As a part of a “racial betterment plan,” Germany practiced eugenics during the 1930s, according to the British Journal of Urology, but history shows California used the practice decades before the Germans.
Eugenics is not a word in everyday language. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term. It means, “The science which deals with all influences that improve inborn qualities,” according to British Journal of Urology.
California passed its first eugenics law in 1909—specifically targeting patients in state hospitals and state prisoners, “who were inmates for life” or “showing sex or moral perversions, or were certain repeat offenders.”
In the heyday of California eugenics policies, 70 percent of sterilizations were preformed on people who were mentally ill, and “those suffering from perversion or marked departures from normal mentality,” according to Eugenics Nation.
Records show 20,108 people were forcibly sterilized before medical science discredited and disavowed this practice in the 1960s, reports Eugenics Nation. However, because of the “sensitive nature of sterilization records, many are difficult to access or may have been altered,” which, according to From Legislation to Lived Experience, may have deflated the actual number of people sterilized.
Under the eugenics program, San Quentin and Folsom State prisons sterilized numerous inmates as a way to alleviate undesirable traits, according to Eugenics Nation.
No medical sterilizations are being performed today, but California sentencing policies are achieving the same objective as turn of the century supporters of eugenics.
As an example, offenders with life sentences are excluded from receiving conjugal visits from their spouses. Therefore, these offenders cannot procreate.
Political writer Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine said something similar in a recent commentary about California’s Three Strike law in an article titled The Stupidest Law Ever.
Taibbi wrote, “Another result was that instead of dealing with problems like poverty, drug abuse and mental illness, we increasingly just removed them all from view by putting them in jail.”
Once incarcerated with life terms, individuals are removed from society and cannot produce offspring.
American history is inundated with examples of policies similar to eugenics.
During the 1950’s, states targeted African Americans, attempting to legislate sterilization of women on welfare, according to Eugenics Nation.
As late as 1994, there was legislation proposed by a group offering $200 to women agreeing to sterilization. This was an effort to eliminate abuse of crack cocaine during the war on drugs, according to The Real Costs of Prisons.
In a Prison Focus article, Are Gang Members Special? from The California Supreme Court To Pelican Bay, criminal justice policy is scrutinized for its treatment of so-called gang members: “By examining gang practices as special and unique, through the lens of clinical expertise, we have relegated gang members to the status of incorrigible specimens, who can only be studied, controlled, governed, and suppressed through special, dehumanizing technologies.”
Consistent with Eugenics Nation and the intent in the legislation purposed in the 1950’s and 1994, supporters of eugenics policies attempt to eliminate what lawmakers consider wayward elements of society “by segregating defectives in institutions and removing their ability to reproduce.”
The movement was so disturbing to then-Gov. Gray Davis, that he issued an official apology to the victims of eugenics in March of 2003, according to Eugenics Nation.
