Nicole Rafter

Nicole Hahn Rafter (1939-2016) was an American criminologist who earned her bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College, a master's in teaching from Harvard, and a doctorate in criminal justice from the State University of New York at Albany, after an earlier career teaching high school and college English. Beginning in 1977 she taught at Northeastern University's College of Criminal Justice in Boston, where she developed one of the country's first courses on women and crime as well as a course on crime films. Her scholarship spanned three connected areas: the history of women's incarceration, documenting during the 1980s and 1990s how women's imprisonment differed from men's in ways academic criminology had largely neglected; the history of eugenics, examined in her 1988 book White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919, on how poor populations were portrayed as genetically inferior; and the study of criminology and film, examining how crime movies shape public understanding of criminal behavior and gender.