Creating Born Criminals

Download or read book Creating Born Criminals written by Nicole Hahn Rafter and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: But Creating Born Criminals is much more than a look at the past. It is an exploration of the role of biological explanation as a form of discourse and of its impact upon society. While The Bell Curve and other recent books have stopped short of making eugenic recommendations, their contentions point toward eugenic conclusions, and people familiar with the history of eugenics can hear in them its echoes. Rafter demonstrates that we need to know how eugenic reasoning worked in the past and that we must recognize the dangers posed by the dominance of a theory that interprets social problems in biological terms and difference as biological inferiority.