José Luis Duffy, the Revista Penitenciaria, and medical-legal studies: towards a prosopography of the Argentine penitentiary administration (1905-1909)

Abstract

The following article considers the figure of José Luis Duffy, an expert on the penitentiary system renowned in his era and often mentioned by Argentine historiography but little known abroad. With prosopographical aims, the article examines Duffy’s professional career path and its overlap with other actors of interest in the era such as Joaquín V. González and Antonio Ballvé, before arriving at the Cárcel de Encausados in Buenos Aires, where Duffy came to form a group of specialists on the “issue of crime”.  The creation of Argentina’s first penitentiary journal is also analyzed, as is the founding of the Office of Legal Medical Studies, a global pioneer in carrying out criminological studies in a penitentiary establishment. It was around this Office that Duffy gathered a remarkable group of specialists who attempted to put ideas stemming from positivist criminology into practice, which, despite dominating theoretical debate, did not have direct access to closed institutions. The chronological framework of the study corresponds to the period of the Revista Penitenciaria’s publication, from 1905 to 1909.