In perhaps the most brazen proof that the concept of eugenics is still alive and well today, mass incarceration is stealing the reproductive rights of thousands, including already marginalized minority groups.
Eugenics is a wildly inaccurate, dangerous scientific theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations.
Published in the American Journal of Public Health, the 2020 study discusses how incarcerated individuals’ basic reproductive rights are systematically denied.
Hayes, Suffrin, and Perritt1 begin by saying,
Mass incarceration, by its very nature, compromises and undermines bodily autonomy and the capacity for incarcerated people to make decisions about their reproductive well-being and bodies; this is done through institutionalized racism and is disproportionately done to the bodies of women of color.
This violates the most basic tenets of reproductive justice—the right to have a child, not to have a child, and to parent the children you have with dignity and in safety.
Finding this study feels both vindicating and maddening. It echoes a complaint I’ve been quite vocal about in the past: state-sanctioned population control.
In a time where reproductive choice is so hotly contested, there should be more emphasis and disdain for the not-at-all-subtle racism and outright denial of human rights that “tough on crime” prosecutors and judges across the country engage in.
I am by no means the first person to sound the alarm on mass incarceration as a modern-day form of eugenics. I can’t help but wonder how people on either side of the reproductive rights conversation feel about this.
To me, it is incredibly sad that more people are not versed in history to recognize it and vote out any ignorant, harmful elected officials that so readily embrace these horrific policies of a bygone era.
It comes out over and over again in the way certain prosecutors and judges at multiple levels of government speak to and about defendants and treat them as less than human: berating cancer patients and calling them lazy, demonizing addiction rather getting people than help, saying a black defendant looks “like a criminal.”
All of those cases were in Michigan, by the way.
These three “professionals” are not at all far away from Richard Dugdale, a civil war-era prison “reformer.” In actuality, Dugdale was a eugenicist who advocated for forcibly sterilizing the poor and institutionalizing whomever he deemed “unfit,” all in the name of “bettering” the economy and keeping society “safe.”
Consider this from a 2014 article written by Anthony Bradley, Research Fellow at the Acton Institute:
Eugenics was considered good for America’s social welfare and economic progress. According to Wray, progressives sought “legislative reform campaigns aimed at restricting foreign immigration, mandating state institutionalization of the biologically unfit, and legalizing eugenical involuntary sterilzation.” Eugenics was a way protect society from social traits like “pauperism, laziness, promiscuity and licentiousness, inbreeding, nomadism [idleness], and delinquency.”
Does this sound familiar?
Well it should, because it’s the exact same rhetoric that these people are getting away with over 200 years later. And they’ve tricked voters into paying them to engage in this behavior.
We have mounds and MOUNDS of data, solid irrefutable evidence even, that mass incarceration:
1. doesn’t deter crime, and
2. doesn’t make anyone even a little bit safer2.
So that leaves us with what? Individuals making a lot of money off of prison industries and politicians/elected officials/politically-appointed judges denying reproductive freedom.
Call the spade a spade.
At best mass incarceration is government-funded economic oppression; at worst, it’s modern-day eugenics.
References
- Hayes, C. M., Sufrin, C., & Perritt, J. B. (2020). Reproductive Justice Disrupted: Mass Incarceration as a Driver of Reproductive Oppression. American journal of public health, 110(S1), S21–S24. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2019.305407
- Obus, E. A., Pequet, A., Cristian, C. R., Garfinkle, A., Pinto, C. A., & Gray, S. A. O. (2024). Disrupting the family stress-proximal process: A scoping review of interventions for children with incarcerated parents. Children and Youth Services Review, 161, 107604. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2024.107604
