing the life and character of the offender, and responsibility for supervising those individuals whose sentences had been conditionally suspended was placed in the hands of local prison and welfare associations, thus “moving the locus of discipline from the public sphere of the courts and the carceral institutions to the private spheres of the home, the family, and the workplace” (p. 164). The institutionalization of this system of social court assistance (soziale Gerichtshilfe), as it came to be known, in Prussia in 1918 marked the first attempt to integrate systematically social therapeutics into a justice system based on the antithetical principles of formal legal responsibility and retributive justice—while giving voluntary associations a major voice in the process and endowing them with a degree of public authority.
The problem was that “the social turn in Weimar justice was not accompanied by the anticipated growth in the mechanisms of social assistance and social control. Offenders increasingly avoided incarceration but were not subject to the kinds of guidance and oversight supposedly necessary to making them social” (p. 4). The inevitable backlash against this widely perceived “Verweichlichung” of justice represented, Rosenblum argues, not a biologistic rejection of prevention and welfare, but rather a more or less understandable reaction to the failure to build up the institutional infrastructure on which the success of this welfarist project was predicated. In the final chapters, Rosenblum provides an account of the ways in which the ensuing politicization of court assistance and the call for harsher, rather than kinder, attitudes toward offenders illustrated the larger political crisis of the Weimar Republic, but he also argues that the eventual reinstitutionalization of welfare supervision by the Nazis should be seen as a sign of the continued influence of social concerns under a regime whose policies were supposedly determined by more or less crude versions of social biology.
Rosenblum's account of criminal policy is textured, illuminating, and persuasive. I would, however, venture two criticisms. First, although Rosenblum shows how the rescue and welfare associations premised their rehabilitative efforts on their ability to gain the trust of their clients, their charitable supervision also represented a mechanism of tutelage and control. Although Rosenblum is by no means unaware of this issue, the book itself largely sidesteps the disciplinary dimensions of welfarist practice.
Second, on occasion Rosenblum's efforts to uncover the enduring influence of social concerns leads him to push his claims a bit further than the evidence can bear. For example, while we are all aware that eugenics was essentially an attempt to represent social issues in biological, hereditarian terms, Rosenblum's argument (pp. 220–25) that criminal biology was essentially nothing other than social diagnosis under another name obscures the eugenic dimension of the discipline, whose insistence on the hereditary basis of asociality and the differential value of human life formed the basis for later Nazi racial policies. Nor does the direct continuity that Rosenblum espies between the “social principles and the social agenda” of early Weimar court assistance and its later reincarnation under the Nazis (p. 229) take adequate account of the broader eugenic framework that predetermined which Volksgenossen were deemed to have the genetic potential to benefit from such therapeutic measures.
Nevertheless, Rosenblum's main claim is on the mark: the growth of the German welfare system was driven by individuals inspired by a social vision of deviance and poverty and aiming at resocialization and rehabilitation, not exclusion, and his arguments represent an important challenge to much of the recent historiography of German penology and the welfare state.
