Abstract

Excerpted From: Laura I. Appleman, Eugenics and the Carceral State: Progressive-Era Reform and the Creation of the Modern Criminal Justice System, 90 Missouri Law Review 997 (Fall 2025) (604 Footnotes) (Full Document).

The roots of America’s modern criminal justice system lie not in the late-twentieth-century “war on crime,” but in the Progressive Era’s fusion of eugenics, psychiatry, and legal reform. The first quarter of the twenty-first century has laid bare the deep structural inequities of this system: racialized policing, algorithmic risk tools reproducing bias, the mass incarceration of people with disabilities, racial and gender discrimination in the juvenile justice system, and a carceral state that continues to pathologize poverty and deviance. The intellectual and institutional origins of these practices, however, reach back to the early twentieth century, when Progressive reformers, animated by pseudoscientific theories of heredity and fitness, remade the criminal courts, sentencing structures, and emerging field of criminology. Under the guise of science and social improvement, they constructed a new vision of criminal justice, one that sought to classify, segregate, and eliminate those deemed “unfit” to belong in the civic body. Although these contemporary problems have received extensive scholarly attention, their roots in Progressive-Era criminal justice reform remain largely unexplored in the legal literature. Those reforms, heavily influenced by eugenic theory, fundamentally reshaped criminal courts, sentencing practices, and criminology itself.

The Progressive Era, often celebrated as a moment of professionalization and humanitarian reform, in fact introduced a profoundly coercive regime of social governance. Reformers aimed to rationalize the chaotic criminal system of the Gilded Age through scientific management and administrative expertise. But the “science” that undergirded this project was based on eugenics: the belief that crime, poverty, and immorality were inherited defects of blood and race. Eugenic criminology transformed the understanding of the “criminal type” from moral agent to biological specimen, a being whose degeneracy was measurable, predictable, and heritable. This redefinition authorized a broad expansion of state power: the creation of municipal courts, psychopathic laboratories, and indeterminate sentencing schemes designed to identify and control the deviant. What emerged was a carceral apparatus that conflated deviance with disability, criminality with heredity, and social order with racial hierarchy.

At the center of this transformation was the Progressive-Era conviction that law could operate as a tool of scientific governance. Progressive-Era reformers argued that the criminal system should not punish sin but instead diagnose pathology. Drawing on the new disciplines of psychiatry, psychology, and sociology, they sought to reorder the criminal courts to reflect eugenic hierarchies of intelligence, morality, and worth. Judges, social workers, and court psychiatrists cooperated to “classify” offenders by type: the feebleminded, the defective delinquent, the habitual criminal. Municipal courts in cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and New York instituted psychopathic laboratories to test defendants’ heredity and mental condition. In Chicago, for example, the Municipal Court’s Psychopathic Laboratory, founded in 1914 under Chief Justice Harry Olson, examined thousands of defendants--many of whom were never convicted of a crime--and consigned them to asylums, farms, or colonies in the name of “crime prevention.” The Progressives invoked science and equated it with human advancement. The eugenic belief that society could eliminate criminality by identifying hereditary defects became the operating logic of reform.

Traditional legal accounts of Progressive criminal reform have largely ignored this eugenic foundation. The familiar story portrays Progressives as enlightened modernizers, replacing local corruption with rational administration and bringing compassion to juvenile justice and sentencing. But this narrative omits the racialized and ableist ideologies embedded within the Progressive project. Eugenics offered Progressives an elegant, “scientific” rationale for social stratification, an explanation for poverty, immorality, and criminality that absolved structural inequality. The poor, the disabled, racial minorities, immigrants, and women accused of vice were cast as biologically inferior, their deviance naturalized and medicalized. In the criminal courts, this ideology justified indefinite confinement, sterilization, and segregation, all under the rhetoric of rehabilitation. The Progressive state promised uplift but delivered control.

This Article seeks to reconstruct this neglected legal history and to reveal how eugenic thought helped shape the very architecture of our carceral state. Part I examines the Progressive-Era transformation of the criminal courts and the system of punishment, exposing how eugenic ideology infiltrated legal reform. Drawing on examples from Chicago, Cleveland, and other urban centers, it traces how municipal courts, psychopathic laboratories, and expert administrators redefined justice as social engineering.

Part II explores the rise of eugenic criminology, showing how early criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso and American disciples like Arthur Hall and Charles Davenport translated hereditary theories of degeneracy into legal policy. These criminologists reimagined crime as an inherited condition and redefined the purpose of punishment as social protection rather than moral responsibility.

In Part III, the Article investigates the eugenic roots of Progressive punishment, particularly in juvenile justice and indeterminate sentencing. These reforms, often cited as hallmarks of rehabilitative justice, were in fact designed to separate the “rehabilitable” from the “hereditarily criminal.” The Progressive Era belief that criminal behavior could be predicted through science fostered a new discretionary regime, one that remains embedded in modern sentencing, parole, and risk assessment.

Part IV turns to the intersection of race, psychiatry, and eugenics, explaining how Progressive psychiatrists pathologized racial difference, using psychiatric terminology to criminalize Black, immigrant, and disabled populations. The eugenic classification of “feeblemindedness” and “psychopathy” became powerful legal tools for racial and social exclusion.

Finally, Part V traces the endurance of this legacy into the present, connecting the Progressive-Era project of hereditary classification to contemporary carceral practices. Modern risk assessment instruments, civil commitment laws, and the persistent association between race, disability, and criminality reflect the eugenic logic that the Progressive Era first institutionalized. The Progressive faith in scientific management--so central to early twentieth-century reform--continues to animate today’s technologies of control, from predictive policing to actuarial sentencing.

By recovering this forgotten genealogy, this Article challenges the myth of Progressive-Era benevolence, exposing the genetic determinism underlying the architecture of modern punishment. The role of eugenics in influencing Progressive-Era legislation such as miscegenation and marriage restrictions, sexual segregation, mandatory involuntary sterilization, and immigration limitations is well known territory in our legal history. But eugenics’ role in the twentieth century criminal reform is a story far less told. The Progressive eugenic criminal justice system promised rationality and rehabilitation but delivered coercion and exclusion. Its institutions, including psychopathic laboratories, juvenile courts, and indeterminate sentencing, became the laboratories of the carceral state. To confront our present crisis of mass incarceration, we must first reckon with its true origins: a history in which the language of science and reform masked the machinery of eugenic control.

[ . . . ]

The legacy of eugenics continues to shape the American criminal system in systemic and subterranean ways. The Progressive-Era reforms that transformed the criminal courts and redefined the very concept of the criminal mind were grounded in eugenic philosophy, which explained criminality, mental illness, and social deviance as hereditary flaws, all requiring scientific management. This vision of biological defect as the root of disorder informed not only early twentieth-century penal policy but also the enduring structure of mass incarceration that followed. Its imprint remains visible in the persistent racial and economic disparities that define the modern carceral state.

The eugenic logic of classification and control also endures in the criminalization of poverty, addiction, and mental illness, which continue to be punished through incarceration rather than treated. The inadequate provision of community-based care ensures that the jail or prison remains the primary institution for managing those deemed “abnormal.” In this sense, contemporary carceral practices replicate the Progressive conviction that social problems can be solved through confinement and control, rather than through structural reform.

Modern criminal adjudication and punishment still reflect the Progressive fusion of science and coercion. Using ostensibly neutral tools of prediction, such as risk assessments, actuarial models, and data analytics, the criminal system continues to forecast, classify, and contain those judged likely to offend. A century ago, Progressive reformers embraced the cutting-edge science of eugenics as the cure for social ills. Today’s reformers likewise rely on algorithmic objectivity to achieve the same end. Both regimes rest on the same epistemological foundation: faith in scientific rationality as a means of both identifying and eliminating deviance. The only difference lies in the instruments: the eugenic chart has given way to the digital code.

The continuing influence of eugenic thought can be seen in the disproportionate incarceration of marginalized communities, the criminalization of mental illness and poverty, the persistent reliance on biased predictive technologies, and the policies that regulate rehabilitation and release. These patterns are inheritances of our Progressive past. Confronting mass incarceration therefore requires more than procedural reform; it demands a reckoning with the historical and ideological roots of the system itself. Only by acknowledging how Progressive-Era eugenic philosophy still animates the logics of risk, control, and exclusion can we begin to imagine a more equitable and humane vision of criminal justice.

Van Winkle Melton Professor of Law, Willamette University. J.D., Yale University, M.A., B.A., University of Pennsylvania.