i'm back

to posting about my research. dr. schechter suggested that I go with a biographical treatise on Hooton- which should be fascinating, yes. I'm kind of excited about it- it really does seem like a more easily handled task.
Things i'd like to remember:
- integrate my social analysis
- write consistent notes while reading
- enjoy yourself.
of course.

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.