Views about crime: diagnoses of delinquency in Uruguay during the first decades of the twentieth century

Abstract

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, a number of perspectives on crime in the capital city Montevideo converged in what was seen as an accelerated growth of the issue. As part of that phenomenon, new forms of crime emerged as well, and they were denounced to be identified as more professional, meaning the nature of those crimes had changed. In this present article I propose to analyze a series of diagnoses that incorporated among their main concerns the understanding of those changes in delinquency. To do the above mentioned, I considered a group of texts developed in controlled and academic settings that provided an account of the mutations of crimes through different focus and emphases. Among those texts, I resorted mainly to the ones linked to the spaces of deprivation of liberty and the Montevideo Police.

The work allows us to verify the importance which was attributed to the changes in the world of crime, understand its growth at that time and how they organized strategies to improve the effectiveness of crime control.