Nicole Hahn Rafter

Crime, film and criminology Recent sex-crime movies

This article aims at giving crime-film research a stronger sense of purpose by asking: How do crime films relate to criminology? Using the example of recent films about sex crimes, I argue that crime films should be conceptualized as an aspect of popular criminology, and popular criminology as an aspect of criminology itself. If we define criminology as the study of crime and criminals, it becomes clear that film is one of the primary sources through which people get their ideas about the nature of crime. Some of those ideas echo academic criminology, while others bring to bear ethical, philosophical and psychological perspectives beyond the scope of academic research. By recognizing that popular criminology is integral to criminology, we can invigorate the study of crime films—and criminology itself.

Claims-Making and Socio-Cultural Context in the First U.S. Eugenics Campaign

Although historians have for some time been integrating sociological concepts into their work on eugenics, sociologists have for the most part left the study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century eugenics to historians. Arguing that our understanding of eugenics can be advanced by combining sociological and historical methods, this paper undertakes a constructionist analysis of the first U.S. eugenics campaign, which redefined poor, feeble-minded women as carriers of “depraved” heredity and resulted in establishment of the first U.S. prophylactic institution. The author merges original research and the results of previous historical investigations with social problems theory to answer three questions about this “discovery” campaign: (1) How did it construct feeble-minded women as a eugenic threat? (2) Why did it (in contrast to other eugenic crusades) concentrate exclusively on women? and (3) Why was it successful?

The Social Construction of Crime and Crime Control

A number of disciplines have been deeply affected in recent years by constructionism, an approach that analyzes the processes by which social information is produced, disseminated, “verified,” and “disconfirmed.” Criminal justice too has developed a constructionist tradition, albeit mainly through attracting scholars from other fields into its terrain. This article traces the accumulation of the constructionist tradition within criminal justice by examining work in four areas: social histories of criminal justice practice and theory; critical criminology; research on the victimization of females; and feminist theory about the contribution of criminal justice to understandings of gender. If the constructionist approach continues to develop within criminal justice, it may lay the basis for a sociology of knowledge in the field.

Marxist Feminism: Implications for Criminal Justice

Whether women encounter the criminal justice system as victims, offenders, or system personnel, they frequently find themselves being denigrated on the basis of their sex. We begin by analyzing the relationship between the sexist biases of criminal justice and other institutions and the capitalist economic system. After establishing that sexism is not mere prej udice against women but rather a function of capitalism, we move on to discuss the implications of Marxist feminism for six aspects of criminal justice: females and the law, criminology of women, females as victims, processing of females by the criminal justice system, incarceration of women, and employment of women as criminal justice system personnel. In the course of the discussion we present a number of recommendations which would further the goals of not only sexual but also economic equality.

Gender, Prisons, and Prison History

Since the publication in 1936 of Blake McKelvey’s American Prisons (1972), social historians have developed a sizeable body of work that traces, and in some cases tries to explain, the evolution of U.S. penal institutions. These studies are important for what they tell us about perceptions of social problems in the past. They also have policy implications, indicating the historical roots of current dilemmas and alternative approaches to penal problems. Nearly all of these studies are limited, however, by their blindness to gender differences between prisons for men and women. Written mainly by men, prison histories have focused nearly exclusively on male prisoners. Perhaps their authors would argue that this bias is natural and insignificant since over time the vast majority of prisoners have been male. But by overlooking the variable of gender, prison historians have ignored an important influence on the nature and development of penal institutions.

More Than a Feeling: Integrating Empathy Into the Study of Lawmaking, Lawbreaking, and Reactions to Lawbreaking

Empathy is related, directly or indirectly, to important elements in criminology such as the enactment of harsh penalties for repeat offenders, antisocial behavior, feelings of legitimacy toward the law, and attitudes toward the death penalty. Although empathy is beginning to find its way into criminological discourse, it is still not well understood nor often incorporated into quantitative research. This is likely due to issues regarding the conceptualization and measurement of empathy as well as the lack of measures of empathy incorporated into contemporary data sets. This study discusses the importance of empathy for criminology and uses a set of research examples to exemplify the relationships between empathy and outcomes important to criminology. Empathy emerges as an important predictor of criminal behavior, support for harsh laws, and perceptions of police effectiveness. Future research should incorporate measures of empathy when seeking to understand individual feelings and behaviors as they relate to important facets of criminology and criminal justice.

Criminology's Darkest Hour: Biocriminology in Nazi Germany

Abstract This article deals with criminology and its effects during Hitlers Third Reich (1933–1945). For comparative purposes, it also examines the nature and effects of criminology in fascist Italy (1922–1943). In both states, criminology became an extension of political power, but only in Nazi Germany did it fully reach its murderous potential, working to justify the genocide of not only Jews and Gypsies but of criminals as well. Key questions include: How did biological ideas shape explanations of crime in Nazi Germany? How did Nazi science define ‘criminals’? What were the consequences of Nazi criminology? And what does the study of scientific criminology under the Nazis reveal about the nature of criminology itself?

Introduction to special issue on Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment

Just before I started writing this introduction, I Googled ‘Afghan woman executed yesterday’ and got a verbal description, photographs, and a roughly shot video of the public execution of a woman identified only as Zarmeena, mother of seven children, who after a ‘family dispute’ had beaten her husband to death with a steel hammer as he slept (http:// www.rawa.org/murder-w.htm). Under Taliban law, she was to be killed by a relative of the man she had killed. In the back of a pickup truck, held there by two other women in deep blue burqas, Zarmeena was driven to a sports arena filled with ‘thousands’, including mothers and children. Zarmeena herself was covered so completely in a parachuteblue burqa that it seemed she couldn’t see at all. The two female guards helped her down from the truck, led her to the center of the arena, and forced her to sit, after which a turbaned man put a Kalashnikov rifle to the back of her head and shot three times. Someone tugged her burqa over the legs of her dead body, and then everyone walked away, leaving a motionless, pale-blue heap (See Figure 1 on next page). Conventional criminology would have difficulty explaining the meanings of these images of Zarmeena’s death. The images tell us that the Taliban have power over life and death in the areas they control, and that their justice system is fearsome and harsh. From the images we learn that men—who judged and executed Zarmeena—have the power of life and death over women. From the story we might surmise that in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, domestic violence is not an excuse for murder, or even a mitigating factor. We might also be tempted to surmise that in these areas, parents may use an execution to teach values to their children; but I think that is a misreading, for according to the accompanying news story,

The murderous Dutch fiddler Criminology, history and the problem of phrenology

To form a clear view of the origins of criminology and present-day practices in criminal justice, criminologists need to recognize phrenology as one of their progenitors. Although phrenology is dismissed as a ‘pseudo-science’ and mocked as ‘bumpology’, it in fact constituted an important early science of the mind, and the theories that phrenologists generated in the fields today called criminology, criminal jurisprudence and penology influenced those fields long after the phrenological map of the brain had been forgotten. Coming to terms with phrenology requires rejecting simple distinctions between ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’. It leads to a better understanding of the scientific project of criminology and, more broadly, to a better understanding of the nature of social-scientific knowledge

Genocide and the dynamics of victimization: Some observations on Armenia:

Victimology, following in the train of criminology, is starting to incorporate genocide into its research and theory. How will this new direction affect understandings of genocide, and how might it reshape victimology itself? We begin by proposing a new term, victimality, to indicate a group’s potential for victimization by genocide and other atrocity crimes. Then we rework two of victimology’s traditional concepts – victim precipitation and victim proneness – to show how they might be used to analyse the dynamics of genocidal processes. We apply the three concepts to the Armenian genocide of 1915 and suggest ways in which victimologists might engage further with the crime of all crimes.