The TV series Orange Is the New Black(2013–2019), created by Jenji Kohan, became a site through which to contest and explore Black gender nonconformity in ways rarely seen on popular television. In its first season, the show’s depictions of Black gender-nonconforming characters – Suzanne Warren (Uzo Aduba) and Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox) – produce variable results. This chapter argues that the middle-class back story of Burset as a firefighter produces a plea for relatability, distancing her from the common experiences of transwomen of color who might typically be imprisoned in the US. By contrast, the character of Warren is depicted as anti-assimilationist and threatening to the prison system, even as her characterization draws on racial and gender prison stereotypes. The exploration of Black gender nonconformity complicates historical tropes of Black women in prison with varied results, providing insight into ideologies of criminal behavior, queerness, and blackness.

Psychiatric inpatients who manifest challenging behaviour may require placement in an intensive or special care unit. This applies in both general and forensic psychiatry. Such units provide high levels of staff with low levels of interpersonal interaction with other patients and reduced stress. Levels of coercion are greater in these units and may involve the use of enforced medication, segregation, seclusion and physical and occasionally mechanical restraint. Much debate focuses on the ethics of such coercion. However, it is also necessary to consider the effects of not using such procedures on the health and safety of the patient and others. All methods of coercion have advantages and hazards. Methods vary across the world, and it is not self-evident which ones may be preferable ethically, with much being dependent on national and cultural tradition. Lengths of stay are much longer in forensic psychiatric hospitals, including in their intensive or special care units. Psychiatry is not alone in requiring such units; intensive care units are also needed in general medicine. Over the last year, general and forensic psychiatry and indeed general medicine have adapted to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic with cases having been noted in forensic psychiatric hospitals and prisons.

Neither Holmes nor Clemens was rejecting everything about phrenology. They were most concerned about phrenology’s craniological tenets – the unsubstantiated idea that small bumps and depressions on the skull can reliably reflect the growth and development of underlying parcels of brain tissue and reveal the organs of mind. They did, however, seem to accept the concept of many independent organs of mind, though not necessarily the ones listed by Gall or others. They also bought into the idea that the front of the brain is more intellectual than its posterior. Additionally, they agreed that character traits are inborn, stable, and run in families and that juries should consider the state of a criminal’s brain. Moreover, neither man had any use for metaphysics. Interestingly, Holmes saw phrenology as a branch of anthropology (broadly defined). As he put it: “Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology, call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction … and it becomes the proper study of mankind, one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.” Twain was also fascinated by the diversity he observed among his fellow human beings, and also felt the family of man deserved further study.

Convict bodies contributed to knowledge and representations of criminality, race, and ethnicity, and tropical disease. Scientists used convicts to establish causal links between physique, criminal character, and sometimes race. They were especially interested in anthropometry, or the science of physical measurement, including through close analysis of the skull or other bodily features. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Italian positivist Cesare Lombroso, author of L’Uomo Delinquente (Criminal Man), had made the highly influential, though controversial, proposition that criminality was biologically determined, connected to hierarchies of race, and thus related to degeneration. Lombroso’s theory was particularly influential in Latin America, though the Russians, British, and French received it with more ambivalence. Later, scientists became interested in how both sensitivity to pain and in flows of blood (including to the face) might be physical manifestations of criminality. From the nineteenth century onwards, penal colonies were important spaces of medical research on morbidity and mortality, including studies of leprosy, hookworm, yellow fever, and malaria in places such as French Guiana and the Andamans. Such research fed into larger global investigations into mosquitos as vectors for sickness and disease. The era under consideration here also impacted on the purpose and method of convict studies.

This chapter accepts that biomedicine is the dominant influence on our ideas about health and disease but considers what qualifications need to be introduced to do justice first to the more complicated issues to do with mental health and then to the very diverse conceptions that have been entertained in this area in non-Western societies, ancient and modern. Drawing on Hacking’s work on natural kinds and Luhrmann’s analysis of the uncertainties of modern psychiatry, it suggests further respects in which we need to exercise caution in assessing competing claims for expertise in this area.

“’A Power Able to Overawe Them All’: Criminality and the Uses of Fear,” begins with a discussion of criminality in The Queen v. Eduljee Byramjee (1846). At the heart of the case was the question of whether criminal convictions could be appealed to the Privy Council. On the one hand, to limit appeals to the Queen would implicitly serve to undermine her absolute sovereignty. On the other hand, granting the right to appeal would undermine the authority of the colonial courts and intervene in the social, political, and economic uses to which Indian criminals were put. This chapter also shows how the fiction of Indian criminality became useful to the exercise of British sovereignty. As the last ready supply of working bodies after the abolition of slavery, and the end of British penal transport, Indian criminals provided essential physical labor for the territorial expansion of Empire. The rhetoric of Indian degeneracy, then, was central to both the ideological and material terms by which the British consolidated and expanded their sovereignty. (Word Count: 10,500)

Jean Golding, born in England in 1939, is one of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service ‘Research Legends’. Trained in Human Genetics and Biometry, she is best known for having planned and directed the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), initiated with 14,500 pregnant women in the south of England. The aim was to determine the ways in which different aspects of the environment and genetics are associated with child health and development, including criminality. In a comparison with Brazilian children, conduct problems, hyperactivity, and violent crime were found to be more prevalent in Brazil, but the ALSPAC children had more nonviolent crimes. The associations between behavior problems during childhood and criminality were partly explained by perinatal health factors and childhood family environments in both countries.

Chapter 7 lays out the mounting research documenting the negative consequences that flow from aggressive policing methods such as stop-and-frisk. While it’s uncontroverted that these stops increase distrust between police and communities, there are many additional harms. Researchers connect stop-and-frisks to lasting psychological distress, including anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. There’s even evidence to suggest aggressive stops will encourage some innocent victims to become offenders. In balancing the harms of these stops on one side of the scale in Terry v. Ohio, the Supreme Court makes two mistakes. First, Terry stops don’t merely fail to reduce crime; they increase the likelihood of future law-breaking. Second, most of the harms that flow from Terry stops never enter into the Court’s calculation. In fact, we now know that stop-and-frisks create trauma and the trauma spreads outwards, threatening the health and safety of whole communities.

This chapter explores how Charles Darwin’s ideas about structural and functional anomalies in plants, animals and humans inspired the new Gothic monsters to be found in the work of Grant Allen, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen. It traces the ways in which these writers reimagined human genealogies in light of evolutionary biology, materialism and Darwinist criminal anthropology. Sadistic criminals whose degenerate minds and bodies threatened civilised society, and atavistic flesh-eating plants whose natural ‘criminality’ was coaxed out by sadistic experimental scientists, are part of a significant reimagining of both biological and cultural history in the last half of the century. Indeed, through these types of biological monsters, Gothic writers challenged some of the most cherished ideas that Victorians held about their cultural heritage. Knowledge about human descent, the biology of human and animal abnormality, and criminal compulsions that dwelt in the ‘protoplasm’, largely negated the ideals of the age of chivalry – the medieval origins of the higher-order values that supposedly defined the human as exceptional.

Starting as early as the Spanish colonial caste system, the ancestors of modern Latinos faced discrimination that led Whites to view them as a non-White racial group. The discrimination Latinos faced resulting from the caste system limited their social mobility, helping create a belief that Latinos were incapable of assimilating into colonial society. Other types of formal and informal forms of discrimination against Latinos (e.g., the California Land Act, Operation Wetback, the Zoot Suit riots) had a similar effect, reinforcing beliefs about the inability of Latinos to assimilate as well as creating an impression that Latinos fail to adhere to Anglo-American norms. This chapter traces various historical institutions that have helped shape how White's perceive Latino identity and ultimately shape the way that animus is expressed toward Latinos today.