Biocriminology as a Racial Project? Revisiting Biology, Crime, and Race in the 21st Century

• In Event: 497 - Regular Session. Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

At some point, nearly every US criminological perspective has wrestled with the inescapable question of what to do with race. Historically, biological based criminological theories have been regarded as some of the more controversial explanations of crime and/or violent and aggressive behaviors (VAB), but many of these accounts were also heavily criticized due to explicit racist and sexist interpretations of such behaviors. Today, contemporary researchers using novel neuroimaging and genetic technologies have attempted to eschew biocriminology’s associations with biological determinism and racism, arguing that the production of contemporary bio-knowledges of VAB resist and even denounce such deplorable practices of the past. How should we think about and evaluate the knowledge claims and possible applications of contemporary biocriminology? How have today’s biological theories of VAB challenged, and or moved past, its marred history? And, in what “new” ways have these scientific practices and biotechnologies engaged with and/or attempted to address the ‘question of race’?

Using contemporary racial theory as a conceptual backdrop, I start to situate current and trace future racial potentialities of contemporary biocriminology. Specifically, this paper aims to 1) describe the linkages and divergences between past biocriminology and contemporary biomedical and technoscientific accounts of VAB, and 2) provide an analysis of the continued significance of race in relation to the production and uses biocriminological knowledge. Thus, this paper offers an understanding of the potentials for contemporary biocriminology to create, disrupt, and/or reinforce racialized discourses and/or future racial imaginaries pertaining to crime and violence.

Author

• Oliver E. Rollins, University of Pennsylvania