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 CRIMINALITY
IN CONTEXT

Criminality in Context: The y holo i al o n ation o Criminal ti e

e orm, by C. Haney
Copyrigh eri an y ho ogi a o ia ion. righ re er e .
 PSYCHOLOGY, CRIME,
AND JUSTICE SERIES
Cop Watch: Spectators, Social Media, and Police Reform
Hans Toch

Criminality in Context: The Psychological Foundations of Criminal Justice Reform

Craig Haney

Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children: Cross-National Comparative Studies

Joseph Murray, Catrien C. J. H. Bijleveld, David P. Farrington,
and Rolf Loeber

Rehabilitating Sexual Offenders: A Strength-Based Approach

William L. Marshall, Liam E. Marshall, Geris A. Serran,
and Matt D. O’Brien

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CRIMINALITY
IN CONTEXT
The Psychological Foundations
of Criminal Justice Reform

CRAIG HANEY
Copyright © 2020 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. Except
as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication
may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, including, but not limited
to, the process of scanning and digitization, or stored in a database or retrieval system,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The opinions and statements published are the responsibility of the author, and such
opinions and statements do not necessarily represent the policies of the American
Psychological Association.

Published by
American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haney, Craig, author.

Title: Criminality in context : the psychological foundations of criminal justice reform /
by Craig Haney.
Description: Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, [2020] |
Series: Psychology, crime, and justice series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019033085 (print) | LCCN 2019033086 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781433831423 (paperback) | ISBN 9781433832130 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Criminal psychology. | Criminal justice, Administration of. |
Crime prevention.
Classification: LCC HV6080 .H3135 2020 (print) | LCC HV6080 (ebook) |
DDC 364.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033085
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033086

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0000172-000

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my extraordinary, loving family, without whose unqualified support
I would accomplish very little and, most of all,
to my wife, Aida, who makes all of the good things in my life
so much better.
CONTENTS

Series Foreword xi
Shadd Maruna
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 3
1. Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 15
The Dominance of the “Crime Master Narrative” 18
Psychological Individualism in 19th-Century Law, “Science,”
and American Culture 21
Individualism Embodied: Craniometry, Phrenology, Eugenics,
and Instinct Theory 23
Psychological Individualism and the Crime Master Narrative
in Modern Times 30
Deconstructing the Crime Master Narrative 36
2. Risks and Contexts: An Alternative Paradigm
for Understanding Criminality 49
The Risk Factors Model of Psychological Development 50
Basic Components of the Model 52
3. Criminogenic Trauma: Social History and the Life Course 87
Risk Factors and Damaging Childhood Experiences: Child Maltreatment 89
Criminogenic Effects of Child Maltreatment 104
Conclusion 110

vii
viii Contents

4. Institutional Failure: State Intervention as Criminogenic Risk 135

From Child Welfare to the Control of “Juvenile Offenders” 137
Foster Care as Flawed Intervention 139
Criminalizing Classroom Misbehavior: The School-To-Prison Pipeline 143
Institutional Abuse: Recent Historical Context 144
The Criminogenics of Juvenile Institutionalization 151
On the Nature of Retraumatization 153
Conclusion 156
5. Criminogenic Contexts: Immediate Situations, Settings,
and Circumstances 173
The Situational Revolution 175
Criminogenic Situations and Criminal Behavior 176
Criminogenic Contexts in General 177
“Neighborhood Disadvantage” 184
“Secondary” Risk Factors: Mediating the Legacies of Social History in Adulthood 187
The Criminogenics of Adult Imprisonment 196
Conclusion 199
6. Poverty: Structural Risk and Criminal Behavior 217
Direct Effects of Poverty 220
Poverty and Adverse Community Context 229
Poverty and Institutional Disadvantage 230
Structural Disadvantage: Poverty as a Gateway Risk Factor 232
Conclusion 235
7. The Criminogenics of Race in a Divided Society:
Racialized Criminality and Biographical Racism 249
The Pseudoscientific Merging of Race and Crime 250
Structural Racism: Poverty, Race, and Crime 254
Racial Discrimination as Macro- and Microaggression 257
Race and Maltreatment 258
The Social Historical Impact of Institutional Racism 259
Disproportionate Minority Confinement 262
Disproportionate Adult Imprisonment 265
Race, Crime, and Community 267
Conclusion 270
8. Individualistic Myths and the Disregard of Context:
Deconstructing “Equally Free Autonomous Choice” 289
The “Not Everybody” Fallacy 290
“Free Choice” Through the Lens of Social Contextualism 294
Conclusion 312
 Contents ix

9. Reorienting the Law: Context-Based Legal Reforms 319

A Context-Based Model of Legal Responsibility 322
New Models of Sentencing 327
A Contextualist “What Works”: Rehabilitating Jails and Prisons 335
Psychology and the Political Economy of Prisons 340
Promoting Restorative Justice 344
Conclusion 346
10. Pursuing Social Justice: An Agenda for Fair, Effective,
and Humane Crime Policy 363
Context-Based Crime Prevention 365
Restructuring Communities to Facilitate Reentry 372
Eradicating the Collateral Consequences of Imprisonment 380
Social Reconstruction as Primary Prevention 381
Conclusion 389

Afterword 407
Index 413
About the Author 423
SERIES FOREWORD

It is difficult to convey what an honor and a privilege it is to have this title

included in American Psychological Association (APA) Books’ Psychology,
Crime, and Justice series. I began editing this series in 2011 with very specific
goals in mind—both overt and covert. The explicit goal was to provide a
showcase of how outstanding psychological research is contributing to the
study of crime and criminal justice. Haney’s encyclopedic synthesis of scholar-
ship across dozens of subfields and drawing on five decades of his own original
research and practice certainly achieves this standard.
Behind this, I have another, unspoken ambition for the series as well. As a
psychologist working in the field of criminology, I wanted to disprove the
absurd stereotype of the “headshrinker” that many of my colleagues have
about those of us trained in psychology. We all know this caricature well:
psychologists, apparently, are reductionists who love to pathologize, locating all
of the problems of the world not on economics, politics, history, or culture but
in the space between the ears. If ever there was a psychologist who defies—
actually, obliterates—this gross misrepresentation, it is Craig Haney.
Since long before contemporary concerns about adverse childhood experi-
ences (ACEs), trauma-informed practice, or intersectionality, Haney has been
at the forefront of researching the situational, environmental, and structural
influences on behavior. As an undergraduate, he worked in a mental hospital
and talked his way into a graduate seminar taught by Erving Goffman, before
studying at Stanford with Walter Mischel, Albert Bandura and, of course,
Philip Zimbardo. He was one of the research assistants for David Rosenhan
when Rosenhan was doing his renowned research for On Being Sane in Insane

xi
xii Series Foreword

Places,1 and as if that were not enough, as a PhD student, Haney famously con-
ducted and coauthored the authoritative account of the Stanford Prison Exper-
iment with Zimbardo and Curtis Banks.2
Such a remarkable background begs the question of whether Haney is
the product of all of these experiences or whether something about his
own disposition led him to each of these encounters. (Of course, there is
little question about which side of this debate Haney supports!) Regardless
of how he got there, in the years since these legendary origins, Haney has
become a world-leading expert on the impact of solitary confinement,
death penalty mitigation, the psychology of imprisonment, racial biases in
sentencing, and far beyond.
In this magnum opus, he brings all of this research together in what is
surely the most persuasive and elegant articulation of the environmental
argument from a psychological perspective written to date. The timing for this
work could not be more fortuitous, as trauma has become a hugely popular
topic in the field of criminal justice over the past decade—as if it were some-
how a new finding that the overwhelming number of people in the justice
system have had tragic lives of abuse, neglect, exclusion, and disadvantage.
Even prisons have become aware of the need to provide trauma-informed
care for those in custody, and this work will provide support for such efforts.
Importantly, though, Haney’s message here is much more radical than this.
Haney is calling not just for trauma-informed therapy but for a trauma-
informed system of justice. This book develops the trauma argument to its
logical conclusion—from the initial stage of acknowledging trauma to develop-
ing a framework for proactively preventing the social causes of crime—that
fundamentally challenges how we deal with crime in society.
A common criticism of such arguments goes something like this: “Ah, these
social structural problems probably do cause crime, but there is not anything
that we in criminal justice can do about structural poverty or inequality,
so what is the point?” In some of the most powerful sections in the book,
Haney gives the lie to this view, demonstrating how the criminal justice system
itself systematically contributes to and indeed exacerbates the inequalities
experienced by society’s most disadvantaged. As Jim Jacobs wrote, “The
criminal justice system feeds on itself. The more people who are arrested,
prosecuted, convicted, and especially incarcerated, the larger is the criminally
stigmatized underclass screened out of legitimate opportunities.”3
Psychology has played a role, however limited, in this self-fulfilling
cycle of stigmatization, exclusion and criminality, and it is essential that
psychology play a lead in imagining a way forward. With this remarkable
new work, Craig Haney is leading this charge, and I am honored to include
it in this series.

Shadd Maruna, PhD, Series Editor

Professor, School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work
Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom
 Series Foreword xiii

NOTES
1. Haney, C., Banks, C., and Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated
prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69–97.
2. Jacobs, J. B. (2006). Mass incarceration and the proliferation of criminal records.
University of St. Thomas Law Journal, 3, 387–420.
3. Rosenhan, D. L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250–258.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.179.4070.250
PREFACE

The inspiration for this book began more than 40 years ago. I was returning
to my university office in Santa Cruz from San Quentin State Prison, in the
middle of about a 2-hour drive that I had made many times before. I had just
finished an interview with a prisoner housed on California’s condemned row,
a man sentenced to die for a terrible crime that he had been convicted of
committing several years earlier. That day’s interview was much like a number
of others I had recently done, each time hoping to understand the origins of
the violent acts that had brought this man and many others like him to this
desolate place. As I thought about the harrowing childhood experiences I had
heard about that morning and the way that the damage he suffered in those
early years had been so painfully compounded during his adolescence and
young adulthood, I was struck with an insight that now seems passé but, at
the time, certainly did not. It was the simple realization that the story I had
just heard was eerily similar to the ones I had been told by the several other
death-sentenced prisoners whom I also had interviewed over the past few
months. Their life stories, too, were filled with accounts of abject poverty and
neglect, the trauma of severe emotional, physical, and sometimes even sexual
abuse, of growing up in households and neighborhoods that were plagued by
unemployment, disorganization, and despair, and frequently pervaded by
crime and violence. More often than not, they also included tales of neglect-
ful and cruel treatment at the hands of the child welfare and juvenile justice
systems, where they had been sent for help, through state “interventions”
that—although ostensibly done on their behalf—typically ended up doing
more harm than good.

xv
xvi Preface

For some of these young men, crime had quickly become the only life they
knew. In some cases, it was the “family business,” a kind of craft or trade in
which their parents, relatives, or older siblings were already deeply immersed.
Others—those for whom no such obvious groundwork had been laid—had
been forced to set out on their own, devising makeshift survival strategies to
negotiate the turmoil and physical dangers of the mean streets on which they
were being raised. The troubled behavior that eventually put them on a
pathway to prison seemed at first to be little more than a temporary escape
route, a way to cope with the pains and setbacks that they were suffering in
so many other parts of their lives. Some were lured by the promise of closeness
and camaraderie with other alienated and abandoned young boys like them-
selves, the satisfaction of finding something—even something illegal—that
they were rewarded for, or the comfort of connecting with a group of peers
who treated them with a modicum of acceptance, loyalty, and caring.
In short, they tried to manage the emotional distress, chaotic circumstances,
and thwarted ambitions in whatever ways they could—to dodge beatings and
even bullets, to steal in order to eat, or score drugs that gave them a temporary
respite from anger, fear, or sadness. Some of their strategies were clever, some
were clumsy and ill-conceived. Several of them had turned to the flawed role
models that surrounded them, following in whatever footsteps they could
find to help navigate the cruel realities that they repeatedly confronted. They
struggled to meet these daunting challenges much as other children learn to
master algebra or establish a valued friendship or deal with the disappointment
of missing their high school prom. Over time, however, their short-term survival
strategies turned into longer-term ways of being, ones sometimes embodied
and enacted long after they were truly necessary, and that escalated to much
more troubled and troubling levels along the way.
At the time I first perceived these surprisingly similar patterns in the life
histories I was studying, the commonalities themselves seemed suddenly
and clearly evident. Yet, as I tried to locate broader empirical support for
the role they played in the development of adult criminal behavior, I found
little systematic research on which to draw. To be sure, there was an intuitive
sense among many scholars and practitioners that a background of abuse,
trauma, and disadvantage was not only regrettable but also formative—that it
compromised a young person’s later chances in life, increasing their risk of
engaging in subsequent criminal behavior. Admittedly, there were some studies
supporting this reasoned speculation about the likely life-altering effects of
these experiences and events. But really solid research that could definitively
establish the kind of long-term “criminogenic” or crime-inducing patterns that
I was seeing was still largely lacking. No one had yet assembled a comprehensive
body of hard scientific evidence that clearly and systematically demonstrated
the direct links from early childhood trauma, mistreatment, and disadvantage to
serious, violent, adult criminal behavior. Moreover, the occasional, suggestive
studies that did exist had not yet been well-integrated into anything resembling
a coherent, overarching analysis or theoretical framework.
 Preface xvii

In the years that followed, however, a truly impressive body of research

emerged to fill this void. As I continued my own professional work on these
issues, carefully examining the social histories and life circumstances of people
who had committed the very worst crimes that occur in our society—typically
capital murder—I watched with intense scholarly interest as these significant
research findings were amassed from within several interrelated disciplines—
primarily psychology but also sociology and criminology. They have continued
to mount, in a steady stream of methodologically diverse empirical studies
that have been conducted by numerous researchers over the last four decades,
yielding a highly consistent set of interconnected results. This literature
directly addresses the many separate components of the all too common life-
long patterns that I have seen reflected in case after case, in the backgrounds
and circumstances of so many of the men and women whose lives I have
studied and whom I have encountered in places like San Quentin and in
numerous other prisons and jails across the country.
We now understand vastly more about these issues than we ever have.
We understand—at least in general terms—why crime is more likely to be
committed by persons who share certain kinds of backgrounds and social
histories than others. We certainly can explain why criminality tends to be so
highly concentrated in certain geographical areas, ones with particular socio-
demographic and structural characteristics. And we have developed many
insights into how these forces interact with one another—why certain trau-
matic experiences and events so often combine in ways that greatly increase
the chances that someone will engage in serious forms of criminal behavior,
and what kinds of immediate social circumstances can activate and exacerbate
those criminogenic effects.
Notwithstanding this major shift in thinking and the remarkable advances
in scientific knowledge on which it is based, there is still a curious and highly
problematic disconnect between what we know as researchers and mental
health practitioners and what the larger society and institutions of justice
routinely—sometimes stubbornly—assume about these issues. That is, these
new insights, developed over the last several decades, have created significant
gaps between existing scientific knowledge about the origins of criminal
behavior, on the one hand, and persistent and prevailing beliefs among
members of the public about who commits crime and why, on the other.
Perhaps less understandable than continued public misunderstandings, these
new scientific insights are also clearly at odds with many of the basic oper-
ating assumptions that still govern the criminal justice system itself. Indeed,
I have written this book to help close some of those important gaps, not
only by summarizing and integrating much of that emerging knowledge but
also by highlighting its implications for implementing a new framework with
which to more justly and fairly assess legal and moral culpability, to more
equitably distribute punishment, to achieve alternative and more benign
criminal justice outcomes, and to develop truly effective and humane strategies
of crime control.
xviii Preface

The initial interviews that I conducted in those early years at San Quentin
led me to focus systematically on the patterns I saw. As it turned out, I would
go on to do these kinds of background “social history” analyses scores of times
over the next several decades, often in the unique context of death penalty
trials and appeals. Capital cases still represent really the only area of criminal
law where this kind of knowledge can be routinely brought to bear, where
a person’s social history is regarded as legally relevant to the official decision-
making process, and where juries and judges regularly rely on them to decide
the defendant’s fate.1 That fact—the special legal relevance of the social histories
of capital defendants—has provided me with a rare opportunity to directly
witness and to conduct in-depth analyses of the way that these research findings
fit together over a life course, in order to try to understand and explain the
lives of many of the persons who have committed very serious violent crimes.
Yet the research I will review in the chapters that follow applies with equal
force and validity to criminal behavior more generally, not just to death
penalty cases. Indeed, the substantial empirical data and numerous theoretical
insights can provide the basis for a major shift in the way criminal behavior is
understood, judged, and addressed. I argue in the pages that follow that this
new framework represents the psychological foundation for the widespread
and long overdue criminal justice reform that is finally underway in the
United States.

NOTE
1. See, e.g., Haney, C. (1995). The social context of capital murder: Social histories and
the logic of capital mitigation. Santa Clara Law Review, 35, 547–609.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book provides a rare opportunity—even a responsibility—to pause

and reflect on where all these ideas came from. Intellectual origin stories are
always subjective and, for that reason, suspect. I am sure that mine is no
exception. However, especially at later stages of a career, when opportunities
to publicly recognize previously unacknowledged debts may be numbered,
they are increasingly important. Among my most important unacknowledged
debts are those to professors Dale Noyd, Jerome Carroll, Rochelle Gelman,
and especially Jane Piliavin, who were early, formative influences, modeling
ways of doing psychology that were rigorous, ethical, and compassionate.
With Jane’s encouragement, I had the good fortune to come to the psychology
department at Stanford at a truly exciting time—when many aspects of the
psychological framework that I employ in the pages that follow were being
developed, written about, and helping to transform the field. Contact with
Albert Bandura, Eleanor Maccoby, Walter Mischel, and Lee Ross made a
lasting mark. I owe a special debt to Philip Zimbardo who, for many years,
was a mentor and a friend.
Stanton Wheeler and the Russell Sage Foundation funded me to go to law
school, as part of an innovative program that trained young scholars to use
social science (in my case, psychology) to inject new perspectives into the
American legal system and challenge existing legal categories. In my very first
law school class, I met another Russell Sage fellow, Michael Lowy, an anthro-
pology professor who, like me, was now a beginning law student. We became
and have remained fast friends, spending countless hours talking about the
nature of legal education and whether and how social science could be used
to transform law. David Rosenhan shared my interests in applying psychology

xix
xx Acknowledgments

to legal issues and facilitated my transition to the very different world of the
Stanford Law School.
I had the opportunity to work for several years with Tony Amsterdam,
who was already a legendary constitutional and criminal law scholar. He was
also a remarkably generous mentor. Anyone who has been around Tony for
even a short time is inspired to work harder, think better, and care more.
I certainly was. Richard Danzig, Charles Halperin, and Michael Wald each gave
me opportunities to work on reform-oriented projects—on policing, mental
health law, and the juvenile justice system, respectively—teaching me the
importance of becoming deeply immersed in the real-world context of a legal
question or issue before claiming to really understand it. I took that lesson to
heart when I began teaching at UC Santa Cruz, where my colleagues supported
my regular forays into the criminal justice system, allowing me to work on
and write about the insights that I gleaned from my involvement in actual
legal cases, in challenges to unconstitutional conditions of penal confinement
that took me inside countless correctional institutions throughout the United
States and in numerous death penalty trials and appeals where I developed
mitigating social histories for scores of capital defendants. My Santa Cruz
colleagues and friends, Tom Pettigrew, Brewster Smith, Ted Sarbin, and,
especially, David Marlowe and Richard Wasserstrom, were unfailingly sup-
portive and patient sounding boards when many of the ideas that follow first
began to percolate.
As important as these more traditional kinds of intellectual influences were,
I am not sure they would have mattered as much in the genesis of this book had
I not had the indirect collaboration of numerous other people outside academia,
whom I also very gratefully acknowledge. They include the countless number
of incredibly talented attorneys and investigators with whom I have worked
over the last several decades. Although they are too numerous to mention by
name, their dedication to advancing the cause of justice continues to be inspira-
tional and instructive. They also facilitated my access to persons and places that
would have been impossible to obtain without their assistance. Those places
include the homes and neighborhoods where persons accused and convicted of
serious violent crimes grew up, the schools they attended, and the criminal
justice institutions in which they and many others were confined. The persons
include hundreds of criminal defendants and incarcerated persons, their family
members and others knowledgeable about their lives, as well as numerous
criminal justice system personnel and crime survivors whom I have interviewed
in the course of compiling case-related social and institutional histories. They
trusted me with their personal, moving, and often painful stories and shared
many insights that helped me put the framework developed in this book in a
more human context. They are the people touched most directly by the social,
economic, and racial injustices addressed in the pages that follow and who have
such an enormous stake in meaningful criminal justice reform. I have tried to
repay their trust and their contributions to these ideas in ways that I hope are
always respectful and that ultimately lead to effective solutions for the range of
social problems and political challenges we collectively face.
CRIMINALITY
IN CONTEXT
Introduction

F or two centuries, a central legal fiction has enabled our legal system to
target primarily the nation’s poorest, most traumatized, badly abused
and, in that sense, least autonomous citizens. This legal fiction is what I term
the “crime master narrative”—the widely accepted notion that crime is the
simple product of equally free and autonomous “bad” choices made by persons
who are acting unencumbered by their past experience and present circum-
stances. Yet, as I argue throughout this book, the crime master narrative is
fundamentally flawed. It has produced a basically unfair apportioning of legal
punishment, one in which persons with the fewest degrees of freedom are
held most accountable, with a correspondingly long-term dispiriting effect.
What we now understand to be a largely misguided analysis of the real causes
of crime has also thwarted attempts to develop more rational, humane, and
effective policies for reducing crime. Because it is largely based on an
unsupported fiction, our myopic devotion to the crime master narrative has
placed countless numbers of potential crime victims needlessly at risk and
placed future generations in harm’s way. Thus, worse than misguided and
wrong, it is dangerous.
As a result of the widespread acceptance of the crime master narrative,
the United States has relied nearly exclusively on imprisonment as its core
strategy of crime control, especially in the unprecedented ways it has been
embraced during the so-called era of mass incarceration.1 As I note at several
different points in the analysis that follows, prison itself represents a supremely

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0000172-001
Criminality in Context: The Psychological Foundations of Criminal Justice Reform,
by C. Haney
Copyright © 2020 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
3
4 Criminality in Context

individualistic response to the social problem of crime. The proliferation of

this institution more than a century ago was in many ways a tribute to the
crime master narrative. It was also a direct outgrowth of a 19th-century model
of psychological individualism—the belief that the causal locus of people’s
behavior resides exclusively inside them, and the corresponding notion that
social problems, such as crime, can and should be addressed primarily by
acting directly on those persons who engage in it.2 Serving as the core behav-
ioral assumption of the crime master narrative, this form of individualism still
guides our nation’s crime-control policies. In this sense, the intellectual justi-
fication for these policies stands or falls on the validity of these staunchly
individualistic assumptions. Yet the extensive research I review and synthe-
size in the chapters that follow has rendered these assumptions increasingly
outmoded and indefensible.

SOCIAL CONTEXT AND CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

Over the past several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in the
way that criminal behavior is analyzed and understood by the scholars and
researchers who systematically study and theorize about it. A more contem-
porary and sophisticated understanding of criminal behavior carefully analyzes
the past social histories and immediate situations or contexts of the persons
who engage in it. This new, scientifically grounded approach represents an
important, definitive challenge to the antiquated, individualistic notions that
have guided our thinking about crime and punishment for such a long time.
As this new model of criminal behavior becomes widely recognized and
accepted, its implications for legal decisionmaking and criminal justice policy-
making will become clearer. I believe it will fundamentally impact our very
conceptions of justice and fairness and serve as the basis for new crime-
control initiatives that emphasize community-based strategies of prevention.
In fact, the perspective on the origins of social and criminal behavior that
I discuss and rely on in the following chapters not only raises serious questions
about our nation’s unrivaled dependence on imprisonment but also poses
parallel and pointed questions about the continued use of capital punishment.
Indeed, the death penalty is in many ways the ultimate expression of the
crime master narrative, reflecting the belief that the causes of serious violent
crime reside so deeply and irredeemably inside some people that they should
not be allowed to continue to live.
This book systematically reviews much of the empirical research that
directly addresses the developmental, institutional, immediate situational,
and structural roots of criminality as the basis for a more scientifically valid
and humane counternarrative. To clarify at the outset, the kind of crime or
“criminality” that I address throughout this book is what is commonly referred
to as “street crime”—criminal behavior that most people think about when
they hear that crime rates are “on the rise,” when politicians promise to
 Introduction 5

“reduce crime,” and the kind of crime that the overwhelming number of men
and women who fill our nation’s jails and prisons have been convicted of
having committed. It is also the broad category of behavior to which the crime
master narrative is routinely applied and also to which the numerous studies
I will cite in the pages that follow pertain. I do not assume that literally every
kind of crime is subject to or needs to be explained by some kind of elusive
unitary theory that encompasses literally every instance of lawbreaking. Thus,
I do not attempt to address very different kinds of crimes, especially acts of
so-called white collar and corporate criminality.
Another important caveat is also in order. I have made a conscious decision
to focus on social history and context and not on individual-level explanations
of crime that entail the supposed genetic or biological differences that some
have argued distinguish lawbreakers from the rest of us. There are several
reasons for this decision. The first is that although biological and genetic
determinism—the belief that criminal behavior is caused by the particular
biological or genetic makeup of its perpetrators—is a perspective with which
our society seems perennially enamored, it represents an especially extreme
and potentially pernicious form of the crime master narrative. It is also one
that lends itself to misuse. Indeed, genetic explanations for complex human
behavior, especially for criminality, have a sordid, racially tainted history that
I discuss in several later chapters.
The second reason is that the strong forms of genetic or biological
determinism—that some people are born “wired” to commit crime—lack
any convincing and sustained scientific support. As several sociological com-
mentators put it: “Genetic determinism has died a quiet death. Evidence is
overwhelming that human beings are never simply instructed by their genes
to show a particular trait or behavior.”3 My own reading of even the more
carefully worded and nuanced contemporary versions of genetic explanations
suggests that what we really know about these interconnections is still
entirely tentative and very much in flux.4 In fact, the most sophisticated
interpretations of what were once understood as genetic predispositions
now seem to concede that, at most, they seem to reflect differences in sen-
sitivity to those aspects of an environment or context that trigger or activate
behavior, in a field that has come to be known as “epigenetics.”5 Thus, much
like the earlier claims made about the genetic basis of IQ, however, there is
reason to believe that whatever individual differences do exist still depend
very heavily on substantial environmental influences (such as the ones
I discuss in this book) for their expression.6
And that leads to my third reason for excluding these theories from dis-
cussion in a book about the role of social history and social context in crime
causation: There are as yet no practical, positive applications for this kind of
knowledge.7 Although the challenges of addressing the criminogenic factors
and forces I discuss in the chapters that follow are daunting, they are suscep-
tible to feasible social and political interventions and remedies. Notwithstanding
their questionable scientific status, the alleged biological and genetic causes of
6 Criminality in Context

crime are not. Thus, the impact of social historical and contextual factors is
far more scientifically well-documented, they have repeatedly been shown to
have a far more important and powerful influence on human behavior (even
in emerging epigenetic models), and they are far more within our capacity as
a society to control and modify in ways that have important practical implica-
tions for meaningful criminal justice reform.

OVERVIEW OF THIS BOOK

To begin telling the story of context and criminality, Chapter 1 summarizes and
critically analyzes the traditional individualistic model of criminal behavior—
a crime master narrative that conceptualizes the causes of crime exclusively
in terms of the blameworthy free choices made by its perpetrators. Although
the crime master narrative concedes that those bad choices may stem from
various and sundry internal sources—perhaps a profound selfishness, deep-
seated immorality, a deranged mind, psychopathic character, fundamental
“evil,” or some particularly unsavory and odious combination of them all—
those sources are presumed to reside entirely within the perpetrator.
However, as I show in Chapter 2, the 19th-century model of behavior that
is at the core of the crime master narrative has not stood up to 21st-century
science. It rarely accounts for more than a small part of the real story. Research
underscoring the long-lasting influence of early “risk factors”—negative and
traumatic experiences—on people’s later life trajectories has radically shifted
the way that criminality is empirically studied and understood. So, too, have
studies of the immediate power of “criminogenic” or crime-producing life
circumstances and external situations to shape adult behavior. Indeed, a massive
amount of systematic research conducted over the last several decades has
established the causal significance of a wide range of background factors and
immediate situations in the analysis of delinquency, crime, and violence.
For this reason, the model of psychological individualism on which the crime
master narrative rests is now an anachronism; exclusively internal or disposi-
tional explanations of crime cannot bear the weight of this new evidence.
The discussion shifts in the next four chapters to a more detailed assess-
ment of the exact role of social history and social context in crime causation.
Thus, Chapter 3 summarizes what is now known about the social historical or
developmental causes of crime. An extraordinary number of studies have
been done that underscore the long-term, life-altering impact of events and
experiences that occur early in life, including the powerful criminogenic
impact of child maltreatment in all its forms. I review at length the empirical
research that clearly documents the way that childhood risks and traumas and
adverse experiences can contribute to delinquency and adult criminality.
Chapter 4 continues this discussion by extending it to a set of distinct and
seemingly paradoxical criminogenic influences: the potentially destructive
effects of harsh institutional interventions and treatment. Among other things,
 Introduction 7

this chapter examines the psychological consequences of a wide range of

institutional responses to juvenile misbehavior and crime, from increasingly
harsh disciplinary practices that are directed toward certain public school
students, to placement in the nation’s historically troubled foster care system,
to confinement in what are too often badly deteriorated or seriously under-
funded juvenile justice institutions in the United States. I examine the still
too-common victimization of children inside institutional settings as well as
the fact that many “institutional risk factors” are psychologically analogous
to the kinds of traumatic family and community experiences to which they
were initially exposed. That is, these are children who were confined in harsh
juvenile justice settings where they experienced their institutionalization as a
form of “re-traumatization,” exposing them again to forms of maltreatment
that are all too familiar.
In Chapter 5, I add to this discussion by integrating research conducted
on another critically important component in the scientific analysis of crime
causation—the role of immediate situational or contextual influences on crim-
inality. Research on the relationship of context to criminality has identified a
wide range of precipitating criminogenic and crime-inducing social circum-
stances that help to provoke and precipitate criminal behavior. Thus, we
know that there are specific situational conditions and dynamics that greatly
increase the probability that crimes will be committed within them, correspond-
ingly increasing the likelihood that anyone who enters them will succumb to
their pervasive and powerful pressures. Here, too, despite extensive scientific
research, the implications of what we know about the situational determinants
of crime have yet to be widely acknowledged in public or political discourse.
These theoretical insights and empirical data about the power of social contexts
and circumstances to shape behavior are essential to any comprehensive
understanding of the roots of criminal behavior. Yet they not only have had
little or no impact in key legal decision-making arenas where the individualistic
“free choice” model still reigns, but they also have failed to inspire a more
rational and effective strategies of crime control.
In Chapter 6, I examine some of the various ways in which the structural
and socioeconomic variable of poverty operates as a central and especially
powerful criminogenic risk factor. Among other things, it functions broadly to
interconnect and compound the destructive influence of the multiple risk factors
often associated with it. Although it is a fact so obvious that its significance is
often overlooked, the nation’s prisons are filled with the nation’s poor. Some
of the disproportionate number of poor persons who are incarcerated have
been erroneously caught up in the wide net of the criminal justice system
because they lacked the necessary resources with which to properly defend
themselves in or extricate themselves from the legal processes that ensnared
them. Many others are imprisoned because they have succumbed to the
severe pressures of a life of deprivation and want, the multiple other risk
factors and traumas to which such a life commonly exposes them, and the
host of criminogenic disadvantages that they continuously confront well into
adulthood.
8 Criminality in Context

Chapter 7 frankly acknowledges the criminogenic implications of the

fact that the United States remains deeply divided by race and ethnicity.
The overrepresentation of racial minorities—primarily African Americans—
in the criminal justice system can be understood in part through the lens
of racial oppression to which many such communities of Color have been
historically subjected.8 Slavery and colonization produced entrenched struc-
tural divisions that still translate into fundamental differences in the day-to-day
realities of many Black and, increasingly, Latino Americans. I use the term
“biographical racism” to describe the sum total of racialized experiences that
accumulate over a person of Color’s entire social history in ways that can and
often do adversely shape and undermine their life course and can themselves
be criminogenic.
In Chapter 8, I directly examine and confront the various ways in which
the broad framework of social contextualism that I have developed up to
this point fundamentally complicates and calls into question any simplistic
“free choice” model of criminal behavior. As I repeatedly note, this free choice
model still dominates virtually all criminal justice settings and legal decision-
making circles. Loosening its irrational grip will require us to interrogate and
confront the intellectual as well as legal sources of inertia and resistance to
change. I explicitly and critically examine some of the ways that the crime
master narrative is used to confuse and obfuscate the analysis of criminal
behavior, impeding the development of crime control policies that are based
on reason rather than emotion.
Chapter 9 shifts focus to examine the direct legal and prison policy implica-
tions of the preceding chapters. As our appreciation of the breadth and depth of
the social contextual determinants of behavior increases, so too does the
urgency of bringing criminal law doctrines, criminal justice practices, and
prison policies into line with these more scientifically valid psychological per-
spectives. This chapter contains the outline of at least some of those much-
needed legal reforms, ones premised on an emerging counternarrative that
fully acknowledges the critically important role of social history and context.
I am not naïve about the difficulty of implementing meaningful change within
an overarching legal system whose fundamental assumptions and standard
operating procedures are so longstanding and institutionally entrenched, no
matter how useful or even seemingly necessary it may be. No student of legal
history can reflect seriously on past attempts to use empirical data to transform
the law without acknowledging the law’s deep-seated resistance to psycho-
logically inspired change.9 And no one can participate in related criminal
justice reform-oriented efforts for very long without being forced to concede
the monumental obstacles that thwart real change. Yet I also believe that a
serious dialogue about these issues is not only long overdue but inevitable.
The time has come to use what is known about the social historical and imme-
diate structural determinants of crime to make the criminal justice system’s
basic operating assumptions more scientifically valid and its doctrines and
procedures more equitable and fair.
 Introduction 9

In that spirit, Chapter 10 develops another set of broad and badly needed
context-based social reforms that stem from the quiet revolution in our
understanding the causes of crime. It acknowledges that proposing a series of
immediate “fixes” to outdated criminal law doctrines and criminal justice prac-
tices that have led to a destructive overdependency on imprisonment still per-
petuates a largely self-limiting system. Absent a viable alternative framework,
these modest fixes are ultimately counterproductive. Thus, I argue that we
must take steps to develop a new and fundamentally different strategy that
explicitly acknowledges and then pointedly, proactively, and preventively
addresses the social contextual causes of crime that are discussed throughout
this book. I suggest a number of ways in which this alternative model can end
our current overreliance on prison and better address our nation’s crime prob-
lem. It focuses attention and resources on meaningful and effective programs
designed to prevent criminal behavior rather than merely reacting to it.
Although here, too, I recognize the truly daunting practical difficulties and
political obstacles that must be overcome in order to mount the kind of
structurally oriented program of crime prevention that I describe, I also believe
that, in light of what we now know about the roots of criminality, anything less
than this simply will not produce substantial, lasting change.

THE POLITICS OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM

I should explicitly acknowledge that meaningful criminal law reform and

significant changes in crime control policy are especially vulnerable to political
resistance and obstruction. Psychiatrist Judith Herman’s caution that “the
study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because
it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people” bears repeating
here.10 Focusing on trauma in the lives of people who have committed crime
is “political” in the same sense, to be sure. But it also is a topic that is easily
“politicized.” The way that a society conceptualizes and responds to wrong-
doing connects to core debates about the role of government in controlling
citizens’ behavior and the proper targets of state intervention—intervention
that, as Robert Cover has reminded us, is often inherently violent in nature.11
At no time has the politicization of these issues been clearer and more sustained
than over the last several decades.12 Unfortunately, that politicization not only
became remarkably one-sided during these years but also often diverted the
public’s attention from many of the issues that I address in this book.
Concern over potential politicization leads to another issue that bears
emphasis. I want to say at the outset and repeat at several junctures along the
way that I am well aware of the ease with which a focus on criminogenic
traumas and risks lends itself to a painfully stigmatizing form of deficit think-
ing.13 It is my intention to avoid this. The concepts and data presented in
this book are not intended to imply that adverse outcomes are inevitable,
irreversible, or are caused primarily by the personal deficits or failings of the
10 Criminality in Context

persons who succumb to or engage in them. Nor are the analyses that follow
intended to depict persons who are adversely affected by the array of crimino-
genic influences I discuss in detail as passive victims; to the contrary, whether
or not they are ultimately successful at pushing back against these influences,
their lives have typically been characterized by resistance, striving, and resil-
ience. They want and deserve meaningful opportunities far more than idle
sympathy. Moreover, people who have been negatively affected by the risks
and traumas that they have experienced should never be blamed for their
own victimhood. Yet it is also important to acknowledge and analyze the role
of mistreatment and the hurtful and often harmful actions of the larger sys-
tems of oppression as well as what we now know are the predictable conse-
quences of these experiences.
Thus, analyzing the problematic outcomes without pathologizing those
who engage in them means recognizing that criminal behavior is often an
adaptive response to otherwise pathological, destructive past histories and
present environments. People can engage in problematic behavior without
being problematic people, and the negative consequences of exposure to risk
factors and criminogenic conditions are largely learned behaviors that are
highly modifiable. Because they were caused by mistreatment, deprivation,
and adverse external circumstances, rather than inborn, fixed internal traits
or mechanisms, they are subject to being effectively addressed with the
appropriate resources and changed circumstances.
Over the years, however, the work I have done studying the lives of capital
defendants also has taught me a deeply troubling lesson, one that our society
has seemed at many times intent on ignoring. It is that a number of the chil-
dren and adolescents who have endured the very worst forms early trauma,
the most severe kinds of maltreatment, the most egregious institutional
neglect and abuse, and who live in the most impoverished and criminogenic
neighborhoods simply cannot and do not easily overcome these things, at
least not without caring intervention of the sort that is often not forthcoming.
There are many remarkable souls who do, to be sure, but they are exceptions
to be admired and sometimes marveled at, perhaps precisely because of the
long odds they have overcome.
Despite the odds against them, of course, not all of the children who
experience even the worst kinds of trauma go on to commit crimes. Aside
from those with remarkable resilience and the fortunate others who benefit
from the benign intervention of a caring relative or teacher, or an effective
educational or a therapeutic program designed to address some of their
many unmet needs, there are many other adaptations to trauma that do not
involve criminality. But tragically few children who experience the worst to
which our society can subject them emerge miraculously unscathed, even if
they “just try hard enough,” or draw on their divinely-given inner strength,
or summon the will to make it so, or whatever other fiction some com-
mentators engage to ultimately shift blame onto the victims of severe child-
hood trauma and societal neglect. Instead, the effects of these experiences
 Introduction 11

are often life-altering, at least when necessary resources and meaningful

opportunities to rise above potentially harmful pasts fail to materialize.
There are still a daunting number of children in our society who endure
these traumatic life histories and confront such destructively harsh life
circumstances. For them, the criminogenics of prior abuse and deprivation
cannot be simply forgotten, easily transcended, or successfully set aside.
This book seeks to explain the paths that some of them have traveled, and
the steps that can be taken to minimize the number of lives that are
affected in these harmful ways.
The criminal justice system’s reliance on the crime master narrative trans-
lates the predictable consequences of these experiences into nothing more
than a matter of blameworthy free choices, thereby masking the underlying
causes, holding the victims of mistreatment and structural injustice account-
able for the consequences of social historical events and circumstances over
which they often had little or no control. It not only dehumanizes and dis-
tances them from the rest of us but also ensures that we will never effectively
address these larger social ills. We can and should do better. Truly meaningful
and effective criminal justice reform depends on it.

NOTES
1. See, e.g., Hinton, E. (2016). From the war on poverty to the war on crime: The making
of mass incarceration in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. http://
dx.doi.org/10.4159/9780674969223; and Kilgore, J. (2015). Understanding mass
incarceration: A people’s guide to the civil rights struggle of our time. New York, NY: The
New Press.
2. Haney, C. (1982). Criminal justice and the nineteenth-century paradigm: The
triumph of psychological individualism in the “formative era.” Law and Human
Behavior, 6, 191–235. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01044295
3. Simons, R. L., Lei, M. K., Beach, S. R. H., Brody, G. H., Philibert, R. A., & Gibbons,
F. X. (2011). Social environment, genes, and aggression: Evidence supporting the
differential susceptibility perspective. American Sociological Review, 76, 883–912,
p. 883. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0003122411427580. The eagerness to uncritically
accept the many empirical and theoretical claims that have been made in the past
about the alleged genetic and biological causal roots of criminality should not blind
us to the lack of solid and consistent evidence establishing any clear causal link
between genetic makeup and crime or confirming any meaningful level of actual
biological causation.
4. The recent history of an alleged genetic basis for depression is instructive. In 2003,
an influential paper was published that purported to find the elusive and long-
sought-after genetic basis for depression. See Caspi, A., Sugden, K., Moffitt, T. E.,
Taylor, A., Craig, I. W., Harrington, H., . . . Poulton, R. (2003). Influence of life
stress on depression: Moderation by a polymorphism in the 5-HTT gene. Science,
302, 386–389. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1083968. In retrospect, as the
press later reported, this initial report of a genetic basis for depression was greeted
with much fanfare: “The excitement spread quickly. Newspapers and magazines
reported the findings. Columnists, commentators and op-ed writers emphasized its
importance.” See Carey, B. (2009, June 17). Report on gene for depression is
now faulted. The New York Times, pp. A1, A13, p. A13. However, a meta-analysis
conducted 6 years later provided a definitive challenge to the earlier finding. The
12 Criminality in Context

authors of the later study concluded: “The results of this meta-analysis clearly
demonstrate that stressful life events have a potent relationship with the risk of
depression, an association that has been one of the most widely studied environ-
mental factors for a range of mental disorders.” Risch, N., Herrell, R., Lehner, T.,
Liang, K.-Y., Eaves, L., Hoh, J., . . . Merikangas, K. R. (2009). Interaction between
the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR), stressful life events, and risk of depres-
sion: A meta-analysis. JAMA, 301, 2462–2471, p. 2468. http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/
jama.2009.878
5. See, e.g., Radley, J. J., Kabbaj, M. Jacobson, L., Heydendael, W., Yehuda, R., &
Herman, J. P. (2011). Stress risk factors and stress-related pathology: Neuroplasticity,
epigenetics and endophenotypes. Stress: The International Journal on the Biology of
Stress, 14, 481–497. http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/10253890.2011.604751; Yang, B.-Z.,
Zhang, H., Ge, W., Weder, N., Douglas-Palumberi, H., Perepletchikova, F., . . .
Kaufman, J. (2013). Child abuse and epigenetic mechanisms of disease risk.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 44, 101–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.amepre.2012.10.012; Zannas, A. S., & West, A. E. (2014). Epigenetics and the
regulation of stress vulnerability. Neuroscience, 264, 157–170. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.neuroscience.2013.12.003
6. In addition to Simons et al. (2011), Social environment, genes, and aggression, see,
e.g., Belsky, J., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007).
For better and for worse: Differential susceptibility to environmental influences.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 300–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/
j.1467-8721.2007.00525.x; Caspi, A., & Moffitt, T. E. (2006). Gene-environment
interactions in psychiatry: Joining forces with neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuro-
science, 7, 583–590; Ehlert, U. (2013). Enduring psychobiological effects of childhood
adversity. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 38, 1850–1857. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.psyneuen.2013.06.007; Rutter, M. (2006). Genes and behavior: Nature-nurture
interplay explained. London, England: Blackwell; and Shanahan, M. J., & Hofer,
S. M. (2005). Social context in gene-environment interactions: Retrospect and
prospect. Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 60, 65–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/
geronb/60.Special_Issue_1.65
7. For a slightly different perspective on this issue, see Grasso, A. (2017). Broken beyond
repair: Rehabilitative penology and American political development. Political
Research Quarterly, 70, 394–407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1065912917695189
8. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association advises authors to
capitalize “Black” and “White” when the terms are used to denote race. I, too,
believe this is appropriate and will follow this practice. As Catherine McKinnon
explained with respect to the capitalization of “Black,” the word is “as much
socially created as, and at least in the American context no less specifically mean-
ingful or definitive than, any linguistic, tribal, or religious ethnicity, all of which are
conventionally recognized by capitalization.” McKinnon, C. A. (1982). Feminism,
Marxism, method, and the state: An agenda for theory. Signs, 7, 515–544, p, 516.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/493898. I believe the same logic applies to “Color” when
used in this way, and it is capitalized throughout.
9. Haney, C. (1980). Psychology and legal change: On the limits of a factual jurispru-
dence. Law and Human Behavior, 4, 147–199. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01040317.
See also Haney, C. (1993). Psychology and legal change: The impact of a decade.
Law and Human Behavior, 17, 371–398. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01044374
10. Herman, J. (1997). Afterword. In J. Herman (Ed.), Trauma and recovery (pp. 236–247).
New York, NY: Basic Books.
11. Cover, R. M. (1986). Violence and the word. The Yale Law Journal, 95, 1601–1629.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/796468
12. See, e.g., Haney, C. (1998). Riding the punishment wave: On the origins of our
devolving standards of decency. Hastings Women’s Law Journal, 9, 27–78; and
 Introduction 13

Haney, C. (2012). Politicizing crime and punishment: Redefining “justice” to fight

the “war on prisoners.” West Virginia Law Review, 114, 373–414.
13. See, e.g., Valencia, R. R. (1997). Conceptualizing the notion of deficit thinking.
In R. R. Valencia (Ed.), The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice
(pp. 1–12). Abingdon, England: RoutledgeFalmer. See also John Irwin’s caution
about the ease with which this problematic model has been applied in corrections:
Since the appearance of positivism in the social sciences, there has been a persistent
effort to conceptualize crime as behavior committed almost entirely by aberrants. This
general approach is obviously appealing to the more powerful because it conveniently
narrows the definition of crime, draws attention away from their own illegal and
immoral activities, and avoids any changes in basic social and economic relations.
It demands only some fine tuning of various institutional activities such as those of the
“criminal justice system.” Also, it supplies society’s leaders with bogeymen to divert
the public’s attention away from pressing problems—such as unemployment—that
are more likely to demand structural change.

Irwin, J. (1987). Reflections on ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography,

16, 41–48, p. 45.
1
Individualistic Myths and
the Crime Master Narrative

[The cultural organization of criminal justice] produces a construction of reality by

focusing on an incident, narrowly defined in time and place and it freezes the action
there. . . . The result is that the individual then becomes separated out. He is in certain
important ways isolated in respect of that incident from his environment, his friends,
his family, the material substratum of his world.
—LOUK HULSMAN1

T he prosecutor in the final stage of a capital murder trial in California rose

to address the jury in his closing argument. The defendant was an African
American man in his 20s named Lamar Jackson. He had been convicted of
truly terrible crimes—the brutal murders of two women—and now faced the
death penalty.2 Speaking directly to the jurors who soon would decide the
man’s fate, the prosecutor minced few words. He characterized the defen-
dant in unequivocal, vilifying terms as a “one man crime wave” who had
“stubbornly and steadfastly refused to be anything other than an egocentric,
selfish, and violent criminal.” He referred briefly to expert psychiatric testimony
that had been presented earlier in the case, testimony that had portrayed
Jackson in perhaps the worst possible clinical terms, as “a sociopath, a psycho-
path, a completely anti-social personality.”
Not satisfied with these already deeply pejorative labels, the prosecutor
offered his own more sinister twist, lest even one juror conclude that the
defendant suffered from some kind of “illness” warranting the tiniest bit of

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0000172-002
Criminality in Context: The Psychological Foundations of Criminal Justice Reform,
by C. Haney
Copyright © 2020 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
15
16 Criminality in Context

sympathy or compassion. He argued that rather than the product of a psychi-

atric condition—even one as frightening as psychopathy—Jackson’s violent
behavior was entirely under his own control and that he alone was fully
responsible for the consequences of his actions. In fact, he said, Lamar Jackson’s
criminality was “basically a philosophy. It is a road that he chose to go down a
long time ago.” Thus, immune from the influence of any internal or external
forces beyond his control, Jackson’s bad acts were the result of a “lifestyle
choice”—a series of purposeful and selfish decisions that he had made totally
freely and entirely on his own. The prosecutor went on to portray the defen-
dant as utterly ruthless and, using animalistic terms to describe him, called
him an “accomplished predator,” one who “preys, destroys or devours . . .
those persons weaker than himself.”
He ended by telling the jury that there was nothing at all about the defen-
dant or his background that moderated or complicated the simple, stark,
frightening portrait that he had painted of the defendant. Not only had Lamar
Jackson been in total control of the terrible choices he had made in his life,
but he had freely and repeatedly decided to ruthlessly and viciously harm
others. His “badness” was deep and it was all-encompassing—it was all there
was to him. Quite simply, the prosecutor said, “the bad is overwhelming and
in fact the good is virtually nonexistent.” He repeated the theme for emphasis:
“The reasonable interpretation of all of the evidence clearly shows that the
bad not only outweighs the good, using that term loosely substantially, that it
dwarfs it.” And yet again: “as hard as [one] may look” for any good in the
defendant, it is “in fact pretty much nonexistent.”
This powerful, damning account of Lamar Jackson’s presumably evil
character and depraved motivation was for the most part the only one that
the jurors would ever hear—not just from the prosecutor but at any time in
the course of his trial. Even Jackson’s own lawyers—legal professionals who
had taken on the awesome responsibility of trying to save their client’s
life—offered up no more than a halfhearted response to the prosecutor’s
core argument. They essentially conceded most of the prosecutor’s damning
description of their client, including the characterization of Lamar’s despicable
actions as the product of his own evil choices and his vile “nature.”
Not surprisingly, with nothing else to rely on but this compelling picture of
a frighteningly dangerous, utterly selfish, ruthless and depraved “predator”—
someone who had freely chosen bad over good and preyed on weaker victims
as part of his evil lifestyle—Lamar Jackson’s jury unanimously condemned
him to die.
In developing his one-sided, condemning portrait of Lamar Jackson, the
prosecutor had relied on an admittedly extreme version of an otherwise
seemingly “commonsense” conception of violent criminality that is still very
deeply held and widely shared in our society. He could confidently assert—
and confidently assume that most if not all of the jurors would implicitly
agree—that the causes of terribly violent crimes like those that Mr. Jackson
 Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 17

had been convicted of committing are located entirely inside and fully under
the control of the persons who perpetrate them. It is a time-honored conception
that, as I say, many of the jurors not only very likely shared but also regarded
as so straightforward and commonsensical as to be nearly unassailable. They
likely needed little or no convincing of its truth. Most people do not.
Put simply, most of us have been taught, repeatedly and in multiple ways,
that only fundamentally bad people commit bad, violent acts. We have been
taught further that their badness stems from something that resides within
them, something that they chose to indulge in or to respond to, with little or
no concern for the harm they inflict in order to obtain what they desire. In
this way, the bad acts that lawbreakers commit are nearly universally por-
trayed as the product of personal, autonomous choices that are made “freely,”
unencumbered by past history or present circumstances. This narrative of
free choice is why the perpetrators of crime are regarded so often and easily—
intuitively, really—as fully culpable for the bad things they have done.
In addition to being a widely shared, commonsense, layperson’s view of
crime, the seemingly intuitive model of “free choice” serves as the basis of
the legal processes by which we allocate criminal responsibility and mete
out punishment in our criminal justice system. In fact, these processes are
founded on the same core assumptions and operate in much the same way
now as they did since the inception of our justice system centuries ago.
Moreover, all other things being equal, the worse the crime someone has been
found guilty of committing, the harsher the punishment he deserves to have
imposed on him. In a death penalty case, such as Lamar Jackson’s, these
beliefs can lead jurors to conclude that the defendant is culpable enough to
pay with his life.
Yet, as I discuss at length in the chapters that follow, this venerable formu-
lation has become scientifically indefensible. It is fundamentally at odds with
what is known about the causal origins of social behavior in general and
criminal behavior in particular. The remainder of this book is devoted to
exploring that disjuncture—by reviewing the empirical evidence that has
mounted over the last four decades to establish an alternative psychological
framework for understanding the causes of criminal behavior. This more
scientifically valid framework has profound implications for the way we
approach crime control and promote social justice.
The present chapter traces the roots of the anachronistic but still deeply
entrenched individualistic free choice model of criminal behavior and out-
lines the elements of the fundamental paradigm shift in psychology and
related disciplines that is helping to displace it. It is a paradigm shift that
has been underway for several decades in academic circles, even though it
is not yet fully embraced by the public or in political discourse and debates
over crime and punishment. Regrettably, it has had little or no impact
on most of the all-important decisions that are made within the criminal
justice system itself.
18 Criminality in Context

THE DOMINANCE OF THE “CRIME MASTER NARRATIVE”

“Master narratives” are official frameworks that establish broadly accepted

ways of understanding human events and behavior. Contemporary historians
have described master narratives as cultural lenses that are “institutionalized,
canonical, and legitimizing.”3 Because they come from authoritative, institu-
tional sources that people look to as conferring legitimacy, master narratives
are widely shared and accepted as “truth.” Author Toni Morrison observed
that these kinds of narratives or “official stories” assist in the “manufacture
of a public truth” by “control[ling] the presumptions and postulates of
the discussion” in ways that “reinforce the narrative and truncate alternative
opinion.”4
In the case of the “crime master narrative” that has dominated American
society for several centuries, criminal behavior is understood as an individual-
level phenomenon in which lawbreakers themselves are seen as the exclusive
causal locus of their own criminal behavior. In media messages, political
discourse, and public debate and discussion, they and they alone are viewed not
only as personally responsible for their criminal actions but also, collectively,
as the source of the overall “crime problem” in our society. Lawbreaking is
near universally depicted and regularly regarded in our society as the product
of decisions that are made by persons who act as they freely choose to, largely
unconstrained by other social and economic forces in their life. Thus, no matter
how daunting, insurmountable, or extreme, their past background and present
circumstances are viewed as largely irrelevant to understanding why they
acted as they did or determining how severely they should be punished for
their transgressions. By definition, then, all bad choices are viewed as willful
and selfish, ones pursued in presumably conscious disregard of the hurtful
consequences they may have for others. As depicted in the crime master
narrative, criminal behavior is a reflection of the inherent, deep-seated, and
condemnable “badness” of those who engage in it. This “public truth” about
crime and criminality is so dominant that it effectively truncates and preempts
any alternative explanations.
There is a great deal of synergy between the culturally entrenched crime
master narrative and the criminal justice system’s long-standing doctrines
of legal and criminal responsibility. As two legal commentators put it: “The
individualism of the badness model parallels the criminal law’s individualistic
approach to punishment.”5 Because—under the terms of the applicable
criminal law and through the operative lens of the crime master narrative—
lawbreakers are for the most part presumed to be fully responsible for their bad
behavior, dispensing “justice” in individual cases equates with fully punishing
them for the inexcusable things they have done. This narrowly individualistic
and deeply held view shapes how prosecutors approach juries, and it influ-
ences the punitive sentences frequently meted out in criminal trials. It also
has important implications for crime control policy in general.6 That is, it implies
that overall crime rates can only be reduced by making individual perpetrators
pay dearly for the bad choices that they have made.
 Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 19

At the extremes, of course, the crime master narrative can serve as a ratio-
nale for capital punishment—leading jurors to conclude that a defendant’s
bad behavior and the bad character from which it necessarily comes are so
extreme that he is not fit to live. As I noted, this was one of the arguments
made in Lamar Jackson’s death penalty trial. That is, for some citizens, the
assumption that the very worst crimes are perforce committed by the very
worst people justifies the imposition of the very worst punishment—capital
punishment.
The crime master narrative also pushes alternative approaches to crime
control out of public and political debates over crime policies. This is
especially true of alternative strategies that focus more on the underlying or
broader contextual causes of criminal behavior. Programs designed to lessen
the long-term impact of the kind of traumatic mistreatment that is known
to be criminogenic or to address adverse social conditions that are known
to promote criminal behavior—through, for example, implementing child
abuse prevention programs or widespread socioeconomic reforms—are
fundamentally at odds with the crime master narrative. They are difficult to
pursue because they are far outside mainstream thinking about crime control.
Instead, because the venerable crime master narrative is unquestioningly
and reflexively embraced, it ensures that other more scientifically based
contextual approaches are rarely given serious consideration.
The crime master narrative has other secondary, deleterious effects as well.
Its continued prominence operates to preempt or curtail careful case-specific
investigations into and in-depth analyses of the actual causes of particular
crimes or of crime in general. That is, legal decisionmakers (police, prosecutors,
judges, and jurors) who might otherwise have undertaken such investigation
or analysis instead automatically presume that crime is the product of the free
and autonomous choice of its perpetrators. Emblematic of this short-circuiting,
a crime is thought to be “solved” when someone has been found on whom it
can be blamed. As one legal scholar put it,

The process of adjudicating guilt does not contain an inquiry as to why a particular
person has engaged in proscribed behavior. It is satisfied with “proof” merely
that he or she chose the wrong course of conduct and acted in furtherance of
that choice.7

I would add only that the “why” of these wrong choices is implicitly assumed
and thought to be located exclusively inside the presumably deviant and
damnable persons who made them.
The news media similarly see and report on crime virtually exclusively
through the lens of the crime master narrative. Thus, instead of illuminat-
ing the underlying structural causes or interpersonal dynamics that are
(or might be) at the root of any particular crime, media accounts are routinely
focused on little more than the identity of the perpetrators (who are assumed
to be exclusively “at fault”) and whatever personal characteristics they may
possess that seem to account for their bad behavior. These accounts are uni-
formly fashioned in ways that closely follow (and seem to validate) the crime
20 Criminality in Context

master narrative, a narrative that subsequent chapters will demonstrate

is unfortunately based—at best—on partial and incomplete information.8 Its
limitations notwithstanding, the crime master narrative is rarely questioned
because it appears to reflect a “commonsense” account that “everyone knows”
to be true.
In addition, by essentializing and exaggerating the negative qualities of
the alleged perpetrators of crime—the main protagonists in virtually all
crime stories—the media also simplify the stories themselves, often through
contrasting frames in which pure good is pitted against unmitigated evil.9
Victims are described in normalizing, endearing terms that connect them
emotionally to the public. Perpetrators, on the other hand, are depicted in
ways that emphasize their deviance and, in turn, psychologically distance
them from the audience. To be sure, these characterizations of crime victims
are understandable and a perhaps entirely appropriate way to elicit identifi-
cation with and empathy for persons who have innocently suffered. However,
the typical characterization of perpetrators produces only alienation, fear, and
anger, and negates any impulse to understand them in remotely nuanced
ways. It omits and seems to stifle the impulse or need to find any broader
explanatory context in which to situate the perpetrator or his actions. Thus,
as Maria Grabe concluded about the crime news stories that she content-
analyzed, “[b]y virtually ignoring possible structural causes for crime (such as
poverty or racism) criminals are portrayed as society’s irrational enemies
who deserve little sympathy because they presumably act as a result of their
own will.”10
Rather than connecting crime to the larger structural forces that may have
operated over the course of perpetrators’ lives to influence and contribute to
their criminal behavior, or linking crimes to the immediate circumstances that
may have helped precipitate them, the master narrative depicts criminality in
what amounts to a total social vacuum. In so doing, it fails to teach important
lessons about the potential influence of criminogenic factors that are outside the
control of the persons who have broken the law (e.g., child abuse and neglect,
poverty and inequality, racism, institutional mistreatment). Members of the
public are not only the target audiences for these distorted and one-sided media
messages but also are asked as voters and jurors to weigh in on criminal justice
policy and legal decisions. Yet they are rarely given the kind of in-depth descrip-
tive information that would allow them to situate criminal defendants in
a broader social historical and structural context. Instead, lawbreakers are
“contextualized”—if at all—primarily in terms of their criminal records; they
are measured, as the saying goes, by the worst things they have ever done in
their life—and, typically, little else.
In this book, I argue that the crime master narrative overlooks and is
increasingly challenged by what researchers from a wide range of disciplines
now understand about the influence and effect of past experiences and present
circumstances on criminal behavior.11 Yet, despite the fact that the crime
master narrative lacks empirical or scholarly support, it persists. A careful look
at its history helps to explain why.
 Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 21

PSYCHOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM IN 19TH-CENTURY LAW,

“SCIENCE,” AND AMERICAN CULTURE

The crime master narrative is not a recent invention. Understanding its origins
underscores how deeply it is embedded in our culture and consciousness. The
individualistic doctrines of criminal responsibility on which it is based have a
very long and well-established history that predates the birth of the nation
and the creation of its legal institutions. Indeed, by the 18th century, Western
European jurists had firmly placed the causal locus of criminal behavior
deep inside the individuals who performed it. The very concept of criminal
responsibility was intertwined with a model of human behavior that both
presumed and required individual autonomy. It is illustrated in David
Hume’s early 18th-century discussion of legal culpability and his assertion
that only those actions that emanated “from some cause in the character and
disposition of the person who performed them” could be used to establish
legal culpability. In the presumably rare case in which someone’s actions
“proceeded from nothing in him that is durable and constant,” then that
person could not justly “become the object of punishment or vengeance.”12
But the implicit understanding and expectation was that the “character
and disposition of the person” accounted for the overwhelming majority of
criminal acts.
Nineteenth-century American society enthusiastically embraced the
related concept of “psychological individualism.”13 Psychological individu-
alism implied—and 19th-century American society largely came to believe—
that individuals were the causal locus of their own behavior. That is, the
forces that determined what a person did, and why, resided largely, if not
exclusively, inside them. This implied, of course, that social deviance arose
largely from some defective traits and tendencies inside the persons who
manifested or engaged in it.
To be sure, the dominant 19th- and early 20th-century perspective was
never completely individualistic; most knowledgeable members of the general
public and informed commentators conceded that external factors like poverty,
family disorganization, and exposure to the vices and depredations of city
life could play some role in creating or exacerbating a person’s internal
defects. Yet legal doctrines of responsibility and culpability were already firmly
premised on a model of human behavior that attached utmost importance to
individual autonomy—autonomy that was for the most part presumed rather
than demonstrated, largely because it was entirely consistent with the psycho-
logical individualism of the times.
Like the amateur social scientists of the day who employed the paradigm of
independent and autonomous human agency in most of their causal models
and analyses, lawyers and judges went about the task of finding and applying
the common law with much the same perspective. Although psychological
individualism was entrenched most deeply and durably in the criminal law,
it influenced other legal doctrines as well. Legal historian Morton Horwitz
22 Criminality in Context

noted that “[i]n the two decades before the Civil War, the ideologies of
laissez-faire and rugged individualism had finally established a prominent
beachhead in American property doctrine.”14 Roscoe Pound’s sweeping but
accurate generalization captured the legal spirit of these times: “[T]he
common law knows individuals only. . . . And this compels a narrow and
one-sided view.”15
Moreover, at a pragmatic level, individualistic models of blame and exclu-
sively person-centered “solutions” were proposed for a host of 19th-century
social problems, including crime.16 The individualistic model of behavior
served as the conceptual underpinning for an elaborate and extensive prison
system that was under construction across the land. Historian Martin Miller
has estimated that the number of prisoners incarcerated in the United States
grew from a little under 7,000 in 1850 to over 80,000 by 1890. Although
clearly some of this growth in the prison population was attributable to the
increase in the country’s overall population, the rate at which citizens were
imprisoned also increased significantly, from approximately one person in
3,400 who were incarcerated in 1850, to one in 750 by 1890.17 The increased
use of imprisonment during the 19th century was entirely consistent with
the emphasis on individualism that continued to be enshrined in the entire
American legal system during exactly the same period. Penal institutions
were concrete and steel embodiments of the belief that individuals alone
were responsible for the crimes they committed.
If prisoners were regarded, in Hume’s terms, as the appropriate “objects of
punishment and vengeance,” it was because the source of the social ill to
which they contributed—crime—was seen as residing within them. Thus,
not only did people believe that a crime had been “solved” when, as I noted
earlier, some person had been found on whom it could be blamed, but also
that “justice” had been done when that person had been removed from society
and placed in prison to be punished.
For perhaps obvious reasons, this individualism fit nicely into the world-
view of those in positions of power and was consistent with the dominant
ethos of wealthier nations that were in the process of creating their own
elaborate state-run criminal justice systems. As historian Herman Franke
noted, “judges, scholars, members of parliament, ministers, and successful
merchants could regard themselves as independent, autonomous individuals
who owed their places at the top of the social pile to their own moral standing
and abilities.”18
Of course, at the other end of this hierarchy of supposed personal virtues
and noble traits were those on whom punishment was most often inflicted.
Individualism allowed those in power “to think about the causes of crime in
terms of individual shortcomings and ill nature and to consider criminality as
a social phenomenon hardly at all.”19 This was largely true of members of the
fledgling behavioral science disciplines as well. To the extent that serious
violent crimes conjured any particular psychological view of human nature,
they typically “implied in themselves nothing more than the depths of man’s
undoubted depravity.”20
 Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 23

Consistent with the emerging scientism that characterized the 19th century,
numerous theories were advanced in attempts to explain the precise nature
of this “undoubted depravity.” Notwithstanding the flawed, prescientific data
on which they were based, popular theories of human deviance or depravity
virtually always were couched in terms of the individualistic defects of those
who succumbed to predation. For example, in the 1830s, English psychiatrist
James Prichard coined the term “moral insanity” to describe persons who
suffered from a “diseased . . . moral constitution” that led them into a life of
crime.21 Later in the same decade, American psychiatrist Isaac Ray wrote that
criminality was closely connected to mental defectiveness—that criminals
were, in effect, what later would be termed “moral imbeciles.”22 Eventually,
as I show, many members of American society came to believe that “moral
imbecility”—like most forms of deviance and depravity—ran in families and
could be passed down from generation to generation.
Francis Lieber wrote in his preface to Beaumont and de Tocqueville’s 1833
treatise on American penitentiaries that “[p]risons have been called hospitals
for patients laboring under moral diseases.”23 In fact, most criminal misdeeds
were explained in terms of biologically based mental defects. As one early
writer put it: “Crime, imbecility, and insanity are hereditary diseases of the
mind . . . [All] non-organic cases of imbecility show somewhere in the family
annals there has been opium-eating, immoral living, drunkenness, insanity,
imbecility or actual crime.”24
Many members of the emerging discipline of psychology continued to
advance this view. In 1909, prominent psychologist Walter Fernald wrote that
“[e]very imbecile . . . is a potential criminal;”25 and, a decade later, another
influential psychologist, Lewis Terman—one of the early developers of IQ
tests—advocated institutionalizing the mentally retarded in large part because
of “their tendencies to become delinquent or criminal.”26 H. H. Goddard,
one of Fernald’s and Terman’s equally well-known contemporaries, estimated
that “from 25 percent to 50 percent of the people in our prisons are mentally
defective and incapable of managing their affairs with ordinary prudence.”27
These and other alleged individual, ingrained defects were presumed to be
at the root of criminal behavior. Notably, this era was also one in which the
foundations of our entire criminal justice system were established—an era
entirely enamored with pseudoscientific beliefs about the inherent and
insurmountable defects in lawbreakers.

INDIVIDUALISM EMBODIED: CRANIOMETRY, PHRENOLOGY,

EUGENICS, AND INSTINCT THEORY

Among the clearest indications of 19th- and early 20th-century America’s

commitment to the model of psychological individualism on which the crime
master narrative is based was the enthusiasm with which citizens, politicians,
and academics alike wholeheartedly embraced claims about the supposed
24 Criminality in Context

self-contained biological and genetic origins of personality or “character.”

In particular, there were several pseudoscientific theories that each, in turn,
dominated mainstream thinking about human nature and, perforce, the
causes of crime and other forms of deviance. They were conceptually similar
variations on the same basic individualistic theme. Thus, “craniometry,”
“phrenology,” “eugenics,” and “instinct theory” all supposedly “proved” that
the causes of behavior could be found—indeed, were literally physically
contained—in the biology of the persons who engaged in it. This meant that
the defects that allegedly caused criminal behavior not only resided in the
lawbreakers themselves, but that the defects were literally embodied in them
and almost assuredly had been since birth.
The arc of all four theories was very similar. Each rose to prominence
amid claims of being a “scientific breakthrough” that was soon enthusiastically
and widely accepted. Then, as facts mounted to call key claims into question,
the theories were increasingly discredited and eventually abandoned by the
mainstream scientific community—although not necessarily by the larger
public who had so ardently supported them. Moreover, notwithstanding the
disfavor and disrepute into which they eventually fell, for nearly a century,
one or another of these theories not only reigned as popular fads but also as
“scientific truths” that served as the legitimating basis for the creation and
implementation of a wide range of social policies, laws, and criminal justice
practices. Importantly, key aspects of those policies, laws, and practices have
persisted, as have residues of the underlying belief in biological and genetic
determinism on which they were based.
The first of these 19th-century pseudoscientific theories, craniometry,
began with claims that people’s intellectual and moral capacities and charac-
teristics were directly related to the shape and size of their brains, which,
in turn, could be estimated by measuring the shape and size of their skulls.
As one commentator put it, “[l]inking personality and character traits to skull
shape represented the very best thinking in nineteenth-century neuro-
anatomy,”28 and it eventually “dominated nineteenth-century anthropology.”29
Prominent Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who linked genetic expla-
nations of criminality with evolutionary doctrine, argued that criminals were
evolutionary throwbacks whose “atavistic traits” were embodied in their
physical characteristics. He termed these “stigmata” and used them as the
basis for diagnosing criminal defendants and making judgments about them
for use in criminal trials.30
Psychologists and others in the United States were much enamored of
Lombroso’s ideas about the biological and evolutionary origins of criminality.31
Some thought that the practical import of this theory was that it promised
legal authorities a “scientific” way of deciding who was, in fact, a criminal. As
a criminological colleague of Lombroso’s, Enrico Ferri, wrote: “A study of the
anthropological factors of crime provides the guardians and administrators
of the law with new and more certain methods in the detection of the
guilty.”32
 Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 25

Craniometry gradually transformed from an initial emphasis on skull

size to a seemingly more nuanced focus on its shape and was eventually
replaced—at least in popularity and practical application—by something
called phrenology. Phrenologists believed that “character and intellect . . .
were simply the sum of the combined functions of the organs of the brain.
Character was the brain.”33 From this they reasoned that the external features
of the skull revealed underlying truths about the size and organization of a
person’s brain and, therefore, his personality.34 Thus, one “could make a fairly
accurate character analysis by studying the shape of a subject’s head.”35
Phrenology was especially influential and widely embraced in the middle
of the 19th century. As one historian put it, in the 1830s, it not only had a
“bright future” as a budding science, with many deeply committed devotees,
but it also “claimed to be more than an esoteric science—it represented itself
as a social philosophy and popular movement as well.”36 There were “traveling”
phrenologists and “phrenologists of the studio” who popularized these ideas
by giving “individual character readings” for a fee, “purport[ing] to explain
each man to himself—his virtues and vices, his potentialities, and limitations,
how he could improve himself . . .”37—all contained within the contours of
his skull.
Phrenology also had a significant role in the treatment of “insanity,” which
had been previously conceptualized as something akin to spiritual or demonic
possession, and was correspondingly treated with what were often barbaric
methods. In contrast, phrenologists assumed that “the brain was the organ of
mind, and following the analogy of natures, therefore a diseased condition of
the mind, i.e., insanity, indicated a diseased brain.”38 They argued that patients
suffering these maladies should be treated in much more benign and caring
ways.39 For a time, at least, “phrenology as psychiatric theory had a profound
influence on the conduct of American insane asylums.”40
Phrenologists believed that criminal behavior “resulted from a pathological
imbalance in the same cerebral faculties which . . . produced law-abiding
conduct in more normal persons.”41 Commentators were optimistic that
advances in phrenology could shine a “flood of light upon the whole subject
of crime and prison discipline.”42 Editors of the American Journal of Insanity
commented very approvingly on the newly established Prison Discipline Jour-
nal and encouraged the new journal’s editors not to overlook “the practical
excellence” of the principles of phrenology in developing ways to improve
how the nation’s prisons were run.43 Criminals were thought to be relatively
easy for phrenologists to identify and classify because they “were likely to
have a ‘ruffian head,’ with little frontal area but prominence in the posterior
regions of the skull.”44 Moreover, “[b]y spotting which propensities were
particularly well developed”—as manifested in the size of the protuberances
on someone’s skull—“one might even be able to pinpoint the exact offense a
given person was likely to commit.”45
Although phrenology was said to have eventually “died a pauper’s death
in the late nineteenth century,”46 its prominence through much of that century
26 Criminality in Context

reflected the core belief that the causes of a person’s behavior resided entirely
inside them. Its influence on establishing what eventually became the dis-
cipline of psychology is difficult to overestimate. Indeed, Edward Boring’s
definitive early history of the field suggested that “scientific psychology was
born of phrenology, out of wedlock with science.”47 Similarly, one of the
founders of phrenology, Franz Gall, was also called “the father of psychology,” as
well as “the pioneer who foreshadowed the coming of modern criminology.”48
The next iteration of these pseudoscientific theories—eugenics—was by
far the most socially and politically influential. Despite the prestigious and
widespread scientific backing that it received, eugenics was in many ways less
precise than either craniometry or phrenology and did not lend itself as easily
to measurable, definitive disproof. This fact may have accounted for both its
impact and longevity, which greatly exceeded its two pseudoscientific pre-
decessors. Eugenics was first proposed in the 1880s by Francis Galton as an
outgrowth of his devotion to perfecting ways of measuring individual differ-
ences between people and the near religious fervor with which he approached
the goal of improving “mankind” by reproducing its “superior” members.
Galton believed that human “talent and character” were not only inherited
but also could be manipulated at a group or national level through reproductive
control—selective breeding and sterilization.49 By the latter part of the
19th century, eugenics was seen as a way of addressing “supposedly inherited
forms of ‘degeneracy’ including pauperism, criminality, feeblemindedness,
insanity, and homosexuality.”50 These ideas continued to influence public and
legal policy well into the 20th century.
Although eugenics thinking did not gain full popularity and respectability
in the United States until late in the 19th century, the groundwork for its
influence on the crime master narrative was laid in the 1870s by an extremely
influential study published on a supposedly “degenerate” extended family of
alleged criminals—the “Jukes.” Its author, Richard Dugdale, was inspired to
begin his research when, while working as a “volunteer inspector” for the
New York Prison Association, he encountered what he thought was an
unusually large number of jail inmates who appeared to come from the same
family. Despite the subjectivity of his approach, Dugdale’s book was cited
repeatedly as “proof” of the genetic basis of criminality.51 Although Dugdale’s
own thinking was far more nuanced and gave much credence to the import-
ant role that social conditions played in producing life outcomes, by the end
of the century, his book was being used to support the assertion that the crim-
inal “breeds criminals; the taint is in the blood and there is no royal touch
which can expel it.”52
This narrow brand of genetic determinism was seemingly buttressed by
an alleged “follow-up” to Dugdale’s original study, conducted several decades
later by eugenics worker Arthur Estabrook. Using a host of ill-defined
and value-laden terms (e.g., “ignorant harlots”) to describe the surviving
members and offspring of the original group that Dugdale had studied, and
that Estabrook claimed to have personally interviewed,53 he reported that his
 Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 27

findings “confirmed” the earlier eugenics conclusions that Dugdale’s work

had been used to support. He asserted more broadly that it would be a “great
mistake” for social agencies to ever overlook “the importance of heredity”
in response to socially problematic behavior.
Estabrook argued that crime in particular was rampant in certain families
because of their biological makeup.54 He also claimed that imprisonment
was destined to fail because “the eradication of criminality in defective stocks
depends on the elimination of mental deficiency.”55 Estabrook offered “two
practical solutions” to this problem—what he called “permanent custodial care”
(in essence, a lifetime of incarceration) and the “sterilization of those whose
germ plasm contains the defects which society wishes to eliminate.”56
However flawed the underlying science, Estabrook’s ideas about scourge of
“defective stocks” and its role in criminality were widely shared by many of
the 19th- and early 20th-century’s most prominent intellectuals, as well as
being popular with the public at large. Among the notable intellectual propo-
nents of these theories was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a well-respected man
of letters and a professor of medicine at Harvard who also was the father of U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Like many of his contempo-
raries, the elder Holmes subscribed to a genetic theory of criminal behavior. For
example, in one article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, he asked rhetorically,
“Why should not deep-rooted moral defects and obliquities show themselves,
as well as other qualities, in the descendants of moral monsters?”57
Notwithstanding recognition in some quarters of the role that poverty
and other social conditions might play in the etiology of criminal behavior,
eugenics played directly into the tendency to focus entirely on individuals as
responsible for wrongdoing and to ignore or discount the circumstances that
contributed to their actions. Individualistic responses to crime—imprisonment
was primary among them—were readily at hand. Eugenics not only provided
a pseudoscientific rationale for incarcerating “defective” criminals but also
provided the basis for even more drastic interventions. Concern over habitual
criminals and “other degenerate classes of humanity”58 led to the passage of a
number of laws providing for the involuntary sterilization of persons regarded
as “unfit.”59 One physician advocate urged the passage of sterilization laws
in response to a “startling increase of crime, especially in our large centers of
population, by men of inborn criminal tendencies.” 60 The first of such laws
was passed in Indiana in the early 1900s61 and many other states followed
suit. By the mid-1930s, some 28 states had legal provisions for the “eugenical
sterilization” of criminals and others.62
Indeed, no less a figure than the highly respected Harvard criminologist
Sheldon Glueck matter-of-factly endorsed so-called defective delinquent
statutes in the 1920s. He touted the laws’ capacity to facilitate the early
identification of persons who suffered from what he termed “constitutionally
psychopathic inferiority.”63 In the name of “public protection,” he endorsed
keeping them in special institutions for “a wholly indeterminate period which
may amount to life incarceration.”64
28 Criminality in Context

Of course, the eugenics narrative was not always advanced in such

unqualified terms. In fact, there were many turn-of-the-century critics who
outright rejected it as an explanation of criminal behavior. David Rothman
noted that, during what was known as the “Progressive Era” in American
history (i.e., the end of the 19th and the opening decades of the 20th century),
“[t]here was no single all-embracing explanation that dominated professional
or lay thought” with respect to the causes of criminal behavior.65 Indeed,
many Progressive reformers firmly believed that environmental influences
contributed to crime and deviance. Yet most of these same reformers were
committed to an individual-centered treatment model. That is, “all of them
endorsed a case-by-case approach,” in which they sought to “understand the
facts of each offender’s life history” so that they could use diagnosis as the basis
for prescribing a cure.66 By the late 1920s, practice had come to dominate
theory. That is, “an interpretation that emphasized psychological over envi-
ronmental considerations” was used to explain criminality.67 It was one that
“looked more closely to the mental state than the social circumstances of the
offender.”68 And, more often than not, explaining the “mental state . . . of the
offender” led to an analysis of its eugenics origins.
In fact, eugenics remained widely popular among members of the public
well into the 20th century and continued to be regarded as a legitimate
“science” in academic circles. Its status as supposedly settled scientific doctrine
was legally acknowledged in a landmark 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case.69
Some 50 years after his father had written approvingly of eugenics interpreta-
tions of crime, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned an infamous majority
opinion in what would become one of the Court’s most notorious decisions,
Buck v. Bell. In his Buck opinion, Justice Holmes authorized the sterilization
of an allegedly genetically unfit mother, Carrie Buck. His pronouncement in
the case, that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,”70 was entirely con-
sistent with his father’s earlier views and with the eugenics-dominated
spirit of the times.
At the time Buck was decided, the eugenics ideas on which the opinion was
largely based were still widely embraced. Victoria Nourse noted that
By 1928, over 375 American universities and colleges taught courses in eugenics,
as many as 20,000 students took these courses, and 70 percent of high school
biology textbooks endorsed eugenics in some form. America was not alone;
eugenics was a worldwide phenomenon, stretching from Canada to Denmark,
and Sweden and beyond.71

As late as the 1930s, eugenics continued to garner “a large and diverse

political following” that included members of “Junior Leagues and school
principals and the Kiwanis to prohibitionists and birth control advocates
and anti-miscegenationists.”72 Buck was decided in 1927 and would not be
repudiated by the Court until its Oklahoma v. Skinner decision in 1942.73
In fact, a Yale Law Review article published the same year that Skinner was
decided acknowledged that “sterilization operations under compulsory states
laws have been increasing rapidly,” motivated in part by the desire to advance
 Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 29

“[e]ugenic aims” as well as “reducing public welfare costs and punishing

crime.”74 This large and diverse support continued at least until the advent of
World War II, when the specter of Nazism and ominous implications of the
pursuit of racial purity were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.75
The final variation in embodied individualism emerged near the end of
the 19th century and remained influential well into the 20th. Instinct theory
purportedly explained how the “germ stock” about which eugenicists were
so concerned manifested itself in the psychological make-up of individuals—
in the form of innate traits or instincts that accounted for their behavioral
tendencies. Although it had been mentioned by a number of late 19th-century
writers, including the most prominent figure in the emerging discipline of
academic psychology, William James, instinct theory was most closely asso-
ciated with early 20th-century psychologist William McDougall, through
whose efforts it became wildly popular well into the 1930s.
McDougall, who was described by his contemporaries as having “made in
total as great a contribution to the science as any living psychologist”76 and
in historical accounts after his death as one of the “titans in psychology,”77
achieved his academic reputation largely on the basis of a best-selling text-
book, An Introduction to Social Psychology.78 First published in 1908, the book
appears to have gone through more editions than any other psychology text
in the first half of the 20th century. Its popularity helped account for the
fact that instinct theory “spread like wildfire” after the book was published.79
In it, McDougall defined instincts as “certain innate or inherited tendencies”
that he confidently asserted served as the basis of “all thought and action,
whether individual or collective and from which the character and will of
individuals and nations are gradually developed.”80 In the self-congratulatory
preface he wrote to the 23rd edition of the book, published in 1936, McDougall
claimed that other schools of psychology were finally “converging” on his
ideas. He predicted that someday instinct theory would not only serve as one of
the “main pillars of psychology” but also be recognized as “the indispensable
basis of all the social sciences.”81
By that time, McDougall had tied instinct theory explicitly to eugenics and
used it as the basis for a host of racially and politically controversial claims.
Although the vagueness and circularity of the theory eventually led to its
downfall in scientific psychology, the psychological individualism nested within
eugenics and instinct theory, as well as in their precursor pseudosciences,
craniometry and phrenology—the metamessage that the causes of behavior
resided entirely in the internal makeup of the persons who engaged in it—was
never definitively abandoned. Neither were the basic biological and genetic
assumptions on which it was based.
These pseudoscientific theories and the popular representations of crimi-
nality they generated played a significant role in shaping legal doctrines and
criminal justice policies and practices. The 19th century has been termed
the “formative era” of American law.82 It was also the era of laissez-faire
capitalism, a flourishing Protestant ethic, and a time when the cultural ethos
30 Criminality in Context

was dominated by the “myth of rugged individualism.” As one legal historian

observed, the “hero of the common law was the property-owning, liberty-
loving, self-reliant, reasonable man. He was also the hero of American society,
celebrated by Jefferson as the freehold farmer, by Hamilton as the town
merchant, by Jackson as the frontiersman.”83 He was celebrated as well by
American social scientists whose disciplines were in the midst of their own
formative era. By the time professional social scientists had perceived and
articulated new models of behavior—particularly ones premised on a com-
peting paradigm of “interdependence” that acknowledged the importance of
social history and context,84 psychological individualism had been crystallized
into long-lasting legal doctrines and practices. It also served as the intellectual
basis for powerful legal institutions and represented the more or less intrac-
table assumptions that the general public routinely made about crime and
punishment.

PSYCHOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM AND

THE CRIME MASTER NARRATIVE IN MODERN TIMES

This brief history of the nation’s commitment to the belief that the causes of
behavior reside inside the persons who engage in it underscores its deep
cultural and intellectual embeddedness. It helps to explain why contemporary
variations of this form of individualism continue to serve as the foundation of
the persistent crime master narrative. These individualistic assumptions still
pervade the general public’s views on crime and punishment, and aspects of
the crime master narrative are still structured into a myriad of legal and
criminal justice practices and policies. As I say, the same 19th century in
which this embodied individualism flourished was the era in which many
basic criminal law doctrines were codified and legal institutions were estab-
lished—ones that persist in recognizable form to present times. Moreover,
recognizable forms of the embodied individualism that was so prominent
then abound now in traditional psychological writing, in much conventional
religious doctrine, appear in numerous judicial opinions and scholarly legal
commentaries, and are conspicuously featured in most media representations
of criminal behavior.
For example, setting aside McDougall’s eugenics-based extremism and the
overtly racist policies to which it led, his basic belief in “innate propensities”
and overall focus on “the nature and extent of the innate basis of mental life”
as a causal explanation for the full range of individual and social behavior are
not far afield from what arguably served, until relatively recently, as main-
stream thinking in much of scientific psychology.85 Compare McDougall’s
views with what social psychologist Hazel Markus described as the operative
model of behavior that dominated both academic and lay psychology—what
she termed the “independent model of the person.” This model held that

The person is the primary source and center of all thought, feeling and action.
Agency resides within the person; it comes from internal states, capacities,
 Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative 31

motivations, and dispositions. From the perspective of this “it’s what’s inside
that counts” model, people are self-determining, self-motivating, and morally
responsible for their own actions. Normatively good actions originate in an
independent, bounded, autonomous self and are separate or distinct from the
thoughts and feelings of others.86

As Markus lamented, however, because the model assumed that the individual
was “the source of all thought, feeling, and action,” it not only led “researchers
and people alike to look deep inside individual minds for sources of thought
and action” but also led them “to ignore or even deny the influences of the
social world.”87
This individualistic model that sees the person as “the primary source and
center of all thought, feeling and action” not only dominated conventional
psychological thinking until relatively recently but remained influential in
other social science disciplines as well. For example, Lawrence Bobo and
Vincent Hutchings described its sway over prevailing analyses of the causes of
social and economic inequality:
The dominant stratification ideology in the United States holds that opportunities
are plentiful and that individuals succeed or fail largely on the basis of their
own efforts and talents. As a result, inequality of valued social outcomes is seen
as not only fair, but necessary because of differential effort and ability. . . .
Accordingly, individuals obtain valued social outcomes by dint of their individual
qualities.88

As perhaps might be expected, there are a number of religious denomina-

tions whose core teachings about good and evil are premised explicitly on a
free will model of behavior and that, therefore, serve as strong affirmations of
psychological individualism and, by implication, the crime master narrative.
For example, as an article in the United Church of God publication, The Good
News: A Magazine of Understanding, concisely explained, although some aca-
demics may offer “many rationalizations for why society is plagued with
crime” and some tend to blame “poverty, dysfunctional families, poor parenting
and the like,” these social ills are “not the fundamental cause.”89 Instead, church
doctrine teaches that “crime is a personal choice.”90 That is, “[w]e all have free-
dom to weigh courses of actions, to consider the consequences, to make and
follow through on decisions.”91
However central psychological individualism and the crime master narra-
tive have been to certain academic disciplines and particular religious doc-
trines, they are positively enshrined in American law and in the operating
assumptions of the nation’s criminal justice institutions. Thus, numerous judi-
cial opinions have acknowledged psychological individualism, “free will,” and
the crime master narrative as the bedrock of American jurisprudence. As the
U.S. Supreme Court wrote in a 1952 opinion, “belief in freedom of the will
and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between
good and evil” are not only widely accepted views but actually “universal
and persistent in mature systems of law.”92 The Court elaborated by providing
some historical context: “Crime, as a compound concept, generally constituted
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wants her baby—though she be, besides, a thief or a traitor or a
weakling or a murderer or a harlot or a drunkard or a fool.
Let them come, the ten million. The chrysalid children are
clamoring, clamoring always for their birth: a wide ‘melody
unheard.’
But my Child will never drop over the edge to any woman but me.
She calls with veiled and dazzling flames of eagerness for her
Birthday: but she will await my made-readiness through a long
night, though it should last till the day-break of another age. Dimly
I weep for her, my needing-me Child. I weep that she must come
to this richly-cursed me. But I weep more that I have not got her in
this sterile now, where is flawed passionate wealth of intangible
life-stuff: but no small round wilful head of hair to wash: no little
fellow’s feet on December flagstones and sweet dragging at my
skirt: no soft pink-baby hunger—
It is hunger I feel from her. I feel her always hungry where she is
and I can give her no nourishing—no warming food in all my
strange unfertile passing life!
It is that less than my empty arms that makes blurred unrests and
writhings in my Dreaming Womb.
A right shape and size

To-morrow

S
OMETIMES I fancy me married—a responsible wife, a
housekeeping matron: with my window-sills full of potted
plants.
I have a woman quality which seems uxoresque: I am someway a
Right Shape and Size to be somebody’s wife. My bodily and astral
dimensions have outlines apparently suitable for something in the
married-woman way.
The wild piquance of being myself—who but for extreme saneness
would be mad—rises up and smashes that concept.
But being a Right Shape and Size I involuntarily imagine it.
Fleetingly I imagine a flat in the West Seventies in New York, or a
bungalow on the Jersey side, or a middle-sized house in a middle-
sized town in Middle-West Illinois—whichever might happen—with
me set marriedly down in the midst of it like a suitable maggot in a
suitable nut. Suitableness, diametrically opposed to Romance, is its
keynote.
I fancy me walking about my married house mornings after
breakfast in a neat linen dress and high-heeled satin slippers:
snipping dead leaves off my window-sill plants, dusting bits of
porcelain, giving my maid some tame household directions. My
Body looks slender and supple and newly-married and in-the-
drawing in the linen house-dress. The geometric gods regard me
with immense satisfaction as being an exact proved theorem. I go
to the telephone to order some Little Neck clams and some
vermouth cocktails for dinner, and a roast and some Brussels
sprouts and the assemblings of a salad: and in it I am ingrainedly
domestic, dreadfully useful, a strong pillar of the vast good nice
world.
Afternoons I go out to a modiste’s to fit a gown, or to a mild
bridge-party along with other suitable women, or to a matinée with
a suitable neighbor.
Everything is perfectly right in my insides and in my thoughts: my
thoughts run in little troughs in which there is no leakage or
deviation, thoughts of a dreadful niceness, thoughts which ever
presuppose potted plants on my window-sills.
Evenings I go out with my husband, or sit around with my
husband, or take leave of him for a few hours at the hall door.
My husband would be the sort of man that is called a Good Scout.
And he would have married me not for my wistfulness or
wickedness or weirdness but for that I am a proper Shape and Size,
with a smooth proper covering of flesh, to make a suitable sizable
wife. And he would be a heavy grappling anchor to hold me fast in
an ocean of domesticness.
Men of the genus Good Scout are all fiercely alike. All women, no
matter what their genus, are exceptions to the rule. But men—rich
men, poor men, beggar-men, thieves: so only they are Good
Scouts—are of marvelous sameness. It comes from the want of
minute lifelong pinpricking care of petticoats and potted plants—a
detailed intensely personal sort of pain which touches dull solid
tones of individuality with vivid various spots of color.
Men are made in ‘job lots’ like their own cravats. Their cravats will
differ in texture and color and quality and price. But each one is
innately necktie. Use it as a garter or a tourniquet or a strangler’s
noose: it still is a man’s deadly necktie. Its use may be ruined but
its necktique is deathless. Except poets—and perhaps scientists—
men are themselves like that. They cannot get away from the
Adam. Nor can women get away from the Eve. But Eve was not a
type but a somewhat pleasant human ensemble. While Adam was a
type and a sufficiently nasty one: a rotter and a welcher: doubtless
the Good Scout type of his day.
A Good Scout is the sort of man who if a woman trusts him with
one one-hundredth of her heart will take the whole heart and twist
and batter it: and read the paper and smoke his pipe and pay the
bills: serenely unaware.
Which is beside the point in this. For in this image all my
marriedness is a thing of outer Shape and Size and Suitableness.
The odd but natural sequence is that I make an excellent wife.
Excellent is the word. I keep a neat house with no dust left in the
corners and no dead leaves on the potted plants. My husband is
well looked after as to breakfasts and dinners and bodily comfort,
and I am rigidly square with him and chastely true to him.
If, some dinnertime, as I sit opposite him in a soft pretty chiffon
gown, my secret thoughts overflow their troughs and I passionately
forget the potted plants and the window-sills and want horribly to
rise up and bloodily murder my husband for being such a Good
Scout: that would be a genuinely powerless matter, a cobweb trifle,
compared with my actual potent Shape and Size which are so
suitable for a wife.
I make truly and simply an excellent wife.
—by God and my Soul-and-bones! it would be honester, finer,
sweeter—more comfortable to be the dirty beggar-woman in the
wet slippery streets—
But it’s facilely fancied because I am of Right Dimensions to be
some Good Scout’s wife.
A curious subtly pitfalled world: in it my Shape and Size, and my
Weight which is also Right, could betray me into being an excellent
wife: and by that a lying chattel, an inexpressibly damaged woman.
Ice-water, corrosive acid and human breath

To-morrow

I
HAVE love for two towns. One is this Butte that I tiredly love
inside me. And the other is New York that I smoothly love with
all my surfaces.
It is some years—a little lump of years—since I have seen
New York: and it is two thousand miles away. So I see and feel its
hard sweet lurid magnetism now ten times sharper than when I
lived in it. But I felt it sudden and sharp at every turn then. A
surface emotion which hits one’s flesh and spreads wide over one’s
area is more exciting than a spirit emotion which pierces inward at
one tiny point: an ice shower-bath on the white skin is more
anguishing than an ice-water drink down the red throat. The spirit
emotion lives longer and works more damage and buries itself at
last in proud shaded soul-reserves. The surface emotion stays
always on the surface and lives actively in the front of one’s senses
and musings.
The feel of New York is a mixture of ice-water, a corrosive acid and
human breath sweeping someway warmish against one’s flesh.
It is immensely ungentle, New York: immensely human: immensely
intriguing to all one’s selves. It is too big to have prejudices and
traditions of locality: so it leaves its dwellers free, by ones and
multitudes, to be human beings.
In South Bend and Toledo and Beloit and St. Paul and all the tight-
built inland towns they murder you with narrowness and harshness
and rancorous ill-will: they are scowlingly annoyed with you for
making them murder you.
In New York they murder you with a large soft wave of indifferent
insolence—no annoyance, no friction. New York eats you as it eats
its dinner, rather liking you.
And my love for New York is made of liking: a plaisance of liking.
made of liking: a plaisance of liking.
I like New York with a charmed restfulness for varied things in it:
subways, and Fourth Avenue, and the River, and Fifth Avenue on a
sunny October afternoon, and the statue of Nathan Hale, and old
cockroachy downtown buildings, and the soft rich whelming creamy
boiling-chocolate fragrance from the Huyler factory in Irving Place.
And mostly I like it for the people in it—People—Persons—People:
they are human beings.
In the inland towns people are half-afraid of thoughts, half-afraid of
spoken words, half-afraid of each other, half-afraid of the fact of
being human.
In New York they are not afraid of any humanness. Even when they
are in themselves craven-cowardly, cowardly enough to turn their
own stomachs, they still turn their humanness unfearfully face-
outward like upturned faces of a pack of cards.
An Italian organ-grinder grinding out his loud fierce music in a long
deep New York side-street is a human organ-grinder: he bestows
his rasped melody widely on everybody in ear-shot, not individually
—since all around him is a spreading world of strangers—but
jointly. So it feels-like.
A beggar-woman at a subway-entrance with a whine and a dirty
face and the deadly black cape and chicken-coopish beggar-odor is
a human beggar-woman. She throws out an inner savor of herself
like a soiled aura on all collectively who pass her. Each-and-all of
New York by tolerating and owning her partakes of her mean
human essence.
A stout-hearted worn-bodied Jew factory girl working at a hard
greasy little machine day after day gives all New York her bit of
young virtue which is hardy and heroic and unaware: the whole
Island of looseness and vice has an equal gift of impregnable
surprising sordid purity thriving on sixes and sevens of poor dollars-
a-week.
All of it is because New York is one Large Condition made of human
breaths and the worn scrapings of tired Youth rather than one large
town made of individuals and stone houses.
And in that is an odd enchantment for me who am born and grown
in the places of Half-fear with an old isolated whole fear always on
me.
In New York I am a partaker of that smooth manna of humanness
as I am of the air and the sunshine and the little black specks of
coal-soot: partly from choice, partly willy-nilly, partly in the
sweeping unanalyzable pell-mell-ness of massed human nature.
And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human
friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for
I don’t like actual human beings too much around me. But yet
friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and
pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire.
It is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of an
afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and
women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a
dress of thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish
fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a
Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and
heart both of which are made of steel, sparkle and the very plain
red meat of living. She says, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’ and clasps my
hand, and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all but
suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet
call of depth to depth, and of friendship which by mere force of
preference and of our separate quality and calibre is true rather
than false. So close and no closer may friendship be. And
friendship, with-all, is closer than any love. It is the closest human
beings ever come to meeting.
In a New York doorway I, made in broad loneliness of self, get
suddenly companion-warmed at the little pleasant twisted fire of
someone else.
It might be so in some other town, even Beloit, but it feels only like
New York to me.
I go in the room where the others are and they say, ‘Hello-Mary-
Mac-Lane,’ and I drink some tea and listen and talk in fragments of
half-meanings. And I get warmed and half-warmed and cooled and
slightly scorched in the easeful unevenly-heated humanness of the
women and men sitting around.
In the inland towns they throw their thoughts and ideas at you at
tea-time, inland thoughts and ideas, which hit you and then drop
off like little pebbles and nuts and hard green apples.
In New York they throw those things in the form of long ribbons,
heated from being worn next their skin, which fly out and wrap
around your skin: pleasantly or foolishly or fancifully.
The point of it is that nobody is afraid of that.
It is nothing fulfilling, nothing satisfying. It is merely human. It is
half-lyric.
It reassures me as a person: it makes me feel human in all my
surfaces.
Which are harder to humanize, in everybody, than any deepest
deeps.
And it is therefore with all my surfaces, smoothly and restfully, I
love New York.
Rhythm

To-morrow

N
OW and again I think I catch some truth by the sweat of its
Rhythm.
Often I read the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and
feel their truth in the blood-sweating tune of their Rhythm—
Rhythm unspeakable and ecstatic.
The prophet Christ believed himself divine and was all Rhythm in
his utterances: and so sounds true as the scheme of digestion and
the laws of hygiene.
He said, Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Everybody who has tried it knows that to be true with the flawless
Rhythmic truth of health and illness.
Mourn frightfully a day and the next day will be a day of soothed
warmth and quiet like a grateful pitiful heat current in the breast.
Mourn a week and that will come the week following. Mourn a year
and the next year will be the year of peace. For anguish: peace. For
peace: anguish. It never fails.
The great thing lacking in Christ, the sense of humor, permitted his
perfect personal Rhythm. Humor oddly wants Rhythm. The human
race is made in Rhythm like its beating heart: but humor is an
‘extra.’ Everybody is so full of lies that humor, an ‘extra,’ always
wonderfully appetizing and out of season, and inexplicably God-
given, feels like a great keystone of the race. So it is: but in a lying
race. And Christ in his beautiful dual rôle would lack humor. As a
God come among the human race to save it, knowing it as he did:
his measureless worldly wisdom being paramount even to his
gentleness: his mind and his personal tenor could be set only in
intense terrific gloom.
The Rhythm in the Beatitudes is equal Rhythm of sense and
Rhythm of sound: Rhythm of music and Rhythm of meaning.
Equally, half and half.
The most Rhythm thing in it is: Blessed are the pure in heart: for
they shall see God.
I feel it soft-prickling just under my skin. Rhythm—Rhythm and
ecstasy!
I have read it many times since I was a child: till I know it in my
brain, in my Soul, in my hands, in my breast, in my throat, in my
forehead, in my gray eyes, in my aching left foot. I know it and feel
it by its Rhythm. There is barbarous justice in it. It cuts everybody
off from seeing God.
Pure in heart I take to mean pure in motive. A fool has an equal
chance with a philosopher: a harlot with a horse-thief: a nasty rag-
picker with a small sweet child. But none is pure in motive.
Of other persons I don’t judge. But me I know to be murderously
un-pure of heart.
If I could open a window or unlock a door with only the simple
mechanical motive in the act— But I can’t. There’s a romantic
impurity in even the look of my hand as it touches the window-sash
or the door-key. There’s a pervasive delicate infusion of impure
motive all over me, Soul and bones, as I perform the act. It is one
curse in the Necklace which God himself bestowed on me so long
ago.
It is not my fault that I am un-pure in heart.
And it is not God’s. It is a comfort to me that I can reason out that
it is not God’s fault. He knew I needed the Necklace and each blue-
green stone in it to rhyme and balance me. In the wide
surprisingness of the universe everything will be rhymed and
balanced. In me, being savagely complex, that balancing took a bit
of doing: hence my unusual Necklace. It comforts me that I can
reach that analytic point. It leaves me a lightning conviction that
God is worth seeing.
And if a day dawns for me when I can open a door with no ulterior
motive: thinking only of the door and the fine small muscular
power of smooth hand and supple wrist given me to open it:
thinking only that I want to get the door open: then back of that
door I know I shall see God!
It is so written in that barbarous blood-sweating worldly Rhythm on
the Mount.
A prayer-feeling

To-day

S
O it is finished: and I have oddly Failed.
I have slyly Succeeded and oddly Failed in equal degree.
I have Failed because I am too cowardly and too weak and too
dishonest to write certain bruised and self-accusing places in my
Soul and in my Heart and in my Mind which rightly come in the
scope of this: there are the Stern and Delicate Voices one closes
one’s ears against: there are the starry grimy Actualities one drops
from one’s hands: there are the Thoughts one Does Not Think. Yet
and yet: they too are in it, hanging cobweb-ish on my wordings
and colons.
It is not a strong tale, and that is very well. This book is less I-
written than it is I-myself. And Just Beneath The Skin no person is
strong: not Theodore Roosevelt, true fearless American: not
Bonaparte, splendid tyrant: not Joan of Arc, titanic martyr. They are
strong in their depths and strong on the outside. So are many
others. So am I, I think. But just under the skin all who are human
are roundly weak.
Roundly weak, every one.
And with that, in my case, False.
This primarily is the picture of one who is made-False: False from
her fingertips to her innermost concept.
It is belike because of that that this, as itself, oddly Fails.
It is as if I have made a portrait not of Me, but of a Room I have
just quitted. My Gloves are left on a chair: my Hat is left on a
couch: my taken-off Shoes are left on the floor: my faint-smelling
Handkerchief is dropped by the door: my round ribboned Garter is
hanging on the door-knob: my Breath is in the air: my Grief is on
the walls clinging like smoke: my flat Despair is on the petunia-
leaves in the window: my fragrant Horridness lingers in the
curtains. I am not there! But I—I have just Quitted that Room!—
Therein I have slyly Succeeded.

My feeling at my book’s-end is a prayer-feeling, both frantic and

quiet: God have mercy on me! but not unless you want to.
And I feel barbarous and utterly solitary, solitary from here to
Jericho, solitary from here to the cool stars.
There comes off the grim gray east hills a soft whelming taste of
Sunset, bloody and full of human marrows.
And I feel a need of great Pain or great Sin to make and break me,
Soul and bones.
 Transcriber’s Notes

Contents was added for the reader’s convenience.

As the first lines of the paragraphs in the original are not indented, in some cases the
presence of a paragraph break is not entirely certain. In such cases, insertion of
paragraph breaks was determined according to the structure and content of the
surrounding text. Page images of the original are available at the Internet Archive:
American Libraries (http://archive.org/details/imarymclanediary00macl).
Except for the following changes, spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been
preserved as printed in the original.
Page 43, comma after “were my husband’s” was deleted.
Page 59, “ecstasy” was changed from “esctasy”.
Page 64, “I’d ’a’” was changed from “I’d’ a’”.
Page 82, a period was added after “bastard lacy valentines”.
Page 96, “Cornwallis” was changed from “Corwallis”.
Page 138, “calefacient” was changed from “calefaciant”.
Page 142, “listlessly” was changed from “listessly”.
Page 160, “four-and-twenty” was changed from “four-and twenty”.
Page 169, “arresting ruination” was changed from “arrest ingruination”.
Page 174, “patrician” was changed from “partrician”.
Page 175, “Mérimée” was changed from “Merimée”.
Page 194, a period was added after “remembrance of myself”.
Page 205, “of” was changed from “if”.
Page 217, “Soul” was changed from “soul”.
Page 227, “philosophers” was changed from “philosphers”.
Page 237, an em dash was added before “I keep on”.
Page 256, “or” was changed from “of”.
Page 276, “highly” was changed from “hightly”.
Page 294, a closing single quotation mark was added after “are sweeter”.
Page 300, a comma was added after “little fellow cries”.
Page 306, “opposite” was changed from “spposite”.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK I, MARY MACLANE:
A DIARY OF HUMAN DAYS ***

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