New Report Reveals How Eugenics Still Shapes the U.S. Criminal Legal System
A new report from CUNY Law Professor Daniel Loehr, published by The Sentencing Project, examines the historical development of habitual offender laws and their foundations in early 20th-century eugenic ideology. While these laws are commonly associated with the “tough-on-crime” policies of the 1980s and 1990s, the report finds that their origins date back much earlier, emerging as an alternative to forced sterilization policies intended to prevent the reproduction of people deemed “habitual criminals.”
Titled The Eugenic Origins of Three Strikes Laws: How “Habitual Offender” Sentencing Laws Were Used as a Means of Sterilization, the report documents the widespread belief in the early 1900s that certain people were “genetically criminal.” It then shows how these beliefs were translated into habitual offender laws, which were explicitly designed to stop “genetic criminals” from reproducing. Through case studies of California, Vermont, and Colorado, the research highlights how state legislators justified habitual offender laws using eugenicist rhetoric. The report also examines how these laws were later adopted by Nazi Germany in 1933.
Finally, the report documents the persistence of these laws in 49 states. “These legal structures persist in our criminal justice system even as other eugenic programs have been repudiated,” explains Professor Loehr. “The research shows that ‘habitual offender’ laws were passed for an explicitly eugenic purpose, yet today people overlook their eugenic origin story.”
Professor Loehr, who joined the CUNY Law faculty in Fall 2024, specializes in constitutional law, criminal procedure, and sentencing law. His research has appeared in journals such as the American Criminal Law Review and the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, and a full elaboration of the eugenic history of habitual offender laws will be published in the Howard Law Journal this Spring.