Category: State Classification

• The "Phrenology" Eugenics

  This theory held that governments, prisons, and scientific authorities were using skull measurement and cranial “reading” to classify people in advance as criminals, inferiors, or social threats. In its strongest form, the theory imagined a bureaucratic future in which destiny was assigned by the shape of the head. The documented record clearly shows that phrenology really did claim to identify criminal tendencies, that it influenced the treatment and classification of offenders, and that nineteenth-century authorities were interested in linking bodily signs to criminality. What remains overstated is the idea of a fully systematic state program that could infallibly pre-determine crime through skull reading alone.