Medicalization of Repression - Eugenics and Crime

• NCJ Number: 94609
• Journal: Contemporary Crisis Volume: 8 Issue: 3 Dated: (July 1984) Pages: 227-241
• Author(s): J Katz; C F Abel
• Date Published: 1984
• Length: 15 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Article is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, San Antonio, Texas, March 1983

Annotation

Because of the potential for biological theories of criminality and intervention strategies (including psychosurgery) to be used to support the existing power configuration, this method of crime control represents 'the medicalization of repression:' the use of medical institutions and ideologies to control or treat persons or classes for social, political, or economic reasons.

Abstract

The 'medicalization of repression' combines two operative concepts. Medicalization describes the transfer of direct state control from the criminal justice system to less obvious representatives of the state, i.e., the medical establishment. The 'repressive' nature of law refers to a class bias in applying law. An historic example of biological crime control, the eugenic sterilization movement, can be used to test the accuracy of the concept of the medicalization of repression. As a leader in the sterilization movement begun in 1927, Virginia is an appropriate case study. Virginia eugenics laws were based on theory of eugenics that allowed a group of individuals (the 'feebleminded,' usually poor blacks) to be separated from the general populace and treated with specialized rules and institutions. All class-related social evils supposedly caused by feeblemindedness became the evidence needed to prove the existence of feeblemindedness. In 1927, the Supreme Court legitimized both the Virginia sterilization law and its use to enforce a particular moral code on women. By attributing crime and poverty to individual traits, the social conditions which produced them were reaffirmed. Further, the medical claims of scientific neutrality were used to deny any political or economic motivations, even though policy was derived from a racist, classist, and sexist system. Current biological theories of crime are no more divorced from political ideologies than were the earlier eugenic theories, and the medicalization of repression would be the outcome of any effort to apply such theories to crime control policy. Forty-three notes are listed.