revealing v. creating

reviewing a question posed to me by RHB: Does the scientist create the environment for these possibilities to exist, or does the scientist simply reveal the undercurrent? poo. Also, who created these different distinctions of white?

did i mention

that i love this?

and more

We are faced, now, with an increasingly relevent question: how have we created, and how do we create daily, the criminal? As our prisons swell with occupants and our educational institutions are battered with the effects low funding, how does society arrange itself to accomodate the development of a rapidly rising criminal class? Some of these answers are inferred in policy like the Three Strikes Law in California, which has imprisoned a great number of non-violent offenders, including petty theft and drug possession.

i'm not home and i want to write.

The economy of the criminal body was one of individual non- ownership.

We are living in a time when the identification of criminals is very much dependant on the political situation around us. In this Age of Terror we are harangued on all sides by terrorists, who have apparently decried our ways of "freedom" and plot daily to end the lives of Americans. These people are not featureless; indeed, their physicality is well known to us, even as it is never fully articulated. First, they are brown folks, and their features follow suit: dark hair, dark eyes, overbearing brow with heavy eyebrows. They speak a different language, it is not important which one. It is simply different. Somehow the combination of these characteristics speaks to other Americans: terrorist. These people, as a result, have been suffering a loss of human rights based on their physical characteristics. Imprisonment without charges, arraignment or trial is somehow acceptable when dealing with people who have these characteristics, whether or not they have any sort of criminal background or history. To quote an amazing man and anti-racist educator, Tim Wise, : "When Timothy McVey blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building, they did not profile Timothys or even scrawny white guys renting U-Hauls, but after 9-11 we look askance at any person who appears to be of Arab background."
There is a similar story for black people. The difference is that the persecution does not need an event to encourage it. Our prison populations are teeming with people of color in general. From the beginning of the twentieth century to now that population has only grown, almost matching the population of whites in a nation where people of color are definitely still the minority. ***GET THESE NUMBERS FROM WPP***

We live in a society where there is a deep context for this unequal persecution. From the beginning...

link to outline & thesis

http://web.pdx.edu/~audreyw/DOCS/Context.doc

Thank you!

here's my outline.

i was going to link this, but I realized I needed to upload it to my site first- and i am not on campus with access to SSH right now. So here it is inline. RHB, you will get a hard copy in your mailbox. Ness, will you give me some feedback too? Thank you, always...

Classifying the Criminal Body
- Measurement of all parts of the body
- Racial Identification/Classification, correlations with other race/characteristics
- Hooton
- Body Type
- Sheldon & Hooton, Somatotyping (Crime and Human Nature, p 81 & Why Men Behave like Apes, 193-220)
- Physical signifiers of feeblemindedness, or other sorts of mental deficiency
- existence of biological tendencies t0ward crime-inducing behaviors (roebuck 34)
- Shift from big noses to genes: the body in its visual form becomes less important than inhereted criminality- the genetic criminal.

Judging the Criminal Body
- How science was taken by official folks. Pamphlets
- Experts to deal with the criminal body: Physicians, anthropologists, psychologists, etc.

Confining the Criminal Body
- Developing & Shifting systems of incarceration: different uses of the body in different contexts.
- Prisons
- Asylums
- Genetic confinement: sterilization
- Capital punishment

Thomas Mott Osborne

From _Criminal Man_, Godwin.
argument based on a simple proposition, based on human nature. All real discipline is self-imposed, therefore external discipline, being coercive, is effective only while the coercive power exists.
- Is the real problem here, then, our system of government and our social/political environment? The classification of the criminal body was perhaps simply a strategy that enforced a number of self-policing systems.
Social re-education: brainwashing.
Kenyon J. Scudder, Superintendent of the California Institution for Men. "If we can successfully adjust men in prison after they have run the whole gamut of the law, if we can get them over the fear of work, if we can send them back to society a little better than when they entered, then how much more sensible it would be if we could reach these cases earlier in life before the damage has been done; reach them in the early years of childhood before they become delinquent, before we allow them to enter on a criminal career. We make our criminals in this country. They are not born into crime." p145

perhaps important

to note is that most of these anthropologists/physicians/etc are providing treatises on the appropriate treatement of the criminal, and suggesting changes to the criminological system as a result of their studies of the criminal body.

If the person being studied could speak, freely and without demand of remorse, what would they say?

"whereas,

it is exceedingly desirable that important treatises on criminology in foreign languages be readily accessible in the English language, Resolved, that the president appoint a cinnuttee if five with power to select such treatises as in their judgement should be translated, and to arrange for their publication." Resolution of the National Conference of Criminal Law and Criminology, held at Northwestern University in Chicago, June, 1909.
Who were these five men? They chose certain publications; why?
"For the community at large, it is important to recognise that criminal science is a larger thing than criminal law. The legal profession in particular has a duty to familiarize itself with the principles of that science, as the sole means for intelligent and systematic improvement of the criminal system." -E. Ray Stevens, Judge of the Circuit Court, Madison, Wis., Member of the Executive Board of American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology.
This man was a judge; an on-the-ground, practical applier of scientific tenet to the lives of criminals. He had the power to implement the suggestions of anthropologists, physicians and psychologists. His belief in the application of these scientific advances is an important signifier of the connection between science and policing/jurisprudence and incarceration.
The connection between these fields- one relatively removed from practical application, and whose primary interactions with the criminal is one of an evidence-collector, and the other which is interacting with the criminal daily, on an actual personal level- is an important one to examine. Theb many lines that science created separating the "normal" social individual and the delinquent made it easier- or perhaps even important- for these rank and file policemen, judges, wardens and guards to treat the criminal with even more distance than before.
Thoughts about feeble-mindedness: if the feebleminded commit crimes, are in fact more biologically apt to be criminals, then what do we say about the rich and acceptably intelligent that were committing crimes of embezzlement, etc?

jeezus.

i am feeling:
- lost
- overwhelmed
- stupid
- lost.

I imagine lots of people go through crap like this. it just feels so... isolating. because no one knows what the hell i'm doing besides me. No one can really help.

ack. not a whole lotta time left...

questions

how was the criminal body objectified? why?
why was it important to classify the criminal types?
If the objective of criminal anthropology was not to interrogate the criminal his/herself, what was the object of interrogation?
How was criminal anthropology used to silence the criminal voice?
Why are we complicit still in the system of hiding/silencing criminals & their hidden systems of punishment?

How was the science of criminal anthropology used against populations of color in the united states? against immigrants?

How were the conclusions drawn by criminal anthropologists implemented in the admittedly advanced American penal system? the policing system?

Who was participating in the development of this science? why? what resources/people/populations did they have access to? Why?

Who funded this work? Why?

What international/national congresses/organizations were talking about criminal anthropology? How?

venessa, rhb: ?

sooo...

venessa & larissa say its time to narrow it down. it probably is. but that means that I have to start writing. hmmph.

epidermises bristle

how do we comply with these professionally/"scientifically" developed discourses of criminality on a day to day basis? Our complicity is cemented in fear; we, like Hooton, have adopted a fear of our own destruction, individual and social. In developed codes regarding the criminal, we have done our best to define appropriate behavior in order to define inappropriate (criminal) behavior; perhaps, actually, it is the other way around.

We do comply with and endorse these systems of incarceration daily through our simple acceptance of our social control mechanisms. We do not question the behavior of police; we do not interrogate the activities and indiscretions of prison guards and officials; we allow punishment to continue, hidden, unknown, unimportant. Why? In part due to the objectification and classification of the criminal body. The "criminal" no longer lives as human once identified as criminal. Could recidivism be due to the systematic and widely accepted de-humanization of the criminal? Their bodies are compromised, their personalities and spirits and selves seen as degenerate. Hooton calls them lower animals, these "habitual criminals" who breed like cats or dogs or pigs.

Was criminal anthropology a process required in order to fully integrate the system of incarceration in prisons into the social understanding? Are prisons and a criminal class of property offenders necessary in order to maintain a fully functional capitalism? In examining the aspects of late stage capitalism, we can definitely notice that ridiculously high rates of incarceration (particularly in the case of young men of color) go along with the advancement of capitalism. Why? Less education and more incarceration mark late stage capitalism.

Perhaps I am being narrow minded, however; there has only been a short period of widely available education anyway. Maybe our very society has experienced some sort recidivistic transgression towards the middle ages... back to the norm, shall we say. Sigh. Oh well for high dreams of democracy. Feudal monarchy, here we come!

contrivers

of the system of criminal justice as it is known today envisioned a utopia: isolation, in some cases biological disabling, rehabilitation, etc- that utopia has indeed proved impossible, degenerative, and subject to the environment of its conception. While Hooton strove to not unduly indict the "Negro and Negroid" population in his studies, the characteristics he identifies are often fit into a discourse of existing racism within systems of policing and incarceration.

More method

"If I have studied 'practices' such as those of the sequesterization of the insane, or clinical medicine, or the organization of the empirical sciences, or legal punishment, it was in order to study this interplay between a 'code' that governs ways of doing things and a production of true discourses that served to found, justify, and provide reasons and principles for these ways of doing things."
Thinking about criminal anthropology: a discourse created in order to develop a code to govern the way criminals are conceptualized, identified and treated through science. A discourse created between the criminal body and its interrogator; the interrogator requires specific responses from a specific body in order to generalize a code.

i forgot

about the body. in particular, I forgot about foucault's analysis of systems of punishment enacted on the body. Looking at an interview about his historical method, I notice that he informed himself in areas where I feel deficient. Really, the entire historical context of the time I'm examining. Poo.
Some notes:
- "analyzing an event according to the multiple processes that constitute it." (Power, 227.) Is criminal anthropology an event or process that surrounded a significant event? If carceralization of the penal system is an event, than perhaps the objectification of the criminal body is an event as well, or perhaps it was a process that was included carceralization. Perhaps it is both- an event in terms of science, a process in terms of carceralization. Carceralization allowed the subject of the criminal body to be effectively studied, and the environment of "scientizing" everything was the context in which amassing such data as Hooton did was embedded.
- "'eventalization' thus works by constructing around the singular event analyzed as process a 'polygon' or, rather, 'polyhedron' of intelligibility, the number of whose faces is not given in advance and can never be properly taken as finite." (Power, 227.) This is a comforting notion. My look at criminal anthropology has many faces: not simply the categorization of the criminal body in an effort to prevent and eliminate crime, but also processes of control of these and similar bodies- bodies that offend the senses of these 'sensible' scientists. The mad, feeble minded, poor and 'lazy' are included in this categorization. Sterilization, institutionalization and isolation were all tools to control these offensive populations. Prisons were both the impetus and a solution for folks like Hooton; isolation of some sort was part of Hooton's vision for criminals and ex-convicts.
Contexts to think about: Post civil war America- Jim Crow, minstrel, lynchings, etc.; WWI and WWII economies and concerns; extreme patriarchal environment; professionalization; scientization (is there a better word for this?); beginning of Cold War; the Depression; is there more?

RHB, if you read this, could you give me some input?

something to remember

that criminals and crime exist and are studied in order to further define the identity of the individual studying and the difference, and sometimes inferiority, of the studied- in this case, the incarcerated criminal. Hooton identifies himself as that human who is transcending the criminal and degenerative elements of society, and he believed that there existed in universities all over the country human stock worthy of particular augmentation. Of course, these people were like him in more ways than theu were not. Unfortunately, as much as Hooton seemed reluctant to condemn people of color, in his conversations about sterilization he includes those who do not develop enough personal capital, the mentally infirm and insane, as well as the criminal and physically degenerate. Who in the United States at the time was the object of isolation from resources and education, and generally socially identified as stupid and lazy? Black folks, in particular- and as much as Hooton may have tried to prevent the unfair targeting of this population, his recommendation of mass sterilization was primarily carried out against poor, uneducated women of color in the United States under sterilizaion laws.

research question

I have written many versions this morning.

I am studying criminal anthropology in the United States because I want to find out how systems of professional/academic science helped to construct our contemporary system of criminal justice and punishment in order to help my reader understand that our contemporary system was built on assumptions around class, race, appearance, behavior and biological inferiority. What the fuck does that mean?

We live in a society that uses prisons and police to control our environment and what happens in it. Is it a process of consistent and repeated social agreement? Is our criminal justice system relevent to the way we want to run our social collective?

Kellor: Habitual criminals must be killed or incarcerated permanently.
Lombroso: Habitual criminals, born criminals, the insane and stupid must be killed or permanently institutionalized.

so

i had to create a new blog & address for this stuff today because my previous blog had a little bit of an inappropriate address. Below is catalogued material from July 9, 2005 until the 12th.
Where is Shannon with my coffee?
Ok, post coffee. feeling frustrated with finding certain articles. somehow summit is offline today... i can't request files that i need! annoying. But I have found lots of new fun books and articles, including a video on Biology and Crime from 1985.

Thoughts: chase down Sterilization League? Their connection through Hooton to criminals is an interesting thread... found: lots of stuff on sterilization of criminals. Requested. Looking for Hooton, Havelock.

an excerpt

"This policy (of humanitarianism) results not only in the preservation and multiplication of degenerate human stocks; in a democratic country it also leads to political and social domination by the inferior elements as soon as their rapid proliferation makes them constitute the majority. But the worst is still to come, sinece dull and witless human beings are unduly suggestible and quickly become subjected to the rule of fanatics and lunatics of moderate to superior intellectual endowment whi have become mentally unbalanced without losing their energy and their capacity for leadership." (Twilight: 302). He goes on to talk obtusely about the Germans and the Japanese. What Hooton fails to realize in 1937, perhaps, is that his texts reflect exactly what Hitler was doing in Germany at the time.

need: timeline of U.S. knowledge about the National Socialist eugenical activities. RHB?

EVERY BOOK HE WRITES includes some conversation on the necessity of sterilization. jeezus.

noticing

that in almost every e.a. hooton text there is a treatise on avoiding the biological degredation & doom of humans. Some of his recommendations are seriously eugenical in nature.
In _Apes, Men and Morons_ he goes over the different racial types he studies; in mentioning the white folks, he calls them "our own great physical group... called Whites for want of a better term..." does he mean great as in large? I think he likely does; he differentiates between different types of white folks, identifying one or two races with very light skin and features because of "abrubt hereditary changes... inbreeding and selection." Their features mentioned are prefaced with adjectives like excessive, bizarre, diminution, extreme. I assume that he is talking about Irish and Scandinavian folks primarily, perhaps Germans. Hmm.

it can be confusing

so the thought of our surviving as biological sin is interesting... our faulty bodies and minds seem to have haunted him. was he afraid of his own imperfections and his proximity to mortality through them? (twilight 290-). his conversation on actual sin, or the misuse and abuse of these imperfect machines of our bodies, is fascinating- he decries our method & vehicle of education, the diet, the automobile. he is almost marxian in his analysis of removal from processes of production. intriguing that this member of the Sterilization League would be so nuanced... we are all, in fact, such nuanced human beans... how could i have ever expected him or any of these other folks to be simply decoded and deconstructed?

starting off

thanks to my awesome prof. Shout out to Richard Beyler, who has shown an honest and challenging interest in me and my work. Without him, I would be just another lost undergrad, wandering the halls of PSU without direction. Or at least with less direction than I have now...

This blog will be a place to:
- catalog what i've done with my day
- freewrite on my findings/thoughts/directions
- vent about frustrations and roadblocks
- etc etc, whatever comes up during this process.

Right now I'm looking at a series of early 20th century physical/cultural anthropologists and their work around crime/criminality/the criminal. It is all pretty fascinating, and it seems as though there has been a general silence on this particular subject. My hope is to reveal some important aspect of our contemporary system of criminal justice that requires improvement; we have, after all, built an entire empire with the help of our internal systems of confinement.

Our system of criminal justice seems to have been based on an assumption of criminal heredity and the physical/mental inferiority of the criminal. There seems to have been two schools of thought on the development of the criminal justice system here in the United States, one that holds on to a humanitarian/recuperation of the criminal ideal, while the other tends toward stifling the criminal in one way or another, including tactics like sterilization, isolation on a criminal "reservation" and other interesting eugenical ideas. Most of these formative anthropolgists seem pretty interested in "cleaning up" the human species through eugenical pursuits like selective breeding and sterilization. One of America's most influential physical anthropologists was a member of the Sterilization League (he might have even been the chairperson, I don't remember right now.) He is credited with training a whole generation of anthropologists at Harvard. Interesting...