im reading thru the works of Cesare Lombroso now (supposedly the 'father of criminology') cause he was friends with/a mentor figure to our horrible buddy Max Nordau.
It is really wild how eugenicists honed in on epilepsy as the center of everything bad in humanity. The introduction of Crime, its causes and remedies says something along the lines of "all born criminals are epileptics but not all epileptics are born criminals" and tbh I'm not even sure anymore what proto eugenicists thought epilepsy was.
lots of phrenology in here. Lombroso talks with a good bit of thoughtfulness about how environmental factors like poverty combine with influence of childhood experiences and family to produce "crime," in the sense that yeah, he recognizes that there ARE many different influences and gets a lot of the influences right.
But it makes me realize that acknowledging "oh there are environmental factors" doesn't really do anything to fix our cruel and shitty thinking about "criminals"
When you get past the initial shock of the racist language and more blatant acknowledgement of stuff that is kept quieter in modern explanations of crime, Lombroso's ideas and solutions are still really similar to the ones we have now. people still think about "crime" basically the same way this guy did, we haven't advanced past him at all
Like, as you're reading, you think "Wow! That's horrible!" and then you think "Wait. We still do/think that."
Lombroso thinks that some people are "born criminals" and incurable, which sounds bad until you realize that's what people think antisocial personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder is. and he refers to people who are "criminaloids" which can be identified by their skull shape (using phrenology)
he advocates for solitary confinement as a solution in a lot of places. reasoning that people who are unfixable shouldn't be allowed to influence anyone else.
he also promotes labor to reform criminals and thinks that young criminals can be reformed by shipping them off to work on farms or "to the colonies"
He has a specific vendetta against tattooing, saying that criminality is highly associated with getting tattoos and also connecting tattooing to "the savage races" or whatever
he talks about "savages" in contrast to "civilized races" incessantly. one key term he uses to discuss his ideas is atavism, the idea of regression to a more primitive or less evolved state. So he's always comparing the traits of criminals to "savages" (indigenous people or anybody who doesn't follow European ideas of civilization) and he gives this big list of traits
“The born criminal shows in a proportion reaching 33% numerous specific characteristics that are almost always atavistic. Those who have followed us thus far have seen that many of the characteristics presented by savage races are very often found among born criminals. Such, for example, are: the slight development of the pilar system; low cranial capacity; retreating forehead; highly developed frontal sinuses; great frequency of Wormian bones; early closing of the cranial sutures; the simplicity of the sutures; the thickness of the bones of the skull; enormous development of the maxillaries and the zygomata; prognathism; obliquity of the orbits; greater pigmentation of the skin; tufted and crispy hair; and large ears. To these we may add the lemurine appendix; anomalies of the ear; dental diastemata; great agility; relative insensibility to pain; dullness of the sense of touch; great visual acuteness; ability to recover quickly from wounds, blunted affections; precocity as to sensual, pleasures; greater resemblance between the sexes; greater incorrigibility of the woman (Spencer); laziness; absence of remorse; impulsiveness; physiopsychic excitability; and especially improvidence, which sometimes appears as courage and again as recklessness changing to cowardice.” (Crime, its Causes and Remedies, 365-366, trans. Henry Horton)
(All the first half of those things he lists are stuff about the skull, which was studied to distinguish between "races" and determine that certain races were inferior, according to phrenology)
there is also a really interesting part (not sure if i wrote down the page?) where he talks about how the "savage" races can't regulate themselves according to the demands of labor in civilization, going to work at a certain time and steadily working over a long period
Oh! here it is
What is repugnant to the criminal is the regularity of the mechanism of modern society, that gigantic system of cog-wheels by which each human being, assigned to his place in the clock-work, must execute at any given instant the prescribed movement. (Crime, its Causes and Remedies, pg. 208, trans. Henry Horton)
and he goes on to compare this to the "savages"
another part I found interesting
...of 333 pupils examined, 13% showed serious cranial anomalies. Now of these abnormal individuals 44% were insubordinate, while of the pupils of normal type only 24% were insubordinate. Of the former, 23% were dull, and 27% inert; of the latter, 11% were dull, and 10% inert. Among the abnormal there were 10% incapable of any progress, and only 2% among those of normal type. Of the 43 with cranial abnormalities, 8 complained of headache, or of a feeling of heat in the head, and of incapacity for continuous work; 12 were impulsive, irascible, and unable to restrain themselves... (Crime, its Causes and Remedies, pg. 306, trans. Henry Horton)
I thought reading Max Nordau's work also that the descriptions of the "criminal" type of person mapped very readily onto modern understandings of ADHD, and wondered if (what we now understand as) ADHD might have been highly disabling/stigmatizing during this period of time due to being associated with an Inherently Criminal Disposition or whatever.
Come to think of it, I believe I've read some things about black boys being more likely to be diagnosed with ODD (oppositional defiant disorder, basically 'This Child Doesn't Respect Authority Disease') and white boys with the same symptoms being more likely to be diagnosed ADHD.
it's very eye-opening to read sources written by eugenicists and proto-eugenicists, rather than just reading About eugenics from a modern POV
