Abstract
The hidden blueprint of eugenics continues to shape the treatment of captive and vulnerable populations throughout the current pandemic. Though nominally discredited, eugenic thinking continues to guide our twenty-first century incarceration policies and our discriminatory treatment of detained, disabled, and neglected populations. During COVID-19, our unrecognized reliance on eugenics has caused a cascade of disasters: disregard for the welfare of incarcerated people who have fought COVID-19 without supplies, social distancing ability, or compassionate release; hospital rationing policies which limit use of ventilators, hospital beds, and other medical devices by disabled and elderly individuals; the skyrocketing death toll in nursing and long-term care homes; and the profound neglect of group home residents, including children in foster care and the cognitively and developmentally disabled.
These inequitable practices follow a pattern consistent with the philosophy of eugenics. Our society has isolated a class of “unfit” and “unvalued” people, whose lives and dignity are treated as less worthy than others. This article reveals the hidden eugenic thinking supporting our mistreatment of disabled, captive, and vulnerable individuals during the pandemic, and proposes broad and longer-lasting solutions to this legacy of discrimination.
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About the Author
Laura I Appleman is the Van Winkle Melton Professor of Law and University Research Integrity Officer at Willamette University. She teaches Criminal Procedure I & II, Family Law, Sentencing Law & Policy, and Race & the Law. Appleman is a national expert on criminal juries, carceral profits, and the role of eugenics in the criminal system. Her scholarship has been widely published in books and law reviews, such as Cambridge University Press, Harvard, Duke, Northwestern, Fordham, Boston College, Harvard Public Health, Wisconsin, and Washington & Lee. She has also written in or been featured in the New York Times, Al-Jazeera America, Slate, the Boston Globe, The Verge, and Freakonomics Radio. A graduate of the Yale Law School, Appleman clerked for Judge A. Wallace Tashima of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, CA. Before joining Willamette, she was a Manhattan criminal public appellate defender, arguing over 50 appeals in the New York appellate courts. Appleman serves on the Public Defenders of Marion County executive board and the Yale Law Alumni Steering Committee, and was elected to the American Law Institute in 2024.
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