“Ravished by Some Moron”: The Eugenic Origins of the Minnesota Psychopathic Personality Act of 1939
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Twenty U.S. states permit the indefinite detention of civilly committed sex offenders after the end of their prison sentences if their dangerousness is due to a “mental abnormality.” This article explores the origins of one such law by examining its predecessor, the Minnesota Psychopathic Personality Act of 1939. Passed in the wake of a panic over sex crimes and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1940, Minnesota’s psychopath statute extended a 1917 eugenics law providing for the compulsory civil commitment and institutionalization of “defectives” to persons alleged to have a psychopathic personality. Analyzing the 1917 and 1939 laws together shows how one state’s psychopath statute had less to do with psychiatric authority than with the legal and administrative framework established by Progressive-era eugenics. From the 1910s until today, dubious claims about the ability of science to identify potential criminals legitimized politically popular, but constitutionally questionable, forms of administrative and social control.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".