The Anatomy of Violence (61 page)

Let’s now step back from Big Brother and the impending glare—or glitter—of these
hypothetical
programs. Consider two quite different questions on the three future programs I have outlined. Could they happen? Should they happen? The practical, and the philosophical.

LOMBROSO could certainly come about in practice in twenty years, or something quite like it. Let’s face it, elements are already in place right now. The prison at
Guantánamo Bay is just one example of how
indefinite detention is being used by countries throughout the world in the
name of national
security. Indefinite imprisonment for dangerous criminal offenders—or “
preventive detention,” as it is neatly packaged—is common in many countries.

You also know that all it takes is one tinderbox crime to set off a new law to protect society. That happened with
Megan’s Law, which required the public registration of
sex offenders after the
rape and
murder of seven-year-old
Megan Kanka in 1994 by a man with prior convictions for
sexual
assaults against young girls.
⁴⁰
It also happened with
Sarah’s Law,
in England, after the murder of eight-year-old
Sarah Payne in 2000 by a sex offender named
Roy Whiting. As we learned earlier, physical
castration is offered right now in Germany and some other countries as a treatment option for sex offenders—we don’t have to wait two decades for that to happen.

Society over the years is also becoming more controlling, with enhanced
safety and security at all levels. I can check the Megan’s Law Web site for where I live with my wife and two boys, and I can see pictures of all the convicted sex offenders living near me, together with their addresses and what their offenses were. There are sixty-nine in my zip code right now.

On the other side of the fence there are ever-stricter safety and security measures in place. My boy
Andrew asked me to bring him a potato gun back from England, as I had told him I had one when I was a kid. But now I find out that they are not sold anymore for health and safety reasons. My sister
Sally, in Darlington, tells me she needed an Enhanced Criminal Records Bureau check so she could monitor children’s examinations at the school near her—a check on whether she has any registrations for offenses under the
Protection
of Children Act. You just never know what my sister could get up to with kids—although I’ve checked her convictions certificate and she seems clean. Kids cannot play conkers anymore at school for safety reasons.
⁴¹
Are we too concerned about children’s safety? Are we wrapping them in plastic bubbles and not allowing them normal life experiences where they can grow? Or are we not being safe enough? In any event, society is certainly becoming more controlling over time—and that control can be subtly extended.

We also know all too well the political “something must be done” brigade. They never hesitate to introduce new laws supposedly to solve society’s problems and win power. Just look at what happened in relatively liberal societies like the United Kingdom in recent years.
Tony
Blair in 1997 won a landslide victory for the center-left Labour Party with his mantra to be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.” In 2003, Blair’s party launched the
Criminal Justice Act, which set in motion
Imprisonment for Public Protection—the IPP program. Under the act, judges can sentence offenders to
life in prison even though the crime they committed would not normally receive a
life sentence. If they have previously committed one of a list of 153 offenses, and if they have currently committed a “serious” offense on that list, and if the judge feels they might commit another serious offense in the future, they will get life.
⁴²
In fact, the judge is
legally compelled
to give a life sentence if an offender meets these criteria.
⁴³
Judges are also required to say what sentence they would have given if they had not viewed the offender as potentially dangerous. In about a third of cases the sentence they would have received, the
“tariff” sentence, is only
two years
in prison—and yet the offender will now get life unless a parole board decides to release him.

Crimes on the list are quite interesting. They range from “serious” offenses such as taking an indecent photograph of a child to attempting to procure a girl under the age of twenty-one.
⁴⁴
It covers quite a lot of ground. Prisons swelled, and 5,828 had been given the IPP life sentence by 2010. Even though about 2,500 of them had served their tariff sentence, only ninety-four—or 4 percent—were released. Even then, of this tiny number of released offenders, a quarter were dragged back into prison after initial release.
⁴⁵
They had served their time and yet are locked up for life.

Will we lock up offenders in the future longer than their “just deserts” if we feel there is a chance they might commit another violent or sexual offense? Of course we will—we do it now! Did the public kick up a fuss with IPP? No, they didn’t! If you think the legislation that launches LOMBROSO in 2034 is a tad hasty and not all that well thought out, bear in mind that IPP has been lauded as “one of the least carefully planned and implemented pieces of legislation in the history of British sentencing.”
⁴⁶
More bungled legislation can follow even sooner than 2034.

My socialist country went one better than IPP. In 2000, magicians in the government conjured up from nowhere the label of
“dangerous and severe personality disorder”—in the face of overwhelming opposition from psychiatrists.
⁴⁷
Under this new legislation, the police have the power to whisk potentially dangerous people off the streets and into
holding institutions for further assessment and treatment—even if they have committed no crime. More commonly prisoners who have served out their sentences can be detained further “for the public good.” The practice is still ongoing, with the British government contemplating increasing and diversifying its operations.
⁴⁸

Forensic psychiatrists in both the United Kingdom and the United States, meanwhile, are remonstrating strongly against the increasing pressure to use
forensic psychiatry to protect the public.
⁴⁹
Yet the public doesn’t seem to mind, and my family in England did not even know about the existence of these programs when I asked them. The essence of the LOMBROSO program has been essentially alive and well for years in countries like England, which has far less of a retributivist stance than the United States,
China, or
Singapore, all of which impose the
death penalty. Yet, paradoxically, it was not tough enough for judicial officials, with the Lord Chief Justice complaining in 2004 that Tony Blair had not been tough enough on the causes of crime.
⁵⁰
Blair slipped up—he really should have launched the LOMBROSO program if he had wanted to stay in power.

Using neuroscience to aid risk assessment has its advocates in the most foremost intellectual circles. The
Royal Society in the United Kingdom commissioned leading academics to examine whether neuroscience technologies now or in the future could help law courts decide the fates of offenders. The ensuing report was appropriately cautious, yet at the same time suggested that neurobiological markers might indeed be shown to be useful, in conjunction with other risk factors, to identify risk for violence when making decisions about probation or parole.
⁵¹
It further suggested that neuroscience may be used more widely in the future to decide which potentially dangerous offenders should be detained to protect society. Let’s reflect on this. If the scientific potential is being envisioned in 2011, it’s not entirely unreasonable to imagine the field moving futher, albeit precariously, in that future direction.

What about the
National Child Screening Program? Could that nefarious venture come about? Let’s look back to
Kip Kinkel. Just after his killings, in June 1998, President
Clinton toured the school corridors and cafeteria at
Thurston High, where Kip had gunned down his classmates. It was not too dissimilar to President
Obama’s visit to Newtown after the
Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy. He met with the surviving victims and gave them more than presidential comfort. Clinton
instructed the attorney general to generate a new school guide entitled “
Early Warning, Timely Response” that would help keep kids out of harm’s way. Scientists and practitioners got in on the act too, with the
American Psychiatric Association announcing “
22 warning signs” of dangerous kids.
⁵²
Do you see some of these same signs in your own child or younger sibling? Things like:

Kip had them all—and a lot more besides, including cruelty to animals, attention deficit, and recorded juvenile delinquency.
⁵³
There is almost always a reasoned sociopolitical response to national tragedies, and such tragedies will continue to cultivate new policies out of current-day events. The
Minnesota Department of Health, in conjunction with the Minnesota Department of Education, has a brief and simple screening program to identify not just health problems in children, but also social and emotional problems like emotion regulation difficulties.
⁵⁴
Instead of starting at ten years it starts very early, screening children aged zero to six years. It’s an excellent program, there are many like it, and neither I nor anyone else is complaining. Yet can we not see this and other screening programs like it creeping further along as violence is already viewed as a
public-health problem by the
World Health Organization
⁵⁵
and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?
⁵⁶

Is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to conceive that private investors would actually foot the bill for a LOMBROSO program, as I suggested? Not if they are already doing it.
Tracy Palandjian is the charismatic chief executive officer of
Social
Finance, a nonprofit organization that is drawing in investment capital to finance social benefits like stopping
crime. In 2010, Social Finance
⁵⁷
launched the first
Social Impact Bond, aimed at preventing male prisoners from re-offending upon their release in Peterborough, England. If it reduces re-offending by more than 7.5 percent, the financial savings get returned to investors. So far, savings range from 2.5 percent to 13 percent.
⁵⁸
President
Obama in 2012 slated $100 million for Social Impact Bonds, and Boston is currently the first to show interest in helping juvenile offenders successfully transition into productive lives.
⁵⁹
If the capital-cost side of crime-prevention programs is being handled by the private sector right now, why not in twenty years’ time for the LOMBROSO prevention program?

As for
parental
licensing, this has been debated in both the popular press
⁶⁰
and the academic press
⁶¹
for some years. Articles point out that poor parenting is a well-replicated risk factor for adult violence. Indeed, some governments have already acted to do something about it. In May 2012, Prime Minister
David Cameron, leader of the Conservative-Liberal coalition party in the United Kingdom, committed over $5 million for a state Web site to advise parents on how to raise their children. Cameron argued:

How long will it be before the state tells us what to do by initiating compulsory parenting classes in school, arguing that some parents don’t know that shaking their crying baby at night causes brain damage now and violence later, and that it is “ludicrous” to allow an unlicensed adult to be a responsible parent? We may not be there yet, but today’s daydream can easily become tomorrow’s nightmare.

Other forces that can lead to these
future programs include our sense of
retribution and the power of politics. As I argued when discussing the evolutionary basis to violence, the retributivist stance is ingrained in every one of us, part of our evolutionary heritage to deter the cheats. It’s not going to fade away too easily, and it is particularly alive and well in the United States and other countries with the death penalty, as well as inside me.

We saw with Kip Kinkel how retribution trumped rehabilitation. Consider the four legal philosophies that justify punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. We can also add a fifth—reelection. In the future, when do-gooder efforts to stop the rot have failed, society certainly may wonder whether it’s time to get
to the heart of the matter, protect ourselves and our children, and halt the moral decay with a tough political party willing to get going when the going gets tough. It’s a new landscape not far from the
Queen of Hearts’ “off with their heads” call for law and order in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
.

Politicians will continue to overreact to isolated tragic events in order to quell the public outcry and try to solve society’s problems. With more water under the bridge, scientific advances in knowledge, and a much broader, multidisciplinary perspective to crime causation that incorporates neurocriminology, the ability to predict—and preemptively act—will, I believe, become more probable, not just possible. These things can happen. You can debate that particular conclusion later, but right now let’s move to a more poignant point—do you
want
programs like LOMBROSO?