Born That Way

by William Wright

  While the proponents of seeking out biological influences on criminality made clear that the prime beneficiary would be society, they also emphasized that the criminals themselves would benefit as well. Speakers who worked with delinquent youth said that many of the most problematic kids were eager to change. One biologist even addressed the worst-case bugaboo, government sedating inner-city youth, and asked, “Isn’t sedation better than twenty years in Attica?” The biology-oriented were emerging cautiously from the closet.

  (This hobgoblin of government eagerness to decriminalize troublemakers medically was thrown into interesting light in April 1996, when a Texas child molester, Larry Don McQuay, who was about to be paroled, pleaded with the state to castrate him, saying that when a free man, he would surely kill more children. Horrified, the state refused.)

  Noteworthy among the speakers was David Comings, a geneticist at the City of Hope Medical Center near Los Angeles, who works with troubled young people, many of whom suffered from attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Genetic research had shown that the genetic anomaly that causes ADHD is closely linked with other problems, such as alcoholism, drug abuse, and criminal behavior. Comings told the group that he had treated “thousands of these kids … who are failing in school, unable to concentrate. Teachers find them disruptive, aggressive, fighting, lying.…” Their families had brought them to Comings in desperation. Various pharmaceutical treatments had totally altered the unwanted behavior. Comings surely confused the drug-fearing liberals in the audience by adding that these treatments are expensive and at the present only available to white middle-class kids.

  In her talk, Diana Fishbein had said that as she saw it, the hope was to pinpoint crime- or violence-related genes, in order to identify and aid those most likely to fall victim to adverse social conditions. Throughout the remainder of the conference, the central argument seemed to devolve on her one word aid. Most participants agreed that identifying those at risk for asocial behavior had been made feasible by the new genetic knowledge. There was sharp disagreement, however, about whether this knowledge would be used to aid potential criminals or would instead be used to stigmatize and isolate them, to inflict further injustice on the disadvantaged. Over the next two days the speakers tended to align themselves with one of the two positions.

  Another theme sounded frequently by the opponents of pharmaceutical crime fighting was that the quest for biological links to violence showed a yearning for “simple solutions,” the old idea that if everyone’s destiny is gene determined, social improvements are pointless. As often happened, these critics appeared to be arguing with turn-of-the-century eugenicists, not with the behavioral geneticists present, all of whom emphasized the complexity of the genes-environment interaction and the importance of poverty, racism, and the rest in causing crime.

  Toward the end of the second morning’s session, I was beginning to marvel at the spectacle of avowed opponents of behavioral genetics applications to social problems like Evan Balaban sitting attentively while various scientists talked about hormonal and genetic anomalies conducive to crime. Perhaps the skeptics had been soothed by the prolonged lip service every speaker was paying to the importance of environmental factors, conditions that were society’s fault and society’s job to correct. Or perhaps they were waiting for their moment to pounce with the usual ad hominem denunciations.

  IF IT WAS THE LATTER, they were spared the trouble. Lunch was only one speaker away when I heard shouts coming from a terraced area outside the rear of the meeting hall. It sounded like children in a playground, but I dismissed that as unlikely at a conference center aimed at quiet adult ponderings. The shouts grew louder. Suddenly the doors burst open and a stream of protesters pushed their way into the hall—young blacks and whites, middle-aged white men and women, about thirty-five in all—and started down the two aisles. Some carried placards; others brandished red flags. Some had bullhorns and all were shouting a chantlike refrain that at first I couldn’t make out but which emerged as a reference to the meeting’s rural isolation:

  “Genetics conference you can’t hide, you’re promoting genocide.”

  As the group moved raucously down the aisles toward the stage, it seemed that we were about to experience firsthand a sample of the behavioral trait we were there to discuss. I later learned that sympathetic members of the audience had been in contact with the protesting group and had agreed to open the locked fire doors at a prearranged time. One of the band shouted they were here to shut down the conference. Others voices emerged with cries of “racists” and “Nazis.”

  As they reached the podium, the scheduled speaker docilely yielded the microphone and stepped aside. With this ultimate victory, the protesters arranged themselves in a semicircle on the floor below the stage, a maneuver that placed them inches from the first row, where I was sitting in order to tape the talks. Some of the group proclaimed themselves members of the Communist Party, whose existence in rural Maryland came as a surprise to many in the audience (“In Maryland? Anywhere!” said one professor). As one speaker stepped aside to give the microphone to a cohort, the protesting chorus filled the lull with the chant “Fight for Communism! Power to the workers!” and later “Jobs, yes! Racism, no!”

  Encountering no resistance to their takeover of the amplification system, the intruders lowered their belligerence, but an ugly mood of coercion roiled the auditorium. We would listen to them whether we wanted to or not. No one in the audience moved. Whether from fear, reluctance to miss the spectacle, or both, we were fixed in our seats. A succession of speakers, taking turns at the lectern, hammered at the theme that inner-city crime flourished because of poverty and hopelessness, a lack of alternatives—no other reason. By searching for genetic reasons we were attempting to shift blame from oppressive conditions and place it on oppression’s victims. The reiteration of themes we had been hearing for many hours in the scheduled sessions pointed up the protesters’ obliviousness to the conference’s range of opinion. A distraught Wasserman tried to yell this at those controlling the stage but was shouted down.

  With a line of protesters directly over me, I resolutely looked beyond them to the stage speakers. With my face a study in rapt attention, I felt sure anyone would see the thoughtful consideration I was giving the rhetoric spewing from the loud-speakers as the demeanor of one about to be converted from nasty genetic determinism to benevolent social awareness. Since I was not of the university world, I was unsure my fear was appropriate. I assumed the academics around me were accustomed to such disruptions and were unperturbed by the chest-thumping bellicosity. I was unnerved when a male molecular biologist, husky and tenured, leaned toward me and whispered, “I’m scared.”

  From the microphone, a middle-aged woman in a babushka told us that even though our intentions might be well meaning, the genetic information we sought could be used by others for evil ends, as it had been in the past. Like many of their points, this was a valid and now-familiar admonition but with the unavoidable antiknowledge thrust. Still, I felt relief to have our characterization by the invaders change from genocidal racists to unwitting dupes. You don’t hurt unwitting dupes, I reassured myself; you enlighten them. With the new tone I felt the tension lift.

  A young black male, clearly irate at the conciliatory drift, tried to recapture the combative mood by shouting that if we attempted to enter the inner cities with our sedating drugs, the people “would be ready and will initiate some violence on y’all.” Then for a punctuating punch, he added, “You want trouble. We’ll give you trouble.” His companions did not build on his bellicosity. No one was rude enough to point out that for the government to bring drugs to the inner cities might be seen as redundant.

  A man in the audience succeeded in winning the protesters’ attention. “You don’t want to talk with us,” he said, “we are small beer. You want to talk with the media and the public.” With exaggerated magnanimity he added, “Let us make you a gift of all the media here today.”

 
A derisive laugh from the seated academics signaled a realignment of adversaries I found worrying. Until now it had been the protesters versus the conference, but the remark pitted both groups against a handful of journalists—of whom I was one. It was upsetting enough to have an angry band looming over the audience calling us racists and fascists. Now the conference participants were themselves turning on my small subgroup. I looked around for a fellow journalist.

  An offer was made to the occupation forces of a formal press conference on the terrace outside the auditorium, probably a ploy to ease them out of the building. Fortunately, they agreed, with flags lowered and sullen faces, they filed up the aisles. Reassembled outdoors, they repeated the same slogans and rhetoric (and revealed that they had organized their demonstration on the Internet) but now to a smaller, but more like-minded, audience. The majority had gone to lunch.

  THE REMAINDER OF the conference was tranquil and informative. If the disruption had any effect, it was to make the panelists even more courteous to each other. The content of the sessions remained short on science, as some had predicted, and long on social awareness. It had also ignored one of the most chilling aspects of much of today’s violent crime: black hatred of whites, although that may have been hidden under the euphemism of “social conditions.”

  For all its digressions, disclaimers, and disruptions, the Wye conference had succeeded resoundingly in its primary aim. It had opened a dialogue about possible applications of genetic and biological knowledge to the problems of crime and violence, applications that could be compatible with a vision of a just society. The conference, and the startling new knowledge it examined, had not been shut down by the protesters, nor had its science been crippled by antigenes, highly political academics who saw it as just another brushfire in the retrograde move toward genetic determinism.

  The distinction usually made between the twin disciplines of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology is that the former is concerned with the genes-based differences between individuals and the latter focuses on traits common to all members of the species. The 1995 violence conference turned out to be a three-day effort to decide to which of the two disciplines crime belonged. Was it a trait that found expression only in certain individuals? Or was it a species-typical behavior that would emerge in all humans under the right—or rather, the wrong—conditions?

  By the end of the meetings, the conclusion seemed to be it was both. Yes, under certain circumstances everyone is capable of violence—and the plight of inner-city black male teenagers, most agreed, would qualify as one of those circumstances. And yes, certain individuals, because of their genetic makeup, are far more prone to violent crimes than others. Ancillary to this thought is that with the violence-disposed, a pill regimen could stop the slide into trouble. Among those who had repeatedly been criminally violent, many could be medicated away from this behavior. Whether such intervention would be the criminals’ choice or society’s was a value question, not a scientific one, and a question left almost untouched by the discussions.

  I saw an irony in this conundrum of the two types of criminals—one the result of social conditions, the other the result of flawed neurobiology. While the conference members, heavy with degrees and expertise, grappled with recognizing two categories of criminals, it amused me to think that gang members in South Central L.A. would have no problem differentiating between the two. They undoubtedly knew that among their buddies, some were “different” in the hardwiring department. “Sure, we mug and rip off stores,” I could hear them saying, “but Pablo is crazy. He’ll kill you as soon as look at you.”

  With learned professors in Maryland pondering whether the cause of violent crime is cultural or genetic, gang members immured in crime know that for some it’s one, in the sense of what’s going down, and for some it’s the other, in the sense that they are “different.” And they know which is which. For social planners the question remains: Can and should Pablo be identified early on and eased away from his probable path—by counseling, job training, perhaps medication? Or should he be allowed to commit X-number of murders before society considers pacifying him chemically? Or neither? At the moment, society’s only response is prison or execution. The Maryland conference was attempting to find alternatives. As for the equally large question of why there was so much more violent crime in the United States than elsewhere, the conference offered no answers.

  ABOUT THE TIME of the Maryland violence conference in the fall of 1995, a book called All God’s Children by Fox Butterfield attempted to answer this question. It was the story of a black family, the Boskets, who had a standout history of violent crime. The author, a respected correspondent of the New York Times, traced the violent traditions of the South Carolina county from which the Boskets came, the Anglo-Irish codes that triggered murderous responses to slights to honor, the absorption of these mores into black culture, and their eventual importation to big-city slums. (That this same justification for fights to the death seems also to have traveled from South Carolina to every corner of the globe is not addressed.) The book also examines the “bad” black man as folk hero, the elevation of mavericks and troublemakers to legendary status in black culture. Always present in the narrative is the mood of hopelessness and futility such heroes helped assuage. Having established this historical framework, Butterfield relates the horrendous childhoods of the Boskets, their repeated law-breaking, and their prison careers, which began before puberty and had few interruptions throughout their lives. In all of this the author sees “not just a portrait of the Boskets, but a new account of the growth of violence in the United States.”

  In a day when enlightened people are turning to genes and biology for help in explaining every form of behavior, normal as well as aberrant, All God’s Children serves as a monument to the tenacious belief that the important answers lie in the environment if we just sift through it carefully enough. As a reporter, Butterfield is too thorough not to allude to possible genetic contributions to the Boskets’ extreme behavior, but it is the merest lip service, polite nods to current trends of thought—a few paragraphs in 331 pages of environmental exposition.

  Most of the book relates the sorry family’s saga with little reference to other blacks of their world. Butch did this; Willie was sent there. On the few occasions when an incident throws them into peer-group context, like Willie’s unparalleled mayhem at the reform school Wiltwyck, we see him as a stand-alone troublemaker, a rebel among rebels, and an altogether atypical case history representative of little, I would guess, except his own exotic neurobiology. In Leavenworth or any of the prisons to which the Boskets were sent, the family were unique pariahs whose extraordinary viciousness won them the fear and awe of the violent criminals surrounding them.

  The supposition of Butterfield’s book is that the Boskets were, like all violent blacks, products of the same southern traditions mixed with oppressive and abusive rearings, as were their fellow inmates. Their violence stemmed from the same cultural and social causes but simply took more intense forms for reasons left unexplained. The implied premise is: You’ve seen one violent black family, you’ve seen them all. In spite of the genetically evocative factor that they are a family—not a gang, not childhood chums, not prison mates—this biological link does not trigger curiosity about the possibility of a genetic contribution to their extreme behavior.

  The Boskets’ violence makes for interesting reading, to be sure, but their bizarre stories tell less about the social and cultural forces of crime than would the stories of more routine criminals. We are left in the dark about the factors that set them apart from other violent men and women. And we are left to wonder if all the exacerbating elements of their environments, so meticulously documented, may have been nothing more than convenient pretexts for violence the Boskets would have committed regardless of their background. Comfortable middle-class homes have produced ax murderers and serial killers, but in such cases, if we search hard enough, and we usually do, a cold mother or a
n overbearing father can usually be found to serve as environmental culprit when we can’t fall back on racism and poverty for explanations. In today’s preoccupation with social injustice (probably a lingering obsession from the Marxist and Socialist heyday when it explained everything except meteor showers), such household-specific idiosyncrasies might be viewed as the second team in the pretext catalog.

  The grim facts of the Bosket histories undoubtedly played a role in their chronic explosions. These background elements surely reinforced, even enabled, behavioral bents whose primary causes may have resided in the family neural structures. But we are given no information to allow us to sort out the environmental from the genetic causes. For instance, we do not learn the proportion of violent black males produced by this one South Carolina county, a crucible of violence in Butterfield’s characterization, compared with violent black males from other, less violent counties, or for that matter compared with the entire United States. Even more important, we do not hear about the hundreds and thousands of young black males who came from the same part of the country at the same and with the same dire childhoods who never turned to violence and crime.

  By devoting close to three hundred pages to the Boskets’ environments, most of which was prison, the author, clearly trying for an even-handed analysis, is ipso facto buying into Willie Bosket’s self-serving blather about being a monster the system has created. We know that Willie is a product of his environment mainly because Willie says he is. And of course, Willie has had impressive substantiation of that theory by mainstream criminological thought of the past fifty years.