Eugenics and the Carceral State: Progressive-Era Reform and the Creation of the Modern Criminal Justice System

“The modern American criminal justice system emerged not simply from Progressive-Era reform, but from the intertwined projects of eugenics, psychiatry, and legal modernism. Drawing upon archival, historical, and doctrinal sources, this Article reveals how early twentieth-century reformers—including judges, criminologists, and social scientists—recast criminal law as a mechanism for identifying and controlling hereditary “defect.” Under the guise of scientific progress, the Progressive movement fused eugenic ideology with judicial administration, creating psychopathic laboratories, municipal courts, and indeterminate sentencing regimes that classified defendants by biological “fitness.” These reforms, presented as rational and humanitarian, in fact legitimized a coercive system of confinement and segregation that targeted the poor, the disabled, racial minorities, and other populations deemed “unfit.” By tracing this genealogy, the Article exposes how Progressive Era faith in scientific governance entrenched a lasting logic of heredity within the criminal system—one that still informs contemporary practices of risk assessment, punishment, and social control. In recovering the eugenic origins of our carceral state, the Article challenges the myth of Progressive Era benevolence, calling for a critical reexamination of how modern criminal justice continues to reproduce the hierarchies of the past.”