From “Scourge of the Countryside” to “Social Parasites” and “Job-Hoppers” / “Gypsies” in Czechoslovak Criminology from the First Republic to Early Normalization

Pavel Baloun

Soudobé dějiny/CJCH. X:X  

This text aims to analyse representations of “Gypsies” 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”, and also greatly informed public debate on the issue. In the period of Stalinism, with the abolition...