The Anatomy of Violence (63 page)

Shami had understandable difficulty with that particular question, which challenged the civil-libertarian perspective. It seems that in the name of a liberal democracy and human rights, we would wave good-bye to a life we could have saved, even in the face of perfect prediction, as in the movie
Minority Report
. It is always a question of balance in weighing protection and civil liberty, never a question of absolutes. In striking out for liberal democracy we must also look down at the blood we have on our hands—the blood of innocent lives that could have been saved had we only chosen to act. Would you really agree with Shami Chakrabarti?

Let me attempt to defend Chakrabarti’s point of view. Once we begin to slip on our democratic principles, we can end up on a scrap heap of human-rights violations. Before we vote, politicians tempt us with the illusion of the risk-free society that we say we want. But isn’t that just a charlatan’s call echoing in an immoral wilderness? Is it not a mirage, a future that we dearly want to see, but will never have unless a huge price is paid, the price of gross injustice to the innocent who are wrongly accused?

I think some of you may disagree with Chakrabarti’s perspective. You may conclude that in the face of perfect prediction, perilous though
the ethics may be, we must act. Yet if even one human right is violated, can we in good conscience live with that policy? That is Chakrabarti’s provocative point. Is that
moral sense the reason in a previous chapter you would not push the corpulent man off the footbridge to stop a runaway trolley from killing five railway workers? You object to the principle of utilitarian moral decision-making—the greater good of the greater number. Well, let’s push the envelope on that issue one nudge further.

Consider
Adolf Hitler.
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Hitler, as we discussed, was by anyone’s standards a flawed character—but he was also a human being and he had the right to live. Yet would you or Chakrabarti not have killed Hitler in 1933 to save the lives of 6 million Jews and 60 million German, British, Russian, American, and other international civilians and soldiers?

Imagine yourself standing beside Hitler on March 23, 1933, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. He is giving his speech just before the
Enabling Act, the law that would make him a dictator with absolute power. He talks about the “decision to carry out the political and moral cleansing of our public life.”
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You have a gun in your pocket. You can predict the future and you know for certain you will save 66 million lives if you put the gun to the back of his head near his right ear—as
Kip did with his father—and shoot him. No harm would come to you, and the world would be a better place. Would you kill Hitler?

Think it through. Sixty-six million lives and countless suffering to many millions more. Dreadful though the
dilemma may be, I think that is the particular trigger I would be prepared to pull. Is doing that really living like an animal rather than a civilized human being? Is there not a huge cost to pay in
not
taking this particular life, even if it comes with the huge moral cost of murder?

And yet once we take that step, where will this journey lead us? Let me walk you through the valley of darkness and into the barren desert of just deserts. The question comes down to where exactly in the shifting sands of sensible reasoning you are willing to judiciously draw the line that delineates the protection of society on one side and the invasion of civil liberties on the other. The overall risks weighed against the overall benefits. The difference between right and wrong—between life and death. Between acceptance of the neurocriminological knowledge we are rapidly gaining—and the social concerns we all have over equity, ethics, and liberty.

Where exactly on that sliding scale of violence prediction will
you be prepared to act? There will never be perfect prediction, not the 100 percent in Paxman’s scenario. But what if it was 90 percent? Or 80 percent? Would you enact LOMBROSO, or something like it, at 79 percent? I know that we are all going to draw different lines. Can we agree on a consensus—the average of all the lines we have drawn?

You may be unwilling to draw any line. You may feel as ethically outraged as Shami Chakrabarti was about where neurobiological research on violence may be taking us. But if the idea of programs like LOMBROSO and NCSP give you pause, consider this: they at least give offenders a chance for deliverance. Criminals would not be stripped of the basic human
rights that we deny them today. Under lombroso they could vote, whereas those with criminal convictions cannot vote in the United States and many other countries. They would have conjugal visits. Most
prisoners today do not.

Do you realize that we currently practice
passive eugenics on our prisoners in forty-four out of the fifty United States? Male prisoners are not allowed to send their sperm out. Female prisoners are not allowed to send their eggs out or receive sperm. If you are serving life without the possibility of parole, your genes will not reproduce. You are a loser in the evolutionary game of reproduction. That line was drawn in the judicial sand long ago.

This glaring fact is extraordinarily hush-hush. Have you ever thought about it yourself? When I raised this issue with some of my criminology colleagues, their response was that it had not crossed their minds. When I spoke to over 200 correctional staff in Trenton, New Jersey, in 2009, they admitted they had never thought about it. When I have raised this issue on several occasions in academic talks and lectures, it is followed by universal silence.

There is irony here. Genetic researchers in the 1990s were accused of fostering a eugenic “final solution” to stopping crime. That accusation was demonstrably false. But let’s be sure about one thing: our current policy of what I call “passive eugenics” on criminals did not emerge from genetic or biological research. It was a direct product of social policy. Although some well-intentioned people believe that genetic research on crime should be stopped because it could lead to eugenics, there has been no similar call to halt social-science or public-policy research on crime. And yet
through such policy we are effectively reducing the genetic fitness of the most serious offenders and limiting their genetic material in future gene pools.

Social scientists may have decried Lombroso’s nineteenth-century thinking in branding criminals as evolutionary throwbacks, but in many ways our current thinking and our passive-eugenics policy are still stuck in the nineteenth century. Prisoners are today viewed as little more than Lombrosian subhuman savages who are not fit to reproduce. We practice passive eugenics, don’t we? They shoot horses, don’t they?

Consider the counterpoint. Losing the right to have children is just part and parcel of committing crime. Prisoners lose their freedom. They lose their right to vote. So why not the right to give
life, especially for those who have taken life already? Retribution and deterrence are the rules of the legal game we play with prisoners, and disenfranchisement and passive eugenics are most regrettably the costs that those dealt losing hands in life simply have to pay. And yet … I was always brought up to believe that eugenics was a bad thing.

Kip Kinkel can’t have kids. Not with 111 years in prison without the possibility of parole. It’s ironic that the logic of neurocriminology asks us to cut offenders like Kip some slack, to assist in their defense, not to punish them so harshly because reasons beyond their control
constrained their free will. It’s ironic because biological researchers on crime have in the past been accused of having the worst intentions for criminal offenders. Have we gone wrong somewhere, and do we need to change our perspective? If we compare some salutary events from the recent past with where we stand today, I think a shift has already occurred in our thinking. We are on the cusp of crossing into new territory.

Wouter Buikhuisen was a criminologist at Leiden University in the
Netherlands in the 1970s and ’80s who believed that there was a psychophysiological basis to crime. That perspective resulted in his being hounded like a wild animal and torn to pieces in the Dutch popular press.
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His position was debated in parliament, and he ultimately had to resign his position as chair of the
criminology department at Leiden in 1988. It was intolerable at that time to think of crime and criminality being anything other than a social construction caused exclusively by social forces. As a young scholar, I visited Wouter at Leiden in 1987. We had met the previous year in Italy—he wanted to bring me on board in a faculty position at Leiden. Instead I went to
Los Angeles, where I hoped the academic atmosphere would be more liberal. But was it?

In 1994 I presented my research findings from
Denmark at the annual meeting in San Francisco of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. I showed that a combination of
birth complications interacted with early
maternal rejection in predisposing babies to be violent offenders eighteen years later.
⁷⁷
An article in
Science
in March that year published a figure illustrating my main findings under the headline war of words continues in violence research.
⁷⁸
It reported my own hope that this new biosocial research could lead to “feasible, practical, and benign ways” of preventing violence. Nevertheless, as
Science
reported, it was subjected to “a unified and outspoken assault” by other scientists at the meeting, who characterized my findings as “
racist and ideologically motivated.”
⁷⁹
My sample was all white, so targeting minorities was not the issue. Instead, the findings suggested that biology worked in concert with social influences—and that was intolerable. Twelve years earlier, in 1982, I had to take a chapter on biosocial influences out of my thesis at the insistence of the external examiner in order to obtain my PhD—even though I had published that work two years earlier in a scientific peer-reviewed journal.
⁸⁰

Twenty years has seen an enormous change in the
political landscape of an anatomy of violence. Back in 1994, suggesting an interaction between biological and social factors in predisposing individuals to violence was anathema. Today it is totally passé. Of course such biosocial interactions occur, what’s all the fuss about? In the Netherlands, Wouter Buikhuisen has now been exonerated and given an apology for his persecution,
⁸¹
and in my experience the Netherlands today has more interest in neurocriminology than any country outside of North America.

Yet the very beginning sentence of that article in
Science
on violence still rings like a gunshot in my ears:

Will the emerging science of neurocriminology and the double-edged sword that it wields continue to remain bogged down in a minefield of unproductive diatribes? One of the continuing problems is that this research field borders on the politically incorrect. The left doesn’t like it, and the right doesn’t like it either. Liberals and center-left
parties fear that the research will be used to stigmatize individuals and take attention away from social problems, the true causes of crime. Conservatives and the center-right are concerned that it will be used to let offenders off the hook and take away responsibility and retribution. There is no question that neurocriminology is a difficult terrain to tread, and some would wish it did not exist at all. Are we certain that the uproar will continue—or is the tide turning?

Critics will further contend that neurocriminology raises the ominous specter of violence being reducible to a physical neural cause, the erosion of the concepts of individual accountability and free will, an abandonment of social injustice as an explanation of crime, and the consequent derailment of social intervention programs for underserved populations. Attacking the law’s freedom-of-will assumption with a deterministic-sounding neurobiological excuse could lead to a “throw away the key” solution because we feel biology cannot be changed. Would it be the start of a slippery slope toward the dissolution of responsibility, an increase in unbridled violent offending, and the implosion of civilization, as Shami Chakrabarti feared?

That ever-feared slippery slope. It’s a common refrain surrounding the moral implications of my work.
If we take these steps, what quagmire do they slide us into?
Far too often the slippery slope argument is presented at the end of a discussion.
Well, there’s a slippery slope, so let’s play it safe and tread no further.
That’s a cop-out, and when it comes to the active suppression of new knowledge or the ignorance of silence, it generally stems from the desire of certain groups to maintain the status quo. It turns out that most slopes aren’t so slippery after all if we care to confront our fears and cautiously weigh the risks and benefits of action. There is firm ground underfoot and ample opportunities up and down that slope to choose where we stand—
if
we have the courage to do so.