Professors’ Paper Traces Criminal Risk Assessment to Eugenic Roots
July 14, 2026 / Cooper Allen
Risk assessment plays a critical role in the modern legal system, guiding decisions on bail, sentencing and parole.
But when the practice was first developed a century ago, it was rooted in eugenic criminology, with some proponents even suggesting that those who were deemed genetically criminal should be isolated on penal colonies in an effort to create a utopian society.
This largely overlooked history is the subject of a new paper, “Eugenic Criminology and the Birth of Predictive Algorithms in Criminal Justice,” by Professor Megan Stevenson of the University of Virginia School of Law and Robynn J.A. Cox, an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Stevenson said the origins of risk assessment have long interested her.
“We talk about risk in a sort of generic sense, but we don’t often talk about where the risk is coming from,” Stevenson said, noting various theories around risk likelihood, from predisposition to criminal activity to environmental factors.
After discussing different ideas with Cox, Stevenson said they decided to conduct a deep dive on risk assessment’s history.
Let’s go back to the origins of risk assessment and look at how they develop. And as it turns out, they’re very connected to these ideas that derived from eugenic criminology, of people being born criminals.MSMegan Stevenson
The resulting paper dates the birth of risk assessment to the 1920s and chronicles its development through the 1950s.
Eugenic criminology, Stevenson explained, encompassed the “constellation of ideas that were particularly popular in the Progressive Era, which held that people commit crime due to inherent biological predispositions.” While there was a racial component to the concept, she added, the “wealthy, elite, educated” adherents of eugenic criminology were also “drawing distinctions within people that were racialized as white.”
These ideas, coupled with the emergence of statistics, led to the increasing use of what’s known as indeterminate sentencing, in which those convicted of crimes received sentences with wide ranges and parole decisions were based on when a criminal was deemed reformed.
“This is a very appealing idea, because the idea is you only release people once they’ve been rehabilitated enough to be allowed to be back out in society. But how do you measure rehabilitation, of course, is always the big question, and that’s partly where risk assessment came in,” Stevenson said, adding that there was also a significant amount of corruption during this era in the parole system.
A problem with some of the early ideas around statistical risk assessment, she said, was that the inputs that tools were using to predict whether someone was likely to reoffend were flawed.
“They don’t contain really anything about the person’s behavior while they’re incarcerated,” Stevenson said, noting that, instead, race and ethnicity, family background, work history and intelligence were often employed.
The result was a sentencing and parole system that had elements of eugenic criminology guiding its decisions, the paper finds, with those deemed irredeemable for society left to face indefinite imprisonment.
“These risk assessment tools were adopted, and were really understood at that time, as a way of using statistics to try distinguish between these different categories of criminals: on the high end, the incorrigibles that should be kept incarcerated as long as we can, and on the low end, those who can be released,” Stevenson said.
In telling its early history, Stevenson and Cox spotlight the influential roles played by a few of risk assessment’s key proponents — among them, Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck, a husband-and-wife team based at Harvard who “were extraordinarily influential in their time,” according to Stevenson.
“They operated almost like a detective shop,” she said, describing how the couple would track down and interview people who had spent time in so-called reformatories serving indeterminate sentences and later released. The Gluecks, she said, concluded from this analysis that these reform institutes were not actually rehabilitating inmates, a controversial position for the era.
“They were proponents of this belief that we need to identify this group of irredeemable, born criminals to lock them up for life because otherwise there’s nothing else to be done to protect society,” Stevenson said, noting that their approach echoed the ideas behind eugenic criminology.
The Gluecks even advocated for conducting risk assessments of children in elementary school, she said.
“They became famous for taking out a full-page ad in the newspaper saying, ‘Right now, our criminals can be identified as young as kindergarten,’” Stevenson said.
While they gained fame and influence in the early 20th century, societal explanations for criminal behavior championed by sociologists began to take hold in the late 1950s and the Gluecks’ status as leading voices waned.
Another key figure the paper features is Ernest Burgess, a University of Chicago sociology professor who, working with his graduate students, developed a risk assessment algorithm used by officials in Illinois when making parole decisions — the only system of its kind for decades.
The paper explains how, despite the Chicago School of Sociology’s emphasis on non-biological causes of crime, Burgess’ approach employed several factors synonymous with eugenic criminology, such as nationality and neighborhood characteristics, which were used as a proxy for race.
“Even though he was working on these social-environmental theories of crime, he very much believed that people had individual propensities that would make them more or less prone to crime,” Stevenson said, citing his association with eugenics groups.
While the Progressive Era included the growth of eugenic criminology, it also was marked by developments that would become features of modern criminal justice.
“This is the birthplace of juvenile justice instead of just sending kids to adult jails. This is the era of probation as an alternative to incarceration. There’s a lot of what we think of as modern criminal justice that grew out of this era,” Stevenson said.
The concept of risk assessment itself, despite its unsavory origins, has also become a cornerstone of decisions on arrests, imprisonment, bail and sentencing, Stevenson said.
“We use it way more than we did 100 years ago. It’s now used in almost every phase,” she said.
The paper concludes by explaining that, in its current iteration, risk assessment employs modernized tools and is devoid of the eugenics-inspired language of the 1920s. Still, the authors write, echoes of the past can still be seen in contemporary preventative confinement practices, which, they argue, underscores the importance of understanding history.
“The relationship between past and present is rarely straightforward, but that does not mean it is uninformative. Knowing what came before can help bring the present into sharper focus, guiding analysis and helping to identify persistent patterns.”
This article was originally published here: https://www.law.virginia.edu/news/202607/professors-paper-traces-criminal-risk-assessment-eugenic-roots