Nicole Rafter

Chase Burton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367547394
• eBook ISBN: 9781000467949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a critical summary and exegesis of the work of Nicole Rafter, who was a leading scholar of the history of biological theories of crime causation as well as a profound theorist of the role of history within criminology. It introduces Rafter's key works and assesses her contributions to the fields of feminist criminology, cultural criminology, visual criminology and historical criminology. It also explores her theorization of criminology's identity, scientific status, and possible futures.

While many books on criminological theory explain and historically contextualize theory, they do not interrogate the production of theory or the epistemological assumptions behind it. Drawing on the world of Nicole Rafter, this book offers an accessible handbook to her extensive historical studies and to how her work demonstrated the importance of historical theory to criminological knowledge. Furthermore, the author brings Rafter's historical research to life and shows how it speaks to contemporary issues in criminology and punishment.

Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminological theory, intellectual history, sociology, comparative criminology, and feminist criminology.

Chapter 1

An introduction to Nicole Rafter

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090380-1

Relatively little stands out in the bleary-eyed haze that is my memory of graduate school, but there are a few moments I recall with crystal clarity. One of these moments emerged out of a struggle to develop a coherent analysis of the tensions and contradictions in Cesare Lombroso’s criminology. While brushing up on my history to teach biological theories of crime to undergraduates, I learned Lombroso was a more subtle thinker than I had believed. His famous L’Uomo Delinquente (originally 1876, though I read no Italian and encountered Lombroso’s ideas first by way of his daughter Gina Lombroso-Ferrero’s 1911 English language summary) included arguments about education, disposition, and social structure along with his classic theory of atavism – it was more biopsychosocial than crude biological determinism.

At the same time, of course, Lombroso’s work is full of strange and alarming remarks that straddle the line between pseudoscience and mythology. The concept of atavism has been thoroughly debunked, and his terms and imagery are often unusual and uncomfortable. He writes that a woman criminal, for example, is “a double exception,” and “consequently [] a monster” (Lombroso and Ferrero 1895, 152). The double exception here is that women were deviants by being women and by being criminals; they deviated from the norm of male rationality and from the law. Lombroso’s formula of the monster as a deviant from natural and positive law reflects Foucault’s analysis of the construction of the abnormal monster in the nineteenth century (Foucault 2003). In these moments, Lombroso is anything but insightful, appearing rather as a panicked peddler of popular fears.

The moment of clarity I recall came during a seminar, to which I was admittedly not paying attention. Instead, I was idly entering assorted terms about monsters and criminology into library search engines to see what came up. I came upon an article by Nicole Rafter and Per Ystehede (2010) on the topic of Lombroso and vampire imagery. It was a brilliant reading of his florid, violent, blood-soaked fantasies in their cultural context, showing how literary and fictional tastes can influence even a learned positive scientist. Lombroso, they argue, was participating in cultural hermeneutic exchange with the Gothic literature of his time. Perhaps we could place Lombroso next to Bram Stoker on a syllabus. In fact, as Rafter and Ystehede note, Dracula cites Lombroso – Mina Harker was an educated woman and used Italian positivism to explain the Count’s criminal nature.

The brilliance of the article is that it does not attempt to resolve the familiar questions about Lombroso found in other biopsychosocial commentaries that reflect on his legacy. These commentaries generally ask how we can separate the good from the bad in Lombroso’s agenda, splitting science apart from racism (e.g., Raine 2013). Rafter’s perspective instead reconciled the two sides of Lombroso’s work by showing that the question is not whether he was a scientist or whether his research agenda was sensible, but rather how he understood the concept of science, and his relationship to it. The moments where an author can move past stale dilemmas by showing that those dilemmas hang on the wrong questions are the moments of true insight. I realized that perhaps my confusion stemmed from thinking about Lombroso in the wrong way (of course, vampires are also a nice break from the general graduate school curriculum).

I began reading more of Rafter’s work on Lombroso, and on biological criminology. She had learned Italian to edit and translate the most comprehensive English edition of Lombroso’s Criminal Man, with the penal historian Mary Gibson (Lombroso 2006). She had studied Lombroso’s reception in the U.S., tracing his circulation in bits and pieces, through conferences and journals, more than a century before she participated in that same exchange. She was one of the first to appreciate the significance of Lombroso’s use of visual imagery in criminology (Rafter 2000a). From here, I began reading her work on other topics, such as the history of women’s prisons. My encounter with Nicole Rafter’s work was well underway.

Or, I should say – my second encounter. Rafter’s work was assigned in my graduate program, and it is widely read in criminology. What I had not previously appreciated was the surprising unity and focus of her writing. It is easy to split her books up across classes and syllabi based on the many topics she studied: eugenics, women’s prisons, crime films, and so on. As she put it, she “danced around a lot” (Rafter 2014). I had previously taken her books as academic single servings of historical insights into discrete topics: here is how the movement for women’s prisons developed, here is how cop films became so popular. This is certainly a fulfilling way to read her work. Each of her books comfortably stands on its own.

But I came to believe that her work, despite dancing between topics, also exhibits remarkable continuity. There are several unifying themes that connect her scholarship. One particularly important theme in Rafter’s work is the visual construction and representation of criminality. Her publication of Shots in the Mirror (2000b), a study of the social context of crime films, as well as her subsequent research on visual aesthetics and criminology in the 2000s, might seem to be a major departure from her earlier work on the histories of criminal justice institutions. However, representation and genre are major themes of these earlier works. Creating Born Criminals (1997), Rafter’s magnificent work on concepts of heredity and criminality in the nineteenth century, emphasizes the visual signs of born-criminal theory, to the point that the book includes an extensive photographic spread featuring inmate pictures from case files. In her work leading up to Creating Born Criminals, Rafter developed a view of family degeneracy studies as a “genre” characterized by an emphasis on the ways families were “stamped with [their] peculiar characteristics” (Rafter 1988, 45, quoting in part Charles Davenport). In fact, after the publication of Creating Born Criminals, Rafter collaborated with the artist Susan Erony to curate the exhibit “Searching the Criminal Body: Art/Science/Prejudice,” a visual history of born-bad criminology (Rafter 2000a). And the same genetic-visual stamps at stake in born-criminal theory were passed on through the promiscuity and “harlotry” of “mothers and daughters,” women who represented the possibility of racial contagion (Rafter 1988, 45). The construction and reform of these degenerate women was central to Rafter’s first major book, her history of women’s punishment in Partial Justice (1985).¹

Another of Rafter’s major themes concerns the limits of criminology as a discipline. Partial Justice contributed to the emerging feminist movement in criminology by asking about both the neglect of women’s prison history, and the threadbare application of classical criminological theory to the cases of female offenders. Creating Born Criminals, along with her work on family eugenics studies, addressed the production of criminological theory as an exercise in culture and self-interested institutional politics. And her later work, such as Shots in the Mirror or The Crime of All Crimes (2016), asked why topics such as film and genocide are not part of the core criminological curriculum. Rafter’s work provides a forceful humanistic account of criminology as a culturally bound field that is both scientific and superstitious, seeking progress as well as confirmation of pre-existing bias. This perspective demands that we ask why certain topics are at the ‘core’ of criminology, and others are relegated to the margins.

Despite the themes that connect her scholarship to itself, Rafter did not develop anything resembling a unified theoretical perspective on criminology. Her work tends to be specific, historical, and contextualized. For this reason, she may seem an unusual choice as a Key Thinker in Criminology. Unlike Edwin Sutherland or Michel Foucault, we cannot speak of Rafter as the progenitor of named theories or schools of thought. I do think Rafter’s history at times approached theorizing, which is always on the edges of historical interpretation. She was aware that questions about the role of representation and cultural context speak to broader issues of epistemology and science in criminology. But she was not a criminological theorist in the conventional sense.

So, why write this book? The label of key thinker should not be reserved only for the most visible theoretical luminaries of a discipline, as this entrenches restrictive disciplinary histories and restrictive concepts of what ‘theory’ is. Nicole Rafter’s work shows the potential of an open and imaginative criminology that can pursue new, surprising questions. Beyond this, there are three specific reasons to address Rafter in particular.

The first is that Rafter is an important figure in the history of the feminist movement in American criminology, which has been one of the major disciplinary developments of the last few decades. Feminist criminology has worked to advance the quantity and status of both female criminologists and publications that deal with the crimes and experiences of women. Women have been involved in criminology since its inception – Cesare Lombroso’s daughter Gina was his sometimes collaborator; husband and wife Bernard and Eleanor Glueck formed one of the greatest criminological partnerships of the twentieth century. But female criminologists have generally been fewer in number and with considerably less prestige than their male counterparts. Eleanor Glueck, despite her astounding publication record, never secured a tenured faculty position like Bernard’s. As numerous feminist criminologists have observed, the criminological patriarchy extended to research interests: most classical theories and case studies of core concepts relied exclusively on the observation and theorizing of boys and men (Naffine 1997; Chesney-Lind 1989; for an overview of demographic changes in criminology in recent decades, see Chesney-Lind and Chagnon 2016).

Nicole Rafter was one of these pioneering feminist scholars. Partial Justice (1985), her first book, contributed to a historiographical awareness that women’s prisons, and women’s experiences in prisons, were not the same as men’s. And although Partial Justice is mostly remembered as an intervention in prison history, the book also explored related arguments showing how the history of women’s punishment revealed intersections of gender and social-criminological theory. In addition to her research, Rafter was involved in the professional organizing of feminist criminology, most notably the creation of the Division on Women and Crime (DWC) in the American Society of Criminology (ASC). As the DWC archives reveal, Rafter was an early participant and frequent mentor in the group. The DWC today remains one of the major organs of feminist thought on crime.

The second reason to dedicate a volume to Nicole Rafter is that she is one of the great twentieth-century humanists of American criminology. Criminology is an interdisciplinary and topic-driven field, a constantly changing intersection of sociology, anthropology, forensic science, economics, and numerous other disciplines. In the United States, the criminological mainstream has tended to prioritize contributions from social and hard sciences while marginalizing the humanities. This is not to suggest the humanities are not present, but the pages of journals such as Criminology prefer hard-nosed etiological inquiries rooted in quantitative sociology or biopsychosocial studies. Rafter was a rare exception: she published history in prestigious journals and even gave a Sutherland Address to the ASC on history’s importance for criminological memory (Rafter 2010). The vision that address revealed for the humanities in criminology emphatically did not involve any attempt to exclude or deprioritize conventional hard or social science, but rather to integrate these perspectives under the broad umbrella of a criminological human science.

Rafter’s work presents both the case for history and the case for the broader humanities. She was an English teacher before becoming a criminologist, a career choice that hints at the interest in genre theory and cultural critique on display in Shots in the Mirror. Rafter not only advanced the history of criminology, but she also contributed to the rise of visual criminology, the incorporation of aesthetics and film as objects of serious analysis, and as Chapter 5 discusses, occasionally ventured into the realm of the philosophy of criminology. At the time of her death, she had turned to yet another topic – the criminology of crimes against humanity. There are few of us who can claim to have the remarkable breadth of Rafter’s interests, or to do justice to them in our research. A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. An introduction to Nicole Rafter
• 2. Prison history and feminist criminology
• 3. Intelligence, biology, and crime
• 4. Crime films and criminology
• 5. The end of criminology?
• 6. Criminology and genocide
• 7. Four reflections
• Index