Wednesday, February 07, 2018

Cloward to Cullen to Wright to Beaver to Gottfredson to Molyneux

So apparently Richard Cloward is the founder of the biosocial criminology dynasty.

According to Francis T. Cullen's Wikipedia page page Cloward was Cullen's doctoral advisor.

I was very surprised to read this about Cloward:
In 1966, Cloward co-founded the National Welfare Rights Organization, which advocated federalizing Aid to Families with Dependent Children by building local welfare rolls. In 1982, he and his wife Frances Fox Piven founded "Human SERVE" (Service Employees Registration and Voter Education), which established motor-voter programs in selected states as precedents for the Motor Voter Act enacted in 1993. 
Also in 1966, he and Piven published a paper in the May issue of The Nation magazine — "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty",[4] which advocated wiping out poverty by increasing demands on the federal government, leading to implementation of a guaranteed minimum income. His detractors have called this the "Cloward-Piven Strategy"
Also according to Cullen's page, one of his notable students is John Paul Wright. And according to Wikipedia for Wright, his doctoral student is Kevin Beaver. According to Beaver's page his notable students are J. C. Barnes and Brian Boutwell.
And we've already seen that Barnes and Boutwell give credit to Beaver for "converting" them to biosocial criminology.

I looked up some of Cullen's work and was quite surprised that Cullen was a co-author of Race, Racism, and Support for Capital Punishment. Unlike the evo-psycho bros, Cullen seems to believe that racism actually exists, as the abstract says:
There is a clear racial divide in support for the death penalty, with whites favoring and blacks opposing this sanction. This divide has persisted for decades and remains statistically and substantively significant even when controls are introduced for the known correlates of death penalty attitudes. A meaningful portion of this chasm is explained, however, by racism, with whites who manifest animus to blacks being more likely to embrace the lethal punishment of offenders...
Conservative Criminology: A Call to Restore Balance to the Social Sciences by John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisi has a list of recommendations the authors feel will improve the criminal justice system by making it less liberal. On page 129:
Sentences of death should be swiftly and righteously imposed, without fear of this important sanction.
So what happened with Wright? Well we know that Wright credits Steven Pinker with work that has informed his thinking.
I, John Paul Wright, would like to thank Francis T. Cullen for all his years of academic and personal mentorship. I would also like to acknowledge Kevin Beaver, Matt Delisi, and Michael Vaughn for their encouragement and dedication to this field of study. I also want to recognize the pioneers in the field, whose work has informed much of my thinking: E. O. Wilson, David Rowe, Steven Pinker, Avshalom Caspi, Terri Moffatt, and Judith Rich Harris. Finally I would like to salute Anthony Walsh and Lee Ellis, whose careers exemplify the scholarly pursuit of truth.
I would have guessed there was Steve Sailer connection too, since Wright and Sailer sound very similar when talking about blacks. But in this post from his Unz Review column, Wright is quoted from 2008 complaining about the plight of biosocial criminology and Sailer says:
Is criminology a social science? I hadn’t realized that. I thought criminology was just what people who wanted to be prison guards majored in at junior college. 
Linda Gottfredson however seems to be a big influence on Wright's thinking. In the chapter he co-authored with Mark Alden Morgan entitled Humanbiodiversity and the Egalitarian Fiction in The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: On the Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality edited by Kevin M. Beaver, J. C. Barnes and Brian Boutwell it says:
...There is, unfortunately, good reason to question the objectivity of scientists, especially social scientists, as it relates to discussions of race. 
A hallmark belief, or sacred value, of contemporary progressive ideology is that minority groups do not differ in their talents or abilities and thus that disparities found in the workplace, in the educational arena, or even the criminal justice system, reflect bias and discrimination against these groups. Speaking specifically of intelligence differences between groups, Gottfredson (1994) refers to this sacred value as the "egalitarian fiction." More broadly, the egalitarian fiction provides liberal academics a script, or a narrative, from which they draw to interpret almost every racial disparity as the product of some form of racism. Differences between "races" in crime, for example, cannot occur because groups differ in their levels of conformity to the law, this narrative states, but because racism creates strain that results in crime (Jang & Johnson, 2003), or because laws are racially biased (Alexander, 2012), or because police racially profile (Rojek, Rosenfeld, & Decker, 2012).

Gottfredson, like Wright and Beaver, appeared on alt-right Stefan Molyneux's Youtube video channel

Linda Gottfredson joined Stefan Molyneux for the December 29th broadcast of Freedomain Radio, entitled “Race, Evolution and Intelligence.” Using recycled claims from The Bell Curve — a notorious book by Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994) and Charles Murray — Molyneux asserted that there is a racial hierarchy as far as IQ distribution is concerned. 
“You could roughly equate a sort of five part split or divergence among IQs for particular groups with — I think as Charles Murray pointed out — Ashkenazi Jews sort of at the top, 110, 115, and if you just focused on verbal, 120 plus,” Molyneux said, before listing Asians, Caucasians and, lastly, Hispanics and African-Americans — the latter of whom he claimed have an average IQ of 85. 
Gottfredson, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware, agreed, noting that Molyneux neglected to mention one final racial category. “I would just add one more group and that’s African blacks. The IQs of different groups of African blacks, you know, range more around 70.” Gottfredson, of course, has accepted $267,000 in research grants by the racist Pioneer Fund since 1988, and was a staunch opponent of the 1991 Civil Rights Act.

Later in the video Gottfredson defends the late eugenicist Jean-Philippe Rushton (1943-2012). Prior to his death Rushton headed the Pioneer Fund, and made outrageous pseudoscientific claims about black men and women having larger secondary sex characteristics — which he said were inversely proportional to brain size. 
Molyneux's racial hierarchy in 2015 is somewhat different from his hierarchy in 2017.

2015
  1. Ashkenazi Jews
  2. Asians
  3. Caucasians
  4. Hispanic
  5. African-Americans
  6. Africans (Gottfredson's addition)
2017
  1. Ashkenazi Jews
  2. East Asian (it's unclear if he's including South Asian in with this or not)
  3. Caucasian
  4. Mestizo/Hispanic
  5. African Americans
  6. Sub-Saharan Blacks
  7. Pygmies
  8. Indigenous Australians
As we have seen, evo-psycho bros, human biodiversitarians, and all the rest of the socio-biologists believe fervently in race but they never know at any given time how many races there are. This is why evolutionary psychology is perfect for people who don't like to work very hard - it's so flexible and mood-dependent.

So what might a biosocial criminal justice system look like? I'll discuss that next.