Political paranoia: the psychopolitics of hatred

periodizations which are too pronounced to be credible. By 1915, for example, with the advent of the "psychopath", we have already reached the third phase of eugenic criminology in the twentieth century. Such caesuralism leaves her unable to understand why, despite an evolving terminology, attitudes towards "feeble-minded women" remain remarkably unchanged between 1870 and 191 1, and struggling to explain why New York's first eugenic prison arrived only in 1921, when the discourse was on the wane. The latter perhaps points to the limitations of verbal strategies for understanding state penal policy. Yet throughout, Rafter infuriatingly privileges discourse analysis. In consequence, she is patchy on the wider intellectual context of eugenic criminology, and uninformative on the social setting of New York state between 1870 and 1920, either in detail or in comparison with other states. It is a shame Rafter feels the need to be so constrained by her Foucauldian approach, as this well-written text leaves one in no doubt that she was capable of the systematic study of the records of Napanoch and other institutions she points to the need for in her final chapter. Instead, Rafter is determined to provide "much more than a look at the past". Underlying her book is a desire to answer contemporary incarnations of eugenic criminology, and to use the history of ideas to "guide us" in this project (p. 237). To the extent that her work suggests that "the concept of the criminal body is a construct" which tells us as much about the categorizers as the criminal, she is successful. Ultimately, however, her Foucauldian approach is again woefully inadequate for the task. We are told little or nothing of what linguistic, let alone political or social, strategies were adopted to counter previous incarnations, and advised only "to approach contemporary biological theories as discourses" (p. 238). Such constructivist relativism leads to a neglect of nature/nurture debates and the conceding of too much ground to hereditarian explanations. Instead of speculating on the possibility of forecasting which foetuses will grow into crime-prone adults, Rafter would have done better to emphasize that criminality is a product of social conditions as much as of "social control specialists" (p. 238). Both her history and her polemic would have been improved by incorporating the insight that criminals are "created" environmentally, as well as definitionally.