Kriminal i represivni sustav u Osijeku na prijelazu iz 19. u 20. stoljeće promatran kroz elemente biopolitike i socijalne povijesti
Crime and Repression in Osijek at the Turn of the 19th and Beginning of the 20th Century: Analysis through the Perspective of Biopolitics and Elements of Social History

Summary/Abstract: Elements of biopolitics and disciplinary society, such as statistics, reports, regulations and standardization of educational, medical and other practices, became essential in order to “discipline and punish” sociopolitical subjects throughout the 19th century. Regarding the industrial development, these trends can be observed in Osijek as well, especially in the late 19th and the early 20th century. By receiving different influences from Budapest, Vienna, Zagreb and other cities, Osijek’s town authorities undertook new steps in maintaining productive work force and isolating unwanted criminal deviations that were analytically analyzed and labeled. In the atmosphere of the industrial rationalization of social processes, expansion of bureaucratic trends and biopolitical normative monitoring, new collisions were ahead. Political authorities noticed new deviations, perversions, illegalities, factors that had to be eradicated or somehow corrected. Osijek, one of the largest Croatian towns in the late 19th and the early 20th century, but in the broader European sense still just a minor urban center, held an important position when it came to the trade network by the river Drava. Moreover, considerable number of new manufactures, trades, and factories were opened here, as the foreign investments focused on the exploitation of natural, especially forest resources. Being the capital of the Virovitica County and the Chamber of Trade, Osijek became the administrative and economic center of this region. In order to analyze this modernization phenomena, I consulted the theoretical corpus of biopolitics, using the works of Michel Foucault who, among other things, elaborated the new “art of government”, or “governmentality”, constituted of procedures, calculations, tactics and reflections typical for social dynamics such as this, in the midst of complex processes at the turn of the century. At that time, repressive system went through the obvious but gradual transformation indicated thorough the fact that, for example, scenes of public torture gave their place to the prison incarnation founded upon new juridical reforms according to the paradigm of the Monarchy. Dickens’ industrial revolution, age when the great hopes were put in the analytical factuality with the purpose of effective noticing, labeling and monitoring of all socially relevant developments, and primarily the productive work force, was present in Osijek as well. Police officers carefully traced all subversive actions that took place on the city streets, in pubs, and other places. Prison staff documented all physical and intellectual characteristics of convicts, local newspapers reported on health issues and moralized about decadent youth. Hygiene became the problem of high priority, and prostitution, although morally condemned and seriously inspected, was tolerated mostly for its economic profitability. In general, classification of different crimes became this town’s reality, or in other words, period of the so-called “tolerated illegalities” was slowly turning into a vague memory. New, capitalist disciplinary society defined by factory chimneys and railroads, accepted the more subtle type of ideological stream based on the new legal system and rigid prisons. Sociological category of population and its variables were continually monitored, as an individual’s body was marked with new deviations.

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