In the ninth essay in the Legacies of Eugenics series, Oliver Rollins explores how the new biology of crime opens a backdoor to eugenics.
This is the ninth installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in collaboration with the Los Angeles Review of Books, and supported by the Center for Genetics and Society, the Othering & Belonging Institute, and Berkeley Public Health.
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ON OCTOBER 7, 2024, in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, then–presidential candidate Donald Trump said of immigrants that “many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Although Trump’s campaign would later pretend that this comment was “clearly” directed at “murderers” and not immigrants, and more specifically at those “illegal” persons “invading” the country at the southern border, similar statements from his 2024 campaign, not to mention his pre-government days, make clear that they are a Trumpian refrain rather than an aberration. This refrain, which derives from our country’s long history of eugenic “science,” clearly continues to operate actively and prescriptively in the present.
A kind of living relic of that science, the phrase is often deployed to imply instinctive criminality. When wrapped in nativist fantasies of racial purity, “bad genes” mobilizes the nation’s long-standing fear of the nonwhite Other, typically portrayed as “unfit,” “illegal,” and not a real citizen. The zombielike repetition of eugenic slogans like this one is ultimately about who can and should be a US citizen, who can expect the civil rights protections theoretically guaranteed by the Constitution. The phrase, in short, is about the politics of belonging. Carriers of “bad genes” do not belong.
Consider the following sentence from 250 years ago, said to have been written in Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of Notes on the State of Virginia: “[T]hat tyranny in the daily existence of which we are nursed & educated from our cradles cannot fail to stamp us with odious peculiarities.” Jefferson elaborated on this point in the published manuscript: our sense of natural order is rooted in how we come to know the (unequal) social worlds we inhabit (of who belongs where, who does not belong). These worlds are then internalized as truth. Neither an anti-racist nor a devotee of social equality, he nonetheless reminds us that distinctions of race, couched as “natural,” underpinned the brutal reality of chattel slavery and the alleged “backwardness” of the “savage.” Deployed to evaluate citizenship potential, race-coded characteristics were thus never impartial observations but acts of sociopolitical power. Indeed, unequal power dynamics have always been inseparable from our ways of knowing, including in the domains of science and technology.
Bruno Latour implored us to understand that “science is politics by other means.” This observation is especially true of the “science” of murderous (“bad”) genes and criminal brains. In the name of scientific and social progress, criminologists have sought to simplify the intricate social factors that produce criminality by narrowly—and misguidedly—focusing on the individual subject’s biological constitution. But, tellingly, the search for the biological roots of violence has yet to enhance our ability to understand or prevent criminal behavior.
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The father of modern criminology is usually considered to be the Italian-born physician Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909). The school of criminal anthropology he established was not the first to associate innate biological traits with deviant behavior, but it would be the most influential during the early 20th century. Its allure partly derived from Lombroso’s purported dedication to scientific rigor, and partly—perhaps mostly—from how he reframed and remixed old arguments drawn from phrenology, social Darwinism, and scientific racism to promulgate a cohesive theory of crime. Lombroso’s answer to society’s struggles against crime, as laid out first in his 1876 book LʼUomo delinquente (Criminal Man) and its four subsequent editions, was to focus on the “born criminal.”
Lombroso’s research rather conveniently narrowed the analytic lens to innate traits rather than “unlawful” behaviors. Born criminals, Lombroso claimed, enter the world with “evil inclinations” and a lively impulse to offend, harm, or assault. Unlike his other classifications—the criminaloid, occasional criminal, and criminal by passion—Lombroso maintained that “it would be a mistake […] to imagine that the [preventative] measures which have been shown to be effective with other criminals could be successfully applied to born criminals; for these are, for the most part, refractory to all treatment.” With this statement, the danger inherent in the notion of the born criminal becomes clear: if born criminals are “incorrigible,” without hope of redemption, then the state is justified not just in quarantining but even in executing them, actions now stamped with a warrant of scientific authority.
Born criminals are, according to Lombroso, evolutionary throwbacks “programmed to do harm,” akin to “the most ferocious carnivores and rodents.” Although criminality was allegedly passed down from parents to children, this should not, he cautioned, “make us more compassionate towards born criminals […] but rather should shield us from pity, for these beings are members of not our species but the species of bloodthirsty beasts.” Lombroso’s attempts to link animalistic characteristics to criminal propensity explicitly drew on the tropes of 19th-century scientific racism, which aimed to describe, rationalize, and reproduce “race” as a fixed set of demonstrable differences. His “lower races” were believed to be easily knowable to scientists and citizens alike, revealing themselves through darker skin, intellectual impoverishment, and inferior cultural development. “Those who have read this far,” wrote Lombroso in the final chapter of his book, “should now be persuaded that criminals resemble savages and the colored races.”
Using quasi-evolutionary reasoning served to buttress the born criminal thesis. By the early 20th century, social Darwinism and scientific racism had diffused well beyond the walls of academia, operating as a commonsense mechanism for explaining how natural and social life were governed. Lombroso’s affection for these frameworks rested in the supposed certainty or objectivity they provided. The obviousness of phenotypic differences underwrote scientific “truth.” Consider Gina Lombroso Ferrero’s summary of her father’s description of the born criminal’s physical anomalies:
the scanty beard as opposed to the general hairiness of the body, prehensile foot, diminished number of lines in the palm of the hand, cheek-pouches, enormous development of the middle incisors and frequent absence of the lateral ones, flattened nose and angular or sugar-loaf form of the skull, common to criminals and apes; the excessive size of the orbits, which, combined with the hooked nose, so often imparts to criminals the aspect of birds of prey, the projection of the lower part of the face and jaws (prognathism) found in negroes and animals, and supernumerary teeth (amounting in some cases to a double row as in snakes) and cranial bones (epactal bone as in the Peruvian Indians): all these characteristics pointed to one conclusion, the atavistic origin of the criminal, who reproduces physical, psychic, and functional qualities of remote ancestors.
Lombroso Ferrero’s deliberate use of meticulous physical description encourages acceptance of the born criminal theory not by unveiling something “new” about the relationship between biology and crime but by relying on shared familiarity—everyone knows how feet, noses, and mouths should appear, right?—and directing attention to apparent differences. As historian David Horn has noted, Lombroso believed that the striking traits of the born criminal were so evident that children could instinctively identify and depict them.
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While Lombroso did not consider himself a eugenicist, or an advocate for “eugenic solutions,” his theory profoundly shaped eugenic criminology in the early 20th century. Historian Richard F. Wetzell has shown how the born criminal thesis spurred rationales for the sterilization of “hereditary criminals” and “incorrigible recidivists” during the Third Reich. In the United States, eugenic ideology was integrated into various institutional practices in criminological research, policing, and penal law. Historian Nicole Hahn Rafter emphasizes how Lombroso’s “doctrine was entirely compatible with eugenics; Americans already crusading for eugenic measures found in criminal anthropology seemingly scientific support for their own program.” It’s important to keep in mind that eugenic criminology in the United States preceded, and indeed inspired, sterilization doctrines across the globe. Consider Italian law professor Giulio Q. Battaglini’s words in 1914: “It is natural to demand that measures be adopted to hinder the reproduction of those offenders who constitute deleterious racial elements […] Measures such as the practice of sterilization already prevailing in a number of the American states would answer this purpose perfectly.”
Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton’s research exemplified the convergence between American eugenics and Lombrosian ideas. A 1932 article in The New York Times reported on Hooton’s preliminary findings from a study of over 16,000 participants, which purported to prove that bodily features statistically correlated with specific types of criminals. Hooton argued that first-degree murderers could be distinguished from other kinds of criminals because they were “older, heavier, taller, bigger-chested,” with “relatively shorter trunks,” and larger heads. He later suggested that a “prejudice” existed against those who believed in the hereditary nature of crime. As he put it, “Criminologists consider it edifying to believe that a man can be saved by grace, but refuse to admit that he can be damned by germ plasm.”
While nature-versus-nurture debates were common at the time, Hooton’s work uniquely linked the “prejudice” against naturalistic explanations of crime to the “democratic dogma ‘that all men are created free and equal.’” “I believe,” he wrote in a 1936 essay titled “Plain Statements About Race,”
that this nation requires a biological purge if it is to check the growing numbers of the physically inferior, the mentally ineffective and the anti-social. These elements which make for social disintegration are drawn from no one race or ethnic stock. […] Every tree that bears bad fruit should be cut down and cast into the fire. Whether that tree is an indigenous growth or a transplantation from an alien soil, matters not one whit, so long as it is rotten.
For Hooten, each racial group’s born criminals should be purged—either by permanent postponement of their right to citizenship or by expulsion from society.
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In the wake of the racist atrocities committed by the Nazis, biocriminology came under intense scrutiny. Biological perspectives on crime melted into the shadows of cultural thought but did not disappear. Indeed, as eugenics transitioned into modern genetics, studies of twins and adopted babies surged, aiming to distinguish hereditary influences on criminal behavior from those attributable to upbringing. The studies are ongoing today, notwithstanding their decidedly mixed results. For example, a 2021 study of twins reported that “persistent delinquency [antisocial behavior that begins in childhood and escalates in adolescence] represents an etiologically distinct class of rule-breaking with strong genetic roots.” Similarly, research in the 1970s on XYY chromosomal arrangement sparked an interest in genetic screening among criminologists but largely failed to support a link between an extra Y chromosome and criminal behavior, and most courts worldwide dismissed attempts to invoke the “XYY syndrome” as a legal defense.
Since the 1970s, an increasing number of researchers began focusing on mental traits, drawing inspiration from the 1964 book Crime and Personality by British psychologist Hans Eysenck. Other researchers turned to the intelligence quotient (IQ) as a fundamental attribute of behavior. As Pepper Stetler noted in her essay for this series, low IQ, framed as a biological trait, was deemed an indicator of criminal propensity, a belief that persists in biosocial criminology to this day.
Another attention-grabbing aspect of the research was the promotion of psychosurgery—a type of lobotomy—as a potential solution for violence and crime, with some neurosurgeons boldly asserting that African Americans involved in Civil Rights Movement protests should have their craniums opened up so that offending parts could be sliced away. The surgery would, it was said, cure their “rioting” behavior. This sentiment, needless to say, encountered backlash from a diverse array of voices, including the Black Panther Party and Bertram S. Brown, then the director of the National Institute of Mental Health.
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The contemporary biocriminology narrative is as much a story about the brain as it is about genes. Researchers assume a correlation between genetic risk and “antisocial behavior,” which has become the preferred term to describe clinical conduct related to violence or criminality. For example, since at least 1993, the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene and a handful of others have been associated with antisocial traits, including impulsivity, aggression, psychopathy, and callousness. While we do not fully understand their molecular functions, they have been targeted due to their role in regulating neurotransmitter levels in the brain. One behavior model proposes that “specific genes result in structural and functional brain alterations that, in turn, predispose to antisocial behavior,” writes neuropsychologist Adrian Raine. Genetics and neuroscience thus serve as investigative techniques to explore the neurobiology of antisocial traits and, above all, to insert these inquiries into a medicalized context.
Medicalization is a fancy term that describes how crime, typically defined outside the realm of medicine, has been reinterpreted within its domain. Framing criminality as a mental health issue is obviously not new: such framings were vital to early 20th-century biocriminology. Today’s research, however, aims to narrow the lens by identifying faulty genetic or neurobiological traits that may heighten the chance of developing personality disorders, as clinically defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or through other diagnostic tools. By leveraging medical frameworks and “scientific objectivity,” this research has shifted the analysis of crime “from badness to sickness.” In the lingo of the new paradigm, criminality is a symptom of, or potential risk factor for, mental illness. Consequently, we have an updated, but not vastly different, understanding of the born criminal: less straightforwardly deterministic than previous versions, this one nonetheless risks stigmatizing those diagnosed with (or suspected of) disorders that increase the odds of violent, abnormal, or criminal behavior.
The key question is what to do with this information. Advocates of neurocriminology assume that estimates of neurobiological risk eventually will help prevent crime. If we accept, hypothetically, that scientists can accurately assess the risk of antisocial behavior, and can thus tell us with some certainty that a toddler may grow up to be antisocial, psychopathic, or even murderous, then what are we as a society supposed to do with this information? Even if the toddler is not necessarily condemned to a life of crime, how should we respond? Should society have a say in the management of these “risky” individuals? At this point, replicable studies supporting so-called “neuro-interventions”—e.g., supplements or cognitive behavioral training, which supposedly “indirectly or directly rewir[e] the brain”—have been elusive. Moreover, such “therapies” individualize these behaviors in ways that abstract them from larger social contexts or ethical concerns. Do we have a right to implement early prevention tactics that surveil or even confine the toddler or their family? Without careful social and ethical deliberations, we might find ourselves condemning neurobiologically “at risk” individuals to the same kind of eugenic scrutiny faced by those labeled “born criminals.”
Race, so vital to Lombroso’s theory, looms over this contemporary research program. As sociologist Julien Larregue demonstrates in Hereditary: The Persistence of Biological Theories of Crime (2024), some biosocial criminologists affirm that evolution explains the distribution of traits and behaviors among racial groups, a theory that has long been debunked. As a result, they claim that African Americans are, by fiat of evolution, less intelligent and have “natural” tendencies toward deviance. Consider the words of biosocial criminologist John P. Wright, who asserted in 2008 that evolution “provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races.” Evolutionary theory, he writes, also “helps to explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm can explain these inconvenient truths.” Thus, race, a sociopolitical construction, is disguised as a biological fact.
Neuropsychologists, in contrast to criminologists, have adopted a “race-neutral” approach, arguing that race should not be a factor in their research. They correctly assert the nonsignificance of race but have ignored how racism unequally shapes the making of crime and the criminal. As one neuroscientist explained to me, “Racism is too complex to put into a neurobiological risk model of [antisocial behavior].” Yet, how can a predictive model possibly deliver an accurate and fair risk prediction of mental health or criminality for a Black child without considering the child’s lived experiences with racism? This kind of “biosocial reification,” as sociologist Victoria Pitts-Taylor termed it, could potentially revive eugenic-like measures. The risk here is due not to explicitly racist or eugenicist scientists but to a dogged belief in empiricism. Hard lessons learned from algorithmic risk predictions of crime should caution us against pursuing “objective” technologies to fight crime when these disregard the effects of racism. In the case of the neurobiology of violence, excising social factors (like racism or poverty) that are too complicated to quantify may render “the violent brain model,” as I have named it elsewhere, empirically feasible. The excision, however, also incites a failure to “see” racial lives—thereby silencing the voices and obscuring the experiences of those most impacted by entrenched social inequities. Consequently, these new technologies may inadvertently fuel eugenic regimes of corporal surveillance in the name of public health and safety.
Brain visualization techniques for studying crime have utilized advances in imaging technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to examine the relationship between brain size or function and abnormal behavior. To be sure, researchers are not relying solely on brain scans to explore antisocial behavior; as a neuropsychologist I interviewed told me, brain imaging is “just one tool in the toolbox.” And yet the allure of such visualization is undeniable. Brain scans are often mislabeled as “pictures” of brains rather than being regarded as what they are: a computerized production of quantified data points transformed into aesthetically pleasing hues of red, blue, and green. Scans speak to the challenge of empirical certainty—or, better yet, help attribute a false sense of certainty to what we “see” when the brains of criminals “light up” differently from those of “normal” people.
Consider the group-to-individual (G2i) problem, which addresses the use of brain scans in the courtroom setting. The “problem” lies in the fact that fMRI cannot be used to diagnose antisociality in individuals. This is because neuroimaging studies of antisociality yield group comparisons. Brain images depict statistically average responses from each study group (antisocial groups and healthy groups), which are unhelpful for diagnostic purposes because not all “antisocial” individuals have brains that look or function the same. In fact, the brains of some “antisocial” individuals may resemble the study’s “healthy” population, making their use in the courtroom questionable at best.
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What, then, do decades of advancing scientific knowledge allow us to say about criminality? Nikolas Rose has argued that we have entered a phase of “screen and intervene,” in which the focus on identifying and sorting individuals based on their “risky brains” leads to a politics of mental health—of regulating or treating those at risk for crime. This approach becomes the ideal mode of social protection, shaped by the demands and anxieties of “the public.” Interestingly, Rose resists labeling this research initiative as either a revival or new form of eugenics. His reasoning is that “screen and intervene” is grounded in a public health framework that aims to identify individuals at greater neurobiological risk for antisocial behavior and manage them to ensure public safety. This diverges from eugenic ideologies, which aimed to target and remove those considered dangerously pathological in order to engineer a world of “good stock.”
Sociologist Troy Duster, by contrast, has cautioned that contemporary understandings of biology and crime may indeed invite a return of eugenics. Today’s eugenic threat, he believes, lies in society’s uncritical acceptance of genetic “truths” about social difference. In their landmark 1995 book The DNA Mystique, Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee argue for seeing the gene as a “cultural icon”—“a symbol, a metaphor, a convenient way to define personhood, identity, and relationships in socially meaningful ways.” If the gene is a social phenomenon, then so is “the brain.” Nelkin and Lindee’s approach encourages us to take seriously the idea that scientific knowledge and society are entangled with each other inextricably. Grasping the social basis of scientific facts enables us to understand why the contemporary rhetoric swirling around genes and brains resonates with carceral ideas about immigration, with mental health strategies of prevention, with “inconvenient” evolutionary “truths” about race and intelligence, and with eugenic logics of population control and inherent worth.
Deploying genetic and brain science to decipher biological and social worth creates the illusion that an unbiased—“neutral”—technology can diagnose the crime problem in the United States. The source of crime is surgically extracted, as it were, from its messy sociological and cultural history. We are asked to believe that the basis of criminality is knowable and solvable, not by addressing the reproduction of unequal social relations but by unearthing the molecular basis of high-risk behavior.
The fact is, however, that the high-risk individuals identified by these technologies are often members of marginalized groups: the poor, the disabled, the racially Other, noncitizens, and the mentally ill, who are already overrepresented, overtargeted, and overblamed for the nation’s crime problem. What we are left with is not a scientifically revolutionary perspective on crime but a well-worn display of inequity and power. In the words of James Baldwin, this social practice helps “destroy a truth and [re]invent a history.” As a result, the new biology of crime increases the likelihood of what Duster calls a “backdoor to eugenics.”
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Donald Trump’s myriad accusations that immigrants are the main perpetrators of crime, “poisoning the blood of our country,” underscore the urgency of dealing with the legacies of eugenics. The less visible yet growing resurgence of (neuro)biological research on crime and its increasing uptake in courts may prove to be just as dangerous. Its underlying justification—to shield society from the otherwise uncontrollable criminally ill—aligns far too closely with eugenic logics of the “unfit.”
In fact, the “work” these biomedical predictions do amounts to inscribing neurobiological dangerousness upon populations deemed disposable in order to protect the comforts of the privileged. This work must be regarded as a crucial part of what Ruha Benjamin, in this series, has dubbed a “eugenic infrastructure.” The conjured threat of the (racialized) criminal rationalizes racist agendas, like the New Jim Crow, “punishing the poor,” and biocentric forms of “crimmigration,” as exemplified by the upsurge in the collection of DNA from migrant children for use in criminal databases. The newest iteration of the search for Lombroso’s “criminal man” etches those “odious peculiarities” about which Jefferson warned into the heart of our contemporary society. Our eugenic past threatens to become our present.
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Featured image: Cesare Lombroso. “Fig. 7: Individui della malavita sfregiati,” from L’Uomo delinquente, 1897. CC0. Image has been altered.
LARB Contributor
Oliver Rollins is the Old Dominion Career Development Professor and associate professor of science, technology, and society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the author of Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain (Stanford University Press, 2021).
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