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...