In the ninth essay in the Legacies of Eugenics series, Oliver Rollins explores how the new biology of crime opens a backdoor to eugenics.<\/p>\n
This is the ninth installment in the Legacies of Eugenics<\/a> 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,<\/a> the Othering & Belonging Institute,<\/a> and Berkeley Public Health.<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n ON OCTOBER 7, 2024, in an interview<\/a> with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, then\u2013presidential candidate Donald Trump said of immigrants that \u201cmany of them murdered far more than one person, and they\u2019re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it\u2019s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.\u201d Although Trump\u2019s campaign would later pretend that this comment was \u201cclearly\u201d directed at \u201cmurderers\u201d and not immigrants, and more specifically at those \u201cillegal\u201d persons \u201cinvading\u201d the country at the southern border, similar<\/a> statements<\/a> 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\u2019s long history of eugenic \u201cscience,\u201d clearly continues to operate actively and prescriptively in the present.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cbad genes\u201d mobilizes the nation\u2019s long-standing fear of the nonwhite Other, typically portrayed as \u201cunfit,\u201d \u201cillegal,\u201d 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<\/a> theoretically guaranteed by the Constitution. The phrase, in short, is about the politics of belonging. Carriers of \u201cbad genes\u201d do not belong.<\/p>\n Consider the following sentence from 250 years ago, said to have been written in Thomas Jefferson\u2019s original draft of Notes on the State of Virginia<\/a>: \u201c[T]hat tyranny in the daily existence of which we are nursed & educated from our cradles cannot fail to stamp us with odious peculiarities.\u201d 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 \u201cnatural,\u201d underpinned the brutal reality of chattel slavery and the alleged \u201cbackwardness\u201d of the \u201csavage.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Bruno Latour implored us to understand that \u201cscience is politics by other means.\u201d This observation is especially true of the \u201cscience\u201d of murderous (\u201cbad\u201d) 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\u2014and misguidedly\u2014focusing on the individual subject\u2019s biological constitution. But, tellingly, the search for the biological roots of violence has yet to enhance our ability to understand or prevent criminal behavior.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n The father of modern criminology is usually considered to be the Italian-born physician Cesare Lombroso (1835\u20131909). 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\u2019s purported dedication to scientific rigor, and partly\u2014perhaps mostly\u2014from how he reframed and remixed old arguments drawn from phrenology, social Darwinism, and scientific racism to promulgate a cohesive theory of crime. Lombroso\u2019s answer to society\u2019s struggles against crime, as laid out first in his 1876 book L\u02bcUomo delinquente (Criminal Man) and its four subsequent editions, was to focus on the \u201cborn criminal.\u201d<\/p>\n Lombroso\u2019s research rather conveniently narrowed the analytic lens to innate traits rather than \u201cunlawful\u201d behaviors. Born criminals, Lombroso claimed, enter the world with \u201cevil inclinations\u201d and a lively impulse to offend, harm, or assault. Unlike his other classifications\u2014the criminaloid, occasional criminal, and criminal by passion\u2014Lombroso maintained that \u201cit would be a mistake [\u2026] 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.\u201d With this statement, the danger inherent in the notion of the born criminal becomes clear: if born criminals are \u201cincorrigible,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Born criminals are, according to Lombroso, evolutionary throwbacks \u201cprogrammed to do harm,\u201d akin to \u201cthe most ferocious carnivores and rodents.\u201d Although criminality was allegedly passed down from parents to children, this should not, he cautioned, \u201cmake us more compassionate towards born criminals [\u2026] but rather should shield us from pity, for these beings are members of not our species but the species of bloodthirsty beasts.\u201d Lombroso\u2019s 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 \u201crace\u201d as a fixed set of demonstrable differences. His \u201clower races\u201d were believed to be easily knowable to scientists and citizens alike, revealing themselves through darker skin, intellectual impoverishment, and inferior cultural development. \u201cThose who have read this far,\u201d wrote Lombroso in the final chapter of his book, \u201cshould now be persuaded that criminals resemble savages and the colored races.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s affection for these frameworks rested in the supposed certainty or objectivity they provided. The obviousness of phenotypic differences underwrote scientific \u201ctruth.\u201d Consider Gina Lombroso Ferrero\u2019s summary of her father\u2019s description of the born criminal\u2019s physical anomalies:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Lombroso Ferrero\u2019s deliberate use of meticulous physical description encourages acceptance of the born criminal theory not by unveiling something \u201cnew\u201d about the relationship between biology and crime but by relying on shared familiarity\u2014everyone knows how feet, noses, and mouths should appear, right?\u2014and directing attention to apparent differences. As historian David Horn has noted,<\/a> Lombroso believed that the striking traits of the born criminal were so evident that children could instinctively identify and depict them.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n While Lombroso did not consider himself a eugenicist, or an advocate for \u201ceugenic solutions,\u201d his theory profoundly shaped eugenic criminology in the early 20th century. Historian Richard F. Wetzell has shown<\/a> how the born criminal thesis spurred rationales for the sterilization of \u201chereditary criminals\u201d and \u201cincorrigible recidivists\u201d 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<\/a> how Lombroso\u2019s \u201cdoctrine was entirely compatible with eugenics; Americans already crusading for eugenic measures found in criminal anthropology seemingly scientific support for their own program.\u201d It\u2019s 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\u2019s words<\/a> in 1914: \u201cIt is natural to demand that measures be adopted to hinder the reproduction of those offenders who constitute deleterious racial elements [\u2026] Measures such as the practice of sterilization already prevailing in a number of the American states would answer this purpose perfectly.\u201d<\/p>\n Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton\u2019s research exemplified the convergence between American eugenics and Lombrosian ideas. A 1932 article<\/a> in The New York Times reported on Hooton\u2019s 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 \u201colder, heavier, taller, bigger-chested,\u201d with \u201crelatively shorter trunks,\u201d and larger heads. He later suggested that a \u201cprejudice\u201d existed against those who believed in the hereditary nature of crime. As he put it,<\/a> \u201cCriminologists 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.\u201d<\/p>\n While nature-versus-nurture debates were common at the time, Hooton\u2019s work uniquely linked the \u201cprejudice\u201d against naturalistic explanations of crime to the \u201cdemocratic dogma \u2018that all men are created free and equal.\u2019\u201d \u201cI believe,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in a 1936 essay titled \u201cPlain Statements About Race,\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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. [\u2026] 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For Hooten, each racial group\u2019s born criminals should be purged\u2014either by permanent postponement of their right to citizenship or by expulsion from society.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n 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,<\/a> 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<\/a> of twins reported that \u201cpersistent delinquency [antisocial behavior that begins in childhood and escalates in adolescence] represents an etiologically distinct class of rule-breaking with strong genetic roots.\u201d 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 \u201cXYY syndrome\u201d as a legal defense.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> in her essay for this series, low IQ, framed as a biological trait, was deemed an indicator of criminal propensity, a belief that persists<\/a> in biosocial criminology to this day.<\/p>\n Another attention-grabbing aspect of the research was the promotion of psychosurgery\u2014a type of lobotomy\u2014as a potential solution for violence and crime, with some neurosurgeons<\/a> 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 \u201crioting\u201d behavior. This sentiment, needless to say, encountered backlash from a diverse array of voices, including the Black Panther Party<\/a> and Bertram S. Brown,<\/a> then the director of the National Institute of Mental Health.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n 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 \u201cantisocial behavior,\u201d 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 \u201cspecific genes result in structural and functional brain alterations that, in turn, predispose to antisocial behavior,\u201d writes<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cscientific objectivity,\u201d this research has shifted the analysis of crime \u201cfrom badness to sickness.\u201d<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201crisky\u201d individuals? At this point, replicable studies supporting so-called \u201cneuro-interventions\u201d<\/a>\u2014e.g., supplements or cognitive behavioral training, which supposedly \u201cindirectly or directly rewir[e] the brain\u201d\u2014have been elusive. Moreover, such \u201ctherapies\u201d 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 \u201cat risk\u201d individuals to the same kind of eugenic scrutiny faced by those labeled \u201cborn criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n Race, so vital to Lombroso\u2019s 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 \u201cnatural\u201d tendencies toward deviance. Consider the words of biosocial criminologist John P. Wright, who asserted<\/a> in 2008 that evolution \u201cprovides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races.\u201d Evolutionary theory, he writes, also \u201chelps 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.\u201d Thus, race, a sociopolitical construction, is disguised as a biological fact.<\/p>\n Neuropsychologists, in contrast to criminologists, have adopted a \u201crace-neutral\u201d 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, \u201cRacism is too complex to put into a neurobiological risk model of [antisocial behavior].\u201d 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\u2019s lived experiences with racism? This kind of \u201cbiosocial reification,\u201d as sociologist Victoria Pitts-Taylor termed<\/a> 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 \u201cobjective\u201d 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 \u201cthe violent brain model,\u201d as I have named<\/a> it elsewhere, empirically feasible. The excision, however, also incites a failure to \u201csee\u201d racial lives\u2014thereby 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cjust one tool in the toolbox.\u201d And yet the allure of such visualization is undeniable. Brain scans are often mislabeled as \u201cpictures\u201d 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\u2014or, better yet, help attribute a false sense of certainty to what we \u201csee\u201d when the brains of criminals \u201clight up\u201d differently from those of \u201cnormal\u201d people.<\/p>\n Consider the group-to-individual (G2i) problem, which addresses the use of brain scans in the courtroom setting. The \u201cproblem\u201d 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 \u201cantisocial\u201d individuals have brains that look or function the same. In fact, the brains of some \u201cantisocial\u201d individuals may resemble the study\u2019s \u201chealthy\u201d population, making their use in the courtroom questionable at best.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n What, then, do decades of advancing scientific knowledge allow us to say about criminality? Nikolas Rose has argued<\/a> that we have entered a phase of \u201cscreen and intervene,\u201d in which the focus on identifying and sorting individuals based on their \u201crisky brains\u201d leads to a politics of mental health\u2014of regulating or treating those at risk for crime. This approach becomes the ideal mode of social protection, shaped by the demands and anxieties of \u201cthe public.\u201d Interestingly, Rose resists labeling this research initiative as either a revival or new form of eugenics. His reasoning is that \u201cscreen and intervene\u201d 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 \u201cgood stock.\u201d<\/p>\n Sociologist Troy Duster, by contrast, has cautioned that contemporary understandings of biology and crime may indeed invite a return of eugenics. Today\u2019s eugenic threat, he believes, lies in society\u2019s uncritical acceptance of genetic \u201ctruths\u201d about social difference. In their landmark 1995 book The DNA Mystique, Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee argue for seeing the gene as a \u201ccultural icon\u201d\u2014\u201ca symbol, a metaphor, a convenient way to define personhood, identity, and relationships in socially meaningful ways.\u201d If the gene is a social phenomenon, then so is \u201cthe brain.\u201d Nelkin and Lindee\u2019s 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 \u201cinconvenient\u201d evolutionary \u201ctruths\u201d about race and intelligence, and with eugenic logics of population control and inherent worth.<\/p>\n Deploying genetic and brain science to decipher biological and social worth creates the illusion that an unbiased\u2014\u201cneutral\u201d\u2014technology 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cdestroy a truth and [re]invent a history.\u201d As a result, the new biology of crime increases the likelihood of what Duster calls a \u201cbackdoor to eugenics.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n Donald Trump\u2019s myriad accusations that immigrants are the main perpetrators of crime, \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country,\u201d<\/a> 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<\/a> may prove to be just as dangerous. Its underlying justification\u2014to shield society from the otherwise uncontrollable criminally ill\u2014aligns far too closely with eugenic logics of the \u201cunfit.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, the \u201cwork\u201d 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> a \u201ceugenic infrastructure.\u201d The conjured threat of the (racialized) criminal rationalizes racist agendas, like the New Jim Crow,<\/a> \u201cpunishing the poor,\u201d<\/a> and biocentric forms of \u201ccrimmigration,\u201d<\/a> as exemplified by the upsurge<\/a> in the collection of DNA from migrant children for use in criminal databases. The newest iteration of the search for Lombroso\u2019s \u201ccriminal man\u201d etches those \u201codious peculiarities\u201d about which Jefferson warned into the heart of our contemporary society. Our eugenic past threatens to become our present.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n Featured image: Cesare Lombroso. \u201cFig. 7: Individui della malavita sfregiati,\u201d<\/a> from L\u2019Uomo delinquente, 1897. CC0. Image has been altered.<\/p>\n LARB Contributor<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n In the fifth essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Ruha Benjamin explores how AI evangelists wrap their self-interest in a cloak of humanistic concern.<\/p>\n Ruha Benjamin<\/a>Oct 18, 2024<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Emily R. Klancher Merchant examines the growing enthusiasm among tech elites for genetically engineering their children, in the third essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series.<\/p>\n Emily R. Klancher Merchant<\/a>Aug 22, 2024<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n