“Habitual offender” laws first spread across the country in the early 1900s as part of the eugenics movement, which grew in the 1880s and reached its peak in the 1920s. The aim of the eugenics movement was to create a superior race in order to address social problems such as crime and disease, which the movement assumed had a biological basis.3 Applying pseudoscience, laws and policies were created to prevent those who were deemed inferior, such as the mentally ill, those convicted of criminal offenses, or the physically frail, from reproducing. Eugenics and racism are deeply entwined, and the “projects” of eugenics supported “racial nationalism and racial purity.”4 One example of the relationship between race and eugenics is found in Nazi Germany, where “Nazi planners appropriated and incorporated eugenics as they implemented racial policy and genocide.”5
