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Creating Born Criminals, by Nicole Hahn Rafter. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 284 pp. $36.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-252-022378. NPL paper. ISBN: 0-252-06741-X.
Creating Born Criminals is a useful and important social history of shifting attitudes toward those who have been classified as mentally impaired. Rafter begins the story in the middle of nineteenth century, and provides a careful, thorough, and scholarly chronicle of how American professionals dealing with "the mentally feeble" changed their understandings of the sources of mental retardation-and thus their strategies of reform and treatment.
From the middle of the century to approximately 1880, a movement to take "idiots" out of poorhouses and prisons, and to train them to be full sentient adults, became a dominant strategy ratified by several states. While during the first part of the nineteenth century the mentally incompetent had been relegated to the "undifferentiated trash heaps of human misery," midcentury witnessed the creation of numerous new state institutions-fueled by stories of the miraculous work of new strategies...