From "Scourge of the Countryside" to "Social Patrasites" and "Job-Hoppers"
From "Scourge of the Countryside" to "Social Patrasites" and "Job-Hoppers"

"Gypsies" in Czechoslovak Criminology from the First Republic to Early Normalization

Summary/Abstract: This text aims to analyse representations of “Gypsies” (cikáni) in Czechoslovak criminology in the period from 1945 to the onset of normalization. My focus is also on the issue of long-term continuities and discontinuities in the criminological discourse of the first half of the twentieth century. In the period of interwar Czechoslovakia, police expertise played a crucial role in criminalizing and marginalizing Roma and Sinti in Czechoslovak society, when it served to register, control and carry out surveillance of “wandering Gypsies” (potulní cikáni), and also greatly informed public debate on the issue. In the period of Stalinism, with the abolition of former police-repressive legislation, criminology still offered various representations of “Gypsies” as criminals, but these did not extend beyond the narrow framework of the police community. Ideological emphasis on representing “Gypsies” as victims of capitalism and understanding the “Gypsy question” as a social problem required different representations of Roma – as a social group that could be assimilated into the constructed socialist collective. However, after a certain degree of setback in the period of Stalinism, the development of criminological expertise in the 1960s in Czechoslovakia also brought about an increased interest in “Gypsies”, which was also characteristic of the emerging normalization regime.

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