[.ca] Creating Born Criminals (ISBN 025206741X)

The Historical Origins of Eugenic Criminology:
Nicole Hahn Rafter's latest historical study of criminology and penology, Creating Born Criminals, traces the convoluted development of a category of persons known as "defective delinquents." As the name implies, this category combined criminality with a state of arrested development, which today we would call "mental retardation" or "developmental disability," but over the course of the period Rafter covers was known variously as "imbecility," "feeble-mindedness," or "psychopathy." Rafter traces the origins of what she calls "eugenic custodialism" to the founding of the Newark Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women in New York in 1878. "The Custodial," as it was called, was explicitly designed to confine "feeble-minded" women of child-bearing age in order to protect society against "bad heredity." Though some of these women would be called mentally retarded today, many were simply poor and/or guilty of sexual indiscretions. The founding of this unabashedly eugenic institution, Rafter argues, marked "the first time in U.S. history that the body itself was criminalized." Focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on New York State, Rafter goes on to describe how, in the 1910s, criminologists transformed the feebleminded criminal into the "defective delinquent." Criminologists "reconceptualized dangerousness as not violent behavior but a condition, an invisible hereditary defect carried by even minor offenders." Again, women preceded men into the realm of eugenic criminology. In 1920, New York passed its first defective delinquent law. "For the first time in the United States, prisoners deemed feebleminded" were given indefinite sentences. Although defective delinquent theory fell out of favor soon after the founding of the institutions inspired by it, Rafter found that some inmates spent virtually their entire adult lives at in prison under these laws. Inevitably, these unfortunates tended to be the truly mentally retarded, the prisoners least able to negotiate the administrative hurdles that would lead to release. In an age where incapacitative sentences appear to be making a comeback under various guises, ranging from "three-strikes" laws to the civil commitment of sex offenders, Creating Born Criminals ought to be required reading for everyone interested in criminal justice issues.