In an interview on the Pioneers of Criminology

Last, you’ve chosen a novel set in 1896: The Alienist. What is an ‘alienist’, by the way?

‘Alienist’ was the term for a psychiatrist or a psychologist at the time. They were called alienists because mentally deranged people were thought to be alienated from themselves. This is a wonderful historical novel, written in 1994, about one such alienist in New York City, who helps solve a series of grizzly serial killings at the time when Theodore Roosevelt was the commissioner of police.

It’s a masterpiece of historical reconstruction. Although fiction, it’s populated with the characters that I’ve come to know, such as Bertillon and Lombroso. It’s a marvellous evocation. When I started my own book I used The Alienist as a kind of benchmark. I thought if I could recreate, in a nonfiction way, a sense of time and place as vividly as Caleb Carr does in his fictional treatment, then I would consider my book a success.

So as for the fact it’s called The Alienist – does the psychologist, and the psychology, of the criminal play a big role?

The hero of the book, Dr Laszlo Kreizler, is a crime scene analyst with an understanding of the criminal mind and an endless curiosity about human nature. He investigates these grizzly crimes not in a sensationalistic way, but as a means of understanding human motivation. Kreizler looks at these cases as though viewing humanity through a looking glass. He wonders, what is the human spirit capable of doing? And how can one scientifically understand that? In creating Kreizler, Carr perfectly captures the sensibilities of scientists of the late 19th century.

He also captures their optimistic spirit. This was a period that saw the birth of so many sciences: toxicology, modern chemistry, evolution, germ theory, psychology. There was a sense of excitement that science might provide the key to understanding humanity’s problems and possibilities. They were especially caught up in the promise of medicine, and applied the medical model to many of society’s ills. In that sense they saw crime not as a question of good and evil, but as a problem of disease plaguing society. Even though they were distressed about crime, they sensed an opportunity to explore and understand.

In a way we’ve gone backwards. The scientists of the 1890s were so full of possibilities – they even questioned whether prison was the right idea. One of the French scientists said, ‘As medical men, we wouldn’t use the same drug to treat cancer, heart disease and a broken arm. And yet we use the same medication -- incarceration -- to treat all crime. Shouldn’t we be looking at a variety of treatments?’

I worry that as a society we’ve given up on that creative kind of thinking; that we’re content just to lock prisoners away. Sometimes I wonder, with all our technological know-how, are we really more advanced or humanistic than the pioneers of criminology more than a century ago?