Biosocial criminology and the mismeasure of race

ABSTRACT

This article examines biosocial criminology’s partial social constructionism of race, that is a logic of difference that attempts to accommodate both a social and biological interpretation of race. We focus on the way biosocial criminologists operationalize race to outline the sociological consequences of what we see as a renewed commitment to the bio-criminalization of race. Biosocial criminologists do not reject that race is socially constructed, but in practice they disregard the main consequences and raison d’être of this postulate. Though biosocial criminologists praise the incorporation of cutting-edge science into criminology, the research programme’s actual findings concerning race do not necessarily align with views from genetic and neuroscientific research. Instead, we argue that biosocial criminology solicits social constructionism as a shield to re-insert antiquated biologic notions of race through a guise of bio-sociality.

KEYWORDS:

• Social constructionism
• genetics
• biosocial criminology
• race
• science
• violence

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Julien Larregue http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4319-1129

Notes

1 A more detailed discussion of this methodology can be found in Larregue (2017a).

2 Carrier and Walby (2014, 2015) aptly demonstrate that criminology’s hesitation to biosocial perspectives of crime has little to do with ideological or political inflexibility of social scientists, but the paucity of this paradigm’s assertions and its own political purposes.